Cards from Oren and a Final Contest Reminder!

 

Don't forget to fill out your bracket! And let's check out some terrific cards from Oren. 

 

We're less than 24 hours away from the start of the big NCAA men's basketball tournament, which means it's time to get those brackets filled out. We're still taking sign-ups down to the wire, so check it out if you haven't already!

After the jump, because there is a giant amount of images to load, let's check out some cards from a trade with reader Oren that was put together over the Christmas holidays.

Surprise Visit from the DK

 

...no, not the Donkey Kong. 

 

A few months back, I got a surprise knock on the door from local area not-blogger The Diamond King, who dropped off an incredibly generous selection of Cardinals goodies. I had included my childhood (H)akeem Olajuwon rookie in a mailer sent his way sometime in the past year or so, but certainly wasn't expecting anything in return. We're lucky to have a semi-monthly card show in the area where I suspect at least some of these cards were procured from, and it reminds me that I wanted to make a concerted effort to go to more shows this year (I've already missed the first one.)

Heritage seems like it has such a high print run these days, so I'm always taken aback when I run across a variation like this B&W Arenado, as I never seem to pull stuff like this out of packs anymore. It seems increasingly likely that Arenado will be around for at least the first half of the year with St. Louis now, but I wonder if this card marks his final All-Star appearance with anyone.

The goofy, AI-"enhanced" 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary whatever is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently. They really went nuts with the parallels on these. This one is numbered to just 25. Carlson still hasn't caught on with anyone for the coming season as far as I can tell.

Here's another one of the wacky parallels. This one with the free flowing hair of Ted Simmons is numbered to 75.

This Bud Smith card has an imprint with the National Sports Convention logo on it and is numbered 2 out of 5. Rare stuff here! I've always wondered how "official" some of the past cards with stamps from card conventions on them are, but they've mostly been treated as such by the major publications and databases I suppose.

Angel Rondon may have only had a cup of coffee with the Cardinals, but he still makes for a nice looking autographed card. Of course, almost anyone would look good on an Inception card like this.

Daniel Ponce de Leon was once seen as a key cog in the Cardinals stable of pitchers, but he had some tough breaks along the way including a much publicized scary head injury. When standing next to a comparable Topps high end card, Panini's unlicensed warts are pretty visible, though this does contain a nice chunky patch-looking thing in it.

We're back to the AI set here with a more normal parallel pattern. I think this is gold? This will look nice in my Waino collection and is numbered to just 50.

The red ice(?) sky on Lou Brock's card makes this one a bit apocalyptic looking. It's numbered to 100.

Last, but certainly not least, is this pretty slick looking bat card from the 2019 Topps Tier One set. I can't believe it's already been six years since the Cards brought in Goldy. I hope he does well with the Yankees. The Cardinals are really going to miss his defense at 1B more than anything at this point.

If you've got some time, I'd definitely suggest checking out The Diamond King's blog especially if it's been awhile. It looks like he's been generously giving out some impressive stuff, so I'm sure he'd love to get hooked up with something of his own interest.

Birds and Such

It's another group break round-up. 

 

It's been pointed out a number of times that I seem to collect a lot of bird teams. Both pro bird teams were heavily represented in the latest round of group breaks I opted in to from Colbey's Affordable Group Breaks. These mostly represent, well, let's call it Q4 of 2023.

I don't buy a lot of football, so most of my Eagles acquisitions are random base cards that I feel like adding to my want list over at TCDB. It's always nice to get some newer stuff, especially since I'm not such a hardcore Eagles fan that I always remember a ton of players.

I certainly don't remember these guys, but I love a clear acetate sports card. This is from some sort of 1996 Collector's Edge set.

There weren't many exciting photos to choose from in my haul from the 1996 Upper Deck Silver Collection, so I ended up just choosing my favorite player of the bunch.

The smaller, redder birds were well-represented as well. The 2002 Topps Super Teams set comes from an era where sets featuring exclusively retired legends could actually exist. I knocked off a bunch of cards from my want list here, including a pair of serial-numbered foil parallels.

Speaking of foil parallels, the 2003 Bowman Heritage break was also fruitful for me. It mostly looks like Haren's regular "knothole" style card, but there is a rainbow foil finish to it.

And speaking of parallels in general, I landed a thick black Pujols parallel, complete with facsimile signature. Not bad!

Last, but certainly not least, is this Albert card from the 2007 Bowman Heritage set. It's a card that I swear I've seen several dozen times over the years, and yet didn't manage to own a single copy of until recently. I own most of this set, so it's a bit strange that Pujols has eluded me so long.

