It's Inevitable

Cards from buckstorecards turn the heat up!

We're passed the point of no return and there's no coming back. Summer is inevitable. It's busy. It's impossible to stop. There's a lot going on right now, both in and out of the sports realm. Baseball arms are falling off, as they are wont to do. Video game consoles are being cranked out to the masses. Rock bands are doing their band things. While I have a minute to stop and take a breath, let's check out another bundle o' cards from the Dollar Store (note: not actually a dollar store.)

It's a side-by-side look at a pair of Victor Scott Stadium Club rookie cards. On the left is the sepia parallel and on the right is the base card. I'm not totally sold on Scott as being a future cornerstone of the franchise out in CF yet, but he's swiped enough bases to stick around my fantasy team's lineup at least.

Here's another pair of Cardinals cards, this time from different eras. I was surprised to learn that I didn't yet own this Co-Signers Chris Carpenter card. Cards from the '00s are starting to become tougher to come by these days.

I also landed a copy of one of these wacky Topps Tek cards. It's some sort of "blue rainbow diffractor" parallel (whatever that means) with a print run of just 75 copies.

Kwame Evans Jr. kicks off the duck-billed portion of the trade package. Evans carved out a nice role as a sixth man type last season and is expected to be back with the team's second season in the Big 10 after making it to the round of 32 in March Madness.

I also got hit up with this two-packs of Oregon autos from the 2023 Topps Chrome McDonald's All-American set. I don't have a formal collection of Oregon women's basketball player cards (yet!) aside from a very tiny amount of Sabrina Ionescu cards, but I will definitely start looking for more and more of these especially with the WNBA set to return to Portland very soon.

A 20+ CFL card?! Yes, please! McCullough took over as the lead back at Oregon towards the end of my time in Eugene, and he doesn't have many cards, so this is a treat.

Of course, this is a much newer CFL card (check the date!) of another Ducks alum. Upper Deck started "game dating" their photos in some sets back in the latter half of the '90s, and I really wish that this had become more of a common practice over the years as it's always nice to know what specific game a given photo comes from. Of course, with most of the stuff that Topps puts out these days, they've completely washed out or cropped out the backgrounds so as to make the event they came from fairly meaningless.

(New) Leaf puts out some weird stuff, but here's a perfectly colored autograph that goes quite well with the green on Breeland's uniform here.

I just discovered recently that Panini put out an "Unparalleled" brand NFL set for a number of years that closely mirrors the Revolution brand they use for basketball. I'm not sure why they chose different brand names here, but it's always tough to figure out what Panini is doing.

Speaking of which, Chris Boucher seems to be standing in front of some sort of planet-shaped energy orb here on this parallel Recon card numbered to 199.

It's a token Blues card! Shattenkirk was with the Blues during a good chunk of time in the 2010's and just announced his retirement late last year.

The last card up is one of the best, with a nice addition to my Randall Cunningham PC. This one is from 2012, but I've noticed he's found his way to some more recent checklists, which is always a nice thing.

Cheesin' It

 

Cardinals box break cards featuring Nolan Arenado (still a Cardinal!) and more.

I've slowed down lately in my participation in group box breaks for a variety of reasons, but there's still a few things here and there that have been coming in. Nachos Grande is still hosting regular breaks and has just recently moved to a Patreon-hosted subscription platform that I am eager to check out. Basically, you "subscribe" to your team's tier (if available) over at the Patreon site, and by paying a monthly fee you get all of the cards for your team for the box(es) opened that month. I'm curious to see how it works out.

These cards are from breaks prior to moving over to Patreon, mostly from late 2024 and early 2025. I was only able to find Panini Crusade cards briefly in the wild, but the ones I did open have been very popular on the trading market (i.e. TCDB) for some reason. I feel like it's actually one of Panini's stronger looking baseball products of late, but they generally have a low bar to clear for that.

These are actually silver/grey Crusade parallels, but the base design is essentially the same but with less grey. Chase Davis was the Cardinals 1st round pick a couple of years ago and has worked his way up to the AA level. Could a late season call-up be possible for the former college star?

Allen & Ginter was another one of those "released later than it should be" things last year. I was super happy to add this to my Masyn Winn collection, as despite my overall feelings about this brand of late, the framed minis always look really nice.

Topps Archives was another late 2024 release and featured its usual bevy of base cards and inserts that feature past designs. This one is based on a 1995 Topps Traded set design that I wasn't terribly familiar with. This is another nice Winn card, which happens to be a green parallel numbered to just 99 copies.

Continuing on with the late season stuff was the popular Stadium Club product. This was an incredibly botched release with collation turning me off from being interested in buying more than the one blaster I tried (basically every box seemed to only contain cards from a small handful of teams), but the on-card autographs always look really nice.

I actually landed two (!) of these signature cards. Good Cardinals luck here! I'm sure quite a few other team slots got screwed here.

Of course, the main impetus for me getting these shipped out was the brand new (at the time) 2025 Topps flagship release. We've moved into the '90s as the Topps 35th Anniversary tributes seem to have no sign of slowing down. I ended up with both this fancy Chrome Arenado as well as the slick signed card at the top of this post.

