The Breaker's Club Has Benefits

Looking at some cards from the @Nachos_Grande breaker's club. 

 

Over at Nachos Grande, there's a new sign-up for this year's first Breaker's Club that might sound enticing to team collectors who are interested in adding a variety of cards for their team to their collection. You can read the post for details, but the way this works, basically, is that you pay in advance for a bunch of box breaks with your team of choice already locked in. It served me well last year as I was able to add a ton of interesting cards to my collection. Let's check out a few of those cards, which were primarily pulled in breaks from late last summer.

I'm not sure what the people at Topps were thinking with this weird 3D design on this Pristine set from 2004. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it, though, so at least it has that going for it.

Leaping forward in time to the 2021 Topps flagship set, I believe this is what you'd call a "green ice" parallel of slugger Tyler O'Neill. I'm not sure that this looks much like ice, however, but maybe the name "green shards of glass" was a no-go.

I'm always excited to be part of a Pacific box break, because I have completed very few team sets from those products over the years. Private Stock is the one that had T-206 sized minis, long before Topps made them cool again.

Brad Miller was impressive enough at the plate in the abbreviated 2020 season to get his own insert card. He won't have many Cardinals cards, but he has this one.

Another thing that I like about Pacific sets is that there are several of them with larger checklists, like the one-off Online set from 1998. Larger checklists mean more obscure players get included, like David Howard. My only other two Howard cards are from regionally produced police sets.

From the "every rookie card is numbered" era comes this Dan Haren card from 2004 Donruss Classics. I'm glad they're not doing this anymore. These are numbered to 1999, which doesn't exactly make it rare, but does make it annoying for anyone who wants to build a complete set.

I do like the idea of having numbered inserts, however, because it's a better way to keep track of rarity than putting dubious odds on a pack wrapper. This one is numbered to 1250.

With Panini apparently owning all of the old Pacific brands, the Vanguard design gets trotted out every now and then. I don't think it's ever appeared on its own in a Panini set, though. The player photo sticks out in a way that reminds me of those life-sized wall vinyl sticker things (Fatheads?)

Here is something interest. Well, first of all -- check it out! It's even-worn Albert Pujols pants! I took a long look at this card and first wondered if maybe Donruss did not have the rights to the Home Run Derby name. I also wondered if, possibly, what we know to be the Home Run Derby wasn't always called that by name. Neither of these things are correct, however. It turns out that this was from a non-MLB sanctioned event that actually was called the Big League Home Run Challenge. It was organized by MLBPA and I'm thinking the lack of logos should have been a big tip-off here that something was amiss. In any case, this is a very cool and rather strange card to add to my collection. I wonder if Pujols signed any of those jerseys that has his own name on the front.

It's hard to top the Albert Pujols strange pants card, but this one does it -- at least for me! Prior to this, I only had a single Jim Edmonds autograph in my collection, despite him being one of my favorite players of all-time. And that card is from one of the cheaper mid-'90s sets, depicting Edmonds with the Angels.

I'm not sure that I can do much better than this, but I did sign up for the newest breaker's club. It's definitely worth checking out, and as more teams are taken more boxes may get added to the pile.