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.