Topps brought back their First Pitch inserts after a number of years. Jayson Tatum joins Jon Hamm (obviously) and John Goodman in the pantheon of interesting people who have been featured at Busch Stadium on these cards. Unfortunately, Tatum recently tore his Achilles and probably won't see the basketball court for quite some time, but he'll have his championship ring from a year ago to comfort himself with I suppose.

Here's one from an older set. I think there are literal millions of Mark McGwire inserts from this era and I probably only own about 1 percent of them. Someone might want to check the math on that.

Last up is a pair of inserts from the 2024 Donruss set. There's not much to say about these, but I know Panini continues to put whatever effort they're allowed to into cranking out a Donruss baseball set every year as the next new one is going to be the first Nachos Grande box break of the Patreon era.

Batch o' Breaks

Some new (to me) Allen & Ginter cards, a bunch of green Birds and even a Trail Blazer. 

 

I took a bit of a break from the Meta apps awhile back, but I still had some box break cards to sift through from over in the wild wilderness known as Facebook. I had only been hanging onto that specific app for its "Groups" feature, where there were a couple of low-key super cheap break groups I was involved with.

One of those groups should immediately be familiar to readers here, as it was Colbey's Affordable Group Breaks. This batch of stuff came from a few of those breaks earlier this year, and of course, I'm just now getting around to showing this stuff off.

I felt pretty good about my decision to end my idealistic Allen & Ginter collection with the 2022 set proper, and the 2024 design did nothing to dissuade me. I still do need to track down all of the Cardinals needs from this set, however, and I did like a couple of the insert concepts as well. I even opened a couple of blasters of the stuff at one point.

In any case, the design sort of has a leather / belt buckle look going on with it, which is to say that I don't exactly think it's a bad design. It just doesn't feel anything like the Allen & Ginter sets I started collecting back in 2008.

I'm not sure I had this card on my want list, but it will head to the binders anyway. All I know of Metro Boomin' is that he was in the middle of a big event promoting the debut of the Cardinals first City Connect jerseys last summer, which he is also modeling here. I can't say I'm very up on current hip-hop, give or take a Kendrick Lamar or a Travis Scott. (I can't say I can name a single song by the latter, unfortunately.) I do known that Metro Boomin' is a local STL guy, which makes sense that he was there for the big jersey reveal party.

One of these breaks was a rare NBA break, where my sole need was current Blazers fave Toumani Camara. I'll take all the cards of the Belgian-born defensive wizard any day.

With exclusivity licenses looming in football and basketball, Topps has been putting out a bunch of unlicensed garbage that people always used to make fun of Panini for doing. That being said, I collect all of this stuff, so what do I know? I don't have a ton of Donovan McNabb cards for being the Eagles fan that I am, but I've been slowly adding some Eagles stuff to my TCDB want list lately.

Panini still has the NFL license for now, so we get logos here. Lucky us. A.J. Brown is one of the latest to enter the circle of Eagles I need more cards of, with Brown & co. coming off of a big Super Bowl victory.

Panini rolls out the 1989 Score design year after year, with Bo Nix being one of the latest to get this treatment on a faux-rookie-insert type card. Nix has an absurd number of cards for a guy that's played a single year of professional football.

Last up is this four-pack of Eagles base cards from the 2024 Score set. Again, Panini does a decent job with this low cost set year after year, coming up with a new basic design that still feels like "classic" Score in a way.

Featuring Alan Foster

 

Another nice set of Cardinals, tobacco-style minis, and other ephemera.

If I was smart enough to have tagged everyone in every trade post over the years, I could tell you exactly how many times Night Owl Cards has sent me, well, cards. As it is, I am positive that total is as close to "many" as you can get. This latest batch comes from early February, when we were still looking forward to the days where masses of pollen would be flying around the neighborhoods freely for some reason.

Panini has really scaled back their baseball releases since losing the MLBPA license, which makes sense on some level. The sets that still remain have definitely taken a dip in quality, especially the already iffy Donruss product. There were significantly fewer parallels to chase last year, especially unnumbered ones, but that's not something I'm complaining about. What I really don't like is the design, and you can't pin that on baseball because they carry it through all of their sports including the ones they have full licenses on. Anyway, here's a holo laser style Bob Gibson parallel. I'm not sure I pulled any of these in the 2024 Donruss stuff I did open.

Speaking of too many parallels, Topps has taken up that mantle quite easily in the Fanatics era. The inessential Holiday set certainly hasn't escaped this phenomenon, as it leapt from one silly parallel to a whole bunch this past season. It's still far too early to evaluate the Cardinals decision not to bring back Paul Goldschmidt, but for the moment it feels like something that benefitted both parties. Goldy takes up another premier spot in a dangerous offensive lineup, and the Cardinals free up a position to allow both catchers who were sitting behind Willson Contreras last season to thrive. Also, money was saved, if you care about that.

