A Yepez New Year

 

Group Break cards from Nachos Grande. 

 

This latest batch of Cardinals cards came from assorted group breaks held by Nachos Grande around the early part of fall. With one exception, these cards were mostly from breaks of products released in the past couple of years.

Juan Yepez was once an Atlanta prospect, but he didn't make it to the big leagues until he had established himself as one of the top bats in the Memphis Redbirds lineup, the Cardinals' AAA affiliate. While he had some bright spots in 2022 while Albert Pujols took him under his wing, Yepez didn't really get much of a shot last season and has since moved on to the Nationals organization. Of course, the framed Allen & Ginter mini card is going to get a lot more love than the generic looking Panini sticker auto, but I am happy to have added both to my collection.

Tommy Edman makes an appearance on another Panini product, this time a red, white and blue parallel from last year's Mosaic set. I don't believe there was a 2023 Mosaic baseball set as the number of Panini products in this sport dropped significantly after losing the MLBPA license.

The 2023 Finest break was one of the big highlights. I landed this Nolan Arenado green parallel that is numbered to just 99 copies.

Nolan's arm is bent at a very tough to look at angle here.

Another Arenado Finest highlight, this Headliners insert kind of reminds me of an old Fleer insert with a modern Chrome refractor flourish.

Apparently these 1994 style Draft Picks inserts from the 2021 Topps Archives set were quite a tough pull, landing at 1:24 packs or roughly one per box. I haven't found any Carlsons for sale on COMC since I ended up with this card.

It's back to the unlicensed realm here with a PPP (Purple Prizm Parallel.)

There's almost a good insert idea in here, but besides the obvious lack of MLB logos, there are some things I take issue with. I am not sure exactly what the weird angular pattern behind Goldschmidt's photo is supposed to represent, and that "Straight Fire" font is just hideous.

We travel all the way back to 2002 here with a second year Pujols card that mimics the original 1984 Donruss design. This would have been a fun set to collect back in the day, aside from it being marred by the typical short print confusion of the era.

I also added a numbered Stan the Man card to my collection from the 2021 Topps Gallery set. Gallery could be hit or miss for me (mostly miss), but I did like this particular year's design more than others.