Contest Alert!

A new contest is around the corner! Plus-- group break goodies!

We're deep in the thick of the various college basketball conference tournaments right now, which means March Radness is just a couple of days away. I should get this year's contest group operational at some point late Saturday night in anticipation of Selection Sunday. I've watched next to zero college hoops this season (oh, my poor, poor Ducks), but I'm not going to let that damper my fun in picking the games.

Today we have a fun little batch of Cardinals cards from Nachos Grande breaks. I'm pretty sure there are still teams available for his monthly subscription through Patreon and he also still has his Discord group going for other breaks as well. I recently signed up for another "breaker's club" batch of a bunch of breaks, so there should be more good stuff like this to show off later in the year.

At 25 with 19 big league starts under his belt, Michael McGreevy already feels like a cagey veteran in the Cardinals rotation pool. That's how young this team is going to be, folks.

Masyn Winn is still running hard around the basepaths while dodging an onslaught of squares and rectangles. It's a stormy one out there.

I'm not sure how these Chrome "lightboard logo" cards are distributed, but they look pretty decent with the old STL logo in the background.

I am a sucker for a nice acetate card, and this Paul Goldschmidt from the 2019 Topps High Tek set does not disappoint.

Let's hope this is the year Tink Hence figures it all out!

Stamped buyback cards are as silly as ever, but they're still always a nice find for my top player collections.

Check back on Sunday for this year's contest details!

Still Group Breakin'

Checking out another batch of Cardinals cards from spring's group breaks.

While I'm not participating in card breaks at the level I once was, I still have a regular thing going on with a few low cost breakers. Tonight we'll take a look at some stuff I got earlier this year from the Nachos Grande breaks.

A good chunk of the cards that hit my mailbox this time around were from the then-new Topps Heritage set. As of this writing it looks like I may have finally finished off the non-SP base set, but Topps made it extremely annoying to collect the inserts this time around, getting rid of all of the usual concepts like Flashbacks and New Age Performers, sets that were small enough to complete in a reasonable amount of time. In their place are much larger insert checklists which are not commonly even found in packs. Annoying. They also spammed the whole product with Chrome and color parallels, when in the past one or two of these would suffice.

One of the boxes in these past breaks was something called Historic Autograph Company. It's a 2024 set featuring players from a long bygone era.

I had never heard of these things and they have a strange look to them: glittery and shiny but still trying to look "old" in a way.

They don't even put the player names on the front, but many of these guys are famous enough that you might recognize them anyway.

Speaking of a ridiculous number of parallels, well, that just seems to be Topps in the Fanatics era now. They decided to streamline by significantly cutting down on the number of releases per year but decided to cram even more, ahem, "value" into their core products that they kept around. That's how you get a special Miles Mikolas parallel card adorned with a whole mess of Topps logos.

This 2022 Topps Museum Collection card was a really nice surprise, as you usually don't see high end cards in these breaks. This one is numbered to just 99 copies.

A box of 2004 Bazooka was part of the fun, and among other things I ended up with a chunky red parallel of a Yadi rookie card. Nice!

These 1997 Pacific Prism Gems of the Diamond cards are really not very attractive looking. It's always nice to add another card of The Wizard to my collection, though, especially an older one.

Here's one of those new Topps Heritage inserts. We shall see if I ever track down a second copy of this.

To repeat myself for the billionth time: I miss Topps Total. And I don't mean that on-demand stuff that they put out several years ago. Nobody liked Topps Total because of the design, and that was really the only thing connecting the 2020 era cards with the 2000s product. (This one is a silver parallel.)

Will we see a tribute to the 1991 set in next year's Topps flagship products? Well, it's not like Topps is exactly known for innovation these days, so I'm going to assume yes.

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.

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.