Everyone loves food issues, don't they? I don't have a ton of Hostess cards and am always happy to take them in just about any condition. I really like the shirt that George is wearing here. 

This is, of course, a 1975 Topps buyback from last year's Topps Heritage set. This is actually the second time I've featured Alan Foster on this blog according to my records (i.e. the tags.) The last time was an Airbrushed Fridays (remember that?)

Here's a quad pack of those Fleer/Laughlin World Series cards from the '70s. No one talks about pitchers throwing lightning anymore, these days. It's always heaters and fire and such. Lightning seems cooler to me.

Here's some more stuff from the 2024 Heritage line. These are a couple of inserts from the original (low) series. I have had a hard time finding High Number stuff at a retail level that suits me, but I'm hoping that changes after today's official 2025 Topps Heritage release. I think it's probably due to the abundance of big name rookies in High Numbers, which is kind of silly no one collects Heritage for the rookies. (And, likewise, no one that collects rookies treats Heritage as a big deal.)

Big Cat! I don't mind animals on cards, but this always felt like a half-baked trivia game. The "answer", on the back, is Andres Galarraga.

Night Owl has sent me a ton of Allen & Ginter minis in recent years, and this latest package proved to be no exception. Which one is your favorite? I am going to guess that McCutchen would get the most votes.

Ian Kinsler was the lone horizontal representative in the stash o' minis, and he gets his own spot here. Insurance ads, partially displayed or otherwise, have no place in this product.

Contest Results and buckstorecards Cards

 

Genuine Coverage... Plus!

The 16th edition of the March Radness contest has concluded, and thanks to Florida's victory, there was a big shake-up in the final results. This also means that there was a new face on the top of the podium. Congrats to PSU wrestling dynasty (James C) for taking the top prize! In second place was fellow Cardinals fan Ray S, with Brian P taking third. Bringing up the rear and taking the mysterious worst place prize was none other than Bo Rosny. If you are one of these chosen few bolded names, please get in touch with me as soon as it's convenient so we can figure out the whole prize situation. As a side note, I still do have a couple of prizes to distribute from the winter bowl game contest, but that should get figured out here very soon.

As always, though, we're here to look at some cards. Today's offerings are from regular trader and all-around good guy Doug from Sportscards from the Dollar Store. The Blues have had a pretty incredible season which, heading into the playoffs, somewhat mirrored their 2019 Stanley Cup winning run where they fired their head coach about a month and a half into the season and ended up champions. This season they dumped their coach once again around six weeks into the season and turned things around. They were white hot in March leading into April, although it looks like they've dropped a few since their recent huge winning streak. Anyway, only Robert Thomas is still with the team. I do like the cardboard-y feel of these O-Pee-Chee cards and wish there was something like this in the baseball card world.

Here's a pair of champions from the 2024 Score NFL set. Score football is probably the best thing that Panini does, considering that it's affordable and typically decent to look at, while paying tribute to those old school Score sets.

Ricky Watters in his Eagles uniform came from the Tecmo Super Bowl III era, although seeing him in the modernized Eagles branding is a little jarring here.

I really like Jerami Grant (Portland native... technically!), but he really fell off a cliff this season. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about the Blazers in general right now, but I guess we shall see how this summer plays out.

Upper Deck's SPX sets are really a prime example of '90s sports cards excess.

Mookie Cook is a Portland kid but really just could not find much playing time in his time at UO. I hope he does well, of course, but him taking a bit of a half-step down to a WCC school (San Francisco) is interesting.

Here's a chunky Marcus Mariota card. Panini's "scope" parallels are kind of fun to look at with their circular patterns.

I know there probably aren't a ton of Jonathan Stewart megafans out there, but his career NFL totals of more than 7300 yards rushing and 1200+ yards receiving are nothing to sneeze at. The average pro running back's career is not a lengthy one.

*** PRINTING PLATE ALERT ***

Man, here's Mookie Cook again. Leaf did crank out a lot of cards of his. I wish this company or whatever it is would calm down and just put out a normal set or two with a few parallels, but it instead insists on driving anyone with a mere thought in their brain of compiling a checklist to the brink of insanity.

Bo Nix had a pretty impressive rookie season, so snagging a copy of his rookie card numbered to just 50 is a huge prize. I'm not sure that he's going to be a Hall of Fame type player or anything, but I think in the right situation he could prove to be pretty valuable at the helm of a good team for a number of years.

Rookie Johnny Wilson is also a Super Bowl champion. He's pictured in his college uniform as Score is always one of the first NFL releases of the season. He's a giant dude who I think could be useful in certain situations down the road.

The last card selection on offer is this Panini 'EEE' (as I like to call it) autograph of a St. Louis Cardinals prospect. Levenson was a 5th round pick in 2023 and is still at the A+ level of pro ball. There is a new Panini release ("Prospect Edition") that recently came out, even though it's branded '2024', that might be just a replacement for the Elite Extra Edition. I'm not really sure. I almost bought a blaster of it today, but I'm trying to temporarily save all of my cards cash for the back-to-back Topps Heritage sets this spring.