Break Goodies and a Contest Reminder

Our almost quarterly review of Affordable Group Breaks cards. 

 

Before we get into it, here's the big reminder: the 15th (!) annual Cards on Cards college bowl pick 'em thingy is fully functional and ready for your sweet picks. There's only a couple of days left at best to sign up and at least get your first few picks in, and there's nothing to lose -- so why don't you go and win?!

With the big stuff out of the way, let's check out some cards from the Affordable Group Breaks. As you might know, Colbey from Cardboard Collections has run these things for a long time, and they're always well within my budget.

The 2022 Topps Chrome Sonic set has been well documented by now. I think Topps was riding high off the pandemic trading card boom and basically threw in a cash grab without a lot of regular collectors noticing. What was disguised as yet another Topps Chrome configuration was actually a thing of its own, with the base cards and their slimy parallels only bearing minute differences from the regular Chrome set. Switch up a few meaningless numbers on the back in the fine print, and maybe move the Topps Chrome logo around on some of the cards and... hey, you've got a brand new product, baby! Anyway, I hate this all and it's annoying that it took some of us well-meaning collectors almost two years to understand this.

Here's something that's easier to digest: Topps Pro Debut! This was my, well, debut with the current year Topps minor league product.

It's quite a bummer that this is going to be the only semi-mainstream MILB product for 2024, but the regular flagship design looks nice on these cards. Travis Honeyman is looking like he stole something here. If not a base, then maybe some of Winnie the Pooh's stash?

A quick glance at Luis Rodriguez's B-Ref page shows that he's logged time at both corner positions, catcher *and* pitcher, which makes me think that the organization doesn't quite know what to do with him.

On one hand, I feel like I bought a decent amount of Topps flagship cards this year, but considering how many common inserts (and parallels) I'm lacking, I'm not so sure. Here's one that's fairly pedestrian, except that it's Ozzie.

1989 Topps cards still do pretty much nothing for me, but they had some quality designs.

Colbey snuck in a few Blazers cards. Nice! You might be wondering why I'm featuring a junk wax era Buck Williams card I've probably gone through twenty of through the years.

Well, check the card number here! It's actually a Tony's Pizza card in disguise. I actually had one of these, but this one was a serious upgrade in condition. (If I recall, the card I booted out of my binders was not drenched in pizza grease, it was just beat up regular style.) I used to eat a fair amount of Tony's Pizza back in the day, but I didn't encounter any Fleer basketball cards in their packages until the following year's set, which was unnumbered.

Panini put out some fun Halloween-themed sets for their NBA and NFL licenses this year, in the guise of small packs you could distribute in lieu of Halloween candy. I'm pretty sure 99% of these were scooped up by adults, though. The rookie cards in the football set feature these extreme close-up headshots, which are only a half a tick better than seeing players photographed during off-season workouts in practice garb without pads. I prefer the college photos that they usually put in the regular Score sets.

The orange jack-o-lantern cards are apparently the base cards. These green cards with bats on the borders are a common parallel. I'm just glad they're still making Brian Dawkins cards!

Let's head back to baseball, because this is still a baseball card blog (I think?) There was a decent chunk of card from Panini's latest extremely unlicensed Donruss set, which included a Diamond Marvels parallel of Cardinals prospect Won-Bin Cho.

I also snagged a nice red-and-blue parallel of Albert Pujols, who was a year or two removed from playing in MLB, making him apparently safe for this set.

And let's not forget Waino, who also shut things down before this set came out. This one is a regular blue parallel, which is numbered to 149 this year.

Speaking of Adam Wainwright, I also landed a 2000 Fleer Gamers bat card of the dude that was traded for Adam Wainwright. There were other players involved, but those two were the primary players that are still discussed today. Well, maybe not today exactly. Maybe it'll come up on a question in Baseball Nerd Bar Trivia one of these days.