More Affordable Breaks

Catching up with another bunch of @flywheels group break cards. 

 

My card purchases have nosedived in 2023, but I still have a cache of previously received piles of cards to go through before I'm all caught up. This latest bunch is from some Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks that I signed up for late last year.

Panini used an awkward time to debut a brand new baseball product, Capstone, with their MLBPA license expiring at the end of last year. It's possible there will be another Capstone baseball release someday in the future, but I'm expecting Panini to scale back their baseball release calendar significantly now that they can no longer use active MLB players in their sets. (Minor league prospects, apparently, are still fair game for now.)

This was my first look at Capstone (I've since bought a blaster of it), and it's... well, it's okay. All of the cards are thick, and the most commonly found cards from the base set has this extra glossy sheen on them that actually clouds up the scanned images. (See the Nootbaar card for comparison, which doesn't use the extra gloss and instead uses an etched background.)

I really enjoyed receiving this card from last year's Panini Chronicles set. Obsidian is typically a high end brand for Panini in other sports, but it doesn't have its own separate baseball release.

I signed up for a few football breaks (go Birds!) as well. It surely must have been football season. This Wendell Smallwood parallel from the 2016 Donruss set made me wonder what Smallwood has been up to recently. He was last scene a couple of years ago on Washington's roster according to the internet.

The 1999 Fleer Tradition set adds the conference logo to each card for some reason. I received a bunch of these Eagles cards that were new to me, and picked and old favorite of mine (the Duce is loose!) for the scan.

It's back to baseball with the 2003 Fleer Tradition Update set. Again, I was able to fill a number of team collection needs with this one. This Eduardo Perez card is actually a glossy parallel numbered to 100, which is nice. Perez was a key bench guy for four seasons in St. Louis but is perhaps best known these days for being part of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball announcing booth. (I rarely praise ESPN, but I really miss them having more baseball coverage. Now all we get are Sunday nights.)

This one has an insert-y look to it, but it's just part of the Update base set. I have so many Pujols cards, but I'm never surprised when I find one more.

I also believe I won some sort of giveaway during the breaks, as Colbey included a few extras. It's somewhat interesting that Bo's Topps football rookie card is significantly more expensive than his older baseball counterpart, but I think the general consensus is that there were vastly more Topps baseball cards produced than football cards in the same era. (Either that, or it's because the Raiders are cooler than the Royals?)

I was also gifted this Clint Frazier jersey card from the 2020 Topps Holiday set. I'll end up finding a new home for this one, I'm sure.