Affordable Break Success

Stylish Cardinals cards and more from @flywheels breaks. 

 

Another shipment of Affordable Group Breaks goodies arrived at Cards on Cards central late last spring. It's up to me to decide how often this stuff is shipped to me, but I tend to lose track of what I have stacked up and am never sure what I'm going to get. This particular stack of cards ended up being a really nice one, and I thought I'd show off a few of the returns here.

This J.D. Drew insert comes from the 1999 Upper Deck Encore set. Upper Deck was really cranking out a lot of nice looking inserts around this time. It's a shame what happened to Upper Deck, although they really did it to themselves I suppose.

The seldom seen, and someone boring, 2002 Fleer set was another box in the breaks. Each of these cards has a subtle parallel variation that includes gold text on the back instead of black. I probably could have shown an example of this, but it really is rather boring. Fortunately, I was able to take down several needs from this box break in both the base set and the parallels.

Here's another '99 Encore insert. You can imagine a jersey swatch or some other piece of memorabilia here in place of the holofoil hexagon.

The 2006 Upper Deck Special F/X set seems to have been a one-off attempt at making a premium version of the company's flagship set, something akin to Topps Chrome but using different card stock. It's heavily glossed and still looks pretty nice.

2003 Topps Stadium Club included thicker gold parallels, which seemed to be vulnerable to sticking and rough borders, like a lot of UV-coated cards of the era. This probably won't go down as one of the more memorable Stadium Club sets, but I did end up with a few more of these chunky cards that I didn't already have.

This card is certainly a candidate for the best card I've added to my collection of the year. It comes from the Special F/X set mentioned above, and you certainly don't see a lot of signed Adam Wainwright cards these days. It's one of the nicer looking sticker autos I've ever seen, as the special shiny tape actually blends well with the card design.

One of the breaks was actually a non-baseball break. If you can find a cheap '90s break where the Eagles are available, I'm going to be all for it. This strange little Action Packed set from 1993 highlights the current season's Monday Night Football schedule and includes a blurb about the player on the back.

Colbey included a couple of bonus cards with my break stuff. I believe I have a full uncut sheet that includes this Clyde Drexler SI For Kids card, but I didn't have my own perforated one that I can put in my binder.

I bought a couple of boxes of last season's Panini NBA Stickers, which includes one full-sized card per pack. The cards also have their own parallels, like this foil Dame. The boxes are still available at a discount price from GameStop if anyone is up for a cheap, fun NBA break.