More Breaks from Colbey!

 

Cardinals and Eagles from this summer's Affordable Group Breaks. 

 

My box break participation has slowed down quite a bit this year along with my shrinking sports card budget, but that hasn't stopped me from picking up an occasional slot in the Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks Facebook group. Cheap breaks are really the only reason I continue to use that particular social media platform.

My most recent shipment (from back in July) saw a healthy amount of Cardinals I needed, including a Dylan Carlson rookie refractor from the 2021 Allen & Ginter Chrome set.

This one looks to be from a random giveaway. I'm definitely psyched to have a card documenting Minnie Minoso's solo season in a Cardinals uniform.

This is a very strange card. If you look at it from the side, it looks like two cards glued together, which I suppose was necessary to create the netting effect (you can see through the net.)

Here's a nice numbered Lou Brock insert from Panini's most recent (and final?) Donruss set. I feel like that company is on the verge of closing up shop in the USA with all of the recent news and loss of licenses, but you never know. I would certainly wonder what would happen to all of the brand names and trademarks they own if they suddenly stopped making sports cards.

I thought that I had most if not all of the 2002 Donruss Fan Club team set a couple of times over, but I definitely needed this die cut Fernando Vina parallel and the short printed J.D. Drew "Favorites" card.

If the price is right and the year is also right, I do sometimes snag the Eagles in an NFL break. I really like the look of these 1996 Donruss cards, from one of the last years of their vastly superior classic jerseys. I remember both of these guys from Tecmo Super Bowl III on the Super Nintendo.

Here's a newer (2022) card that looks like it's straight out of the '90s.

Irving Fryar certainly looks strange to me wearing the Eagles current uniform look, which must have debuted around the time these cards were being produced.

Bootleggin' with Panini: Baseball Edition

 

A look at the new Donruss baseball set from a @nightcapcards box break. 

 

The latest, and apparently last Donruss baseball set from Panini dropped recently, offering another somewhat affordable alternative to the usual churn from Topps. The cards are always a mix of cringe/tacky and fun, and this year is no exception.

This year's set features loose tributes to the original 1988 set. The blue bordered "holo" parallels (see Wainwright at the top) look a bit more like the original, but the font used and the always jarring lack of team logos makes these feel like they were produced in some dark alley.

The Diamond Kings subset design varies from year to year, and I feel like this is one of the better ones in recent sets.

Here's the actual base design for the set. It has a bit of a '90s science class feel to it.

And here's the Rated Rookie design. It's not exactly iconic, but it works within the framework of the base design.

The red bordered cards are serial numbered to 2022. Given that I picked up three of these in this break (and added a fourth in another break), I have to assume that these are much easier to come by than the Topps gold bordered base cards that are similarly numbered. If someone wanted to crunch the numbers, I think it would be fairly simple to discover that the print run for this set is much, much smaller than Topps Series 1 (with good reason.)

The red bordered "Retro 1988" cards don't look as good as their blue bordered counterparts.

Here's the third of those red numbered cards.

Hobby inserts are all numbered as far as I can tell. There's a lot happening on this card.

I was also able to snag a "Retro 1988" jersey card in this break. There's a whopping 97 cards on this checklist, so I feel very fortunate that the one pulled was a Cardinal.

Double Whammy

Affordable group breaks from @flywheels take us back to 2005, while @walktheplank82 sends a bunch of current year needs. 

 

We're getting close to the end of the year, so let's double up on today's look at some Cardinals baseball cards. As part of Cardboard Collections' ongoing Affordable Group Break series, I called for another shipment of stuff that I had allotted to me from past breaks. As a coincidence, all of the big time keepers happened to be from 2005, including a low numbered (13/30) Sportscasters insert from the 2005 Leaf set. These cards remind of the more squarely-shaped educational cards I saw as a child that usually featured some sort of wild animal and some factoids about said creature.

A second Albert Pujols need from 2005 Leaf came in the form of this Gamers insert in the popular foilboard style of the day.

Another set I completely missed out on was yet another attempt at gamifying the baseball card experience (or baseballifying the gaming experience?) in Topps Pack Wars. The vertical representation of the stats here is pretty tough to look at, but I'm guessing the Pack Wars game itself was probably pretty simple. (It... was a game, wasn't it?)

It's back to the present with a bunch of cards I received from Bob Walk the Plank in a surprise mailer this summer. I wasn't able to buy my usual amount of flagship Topps blasters this year, so I'm very appreciative of receiving any of the commemorative patch cards that are exclusive to that particular retail configuration.

I believe I've mentioned this before, but the difference in this year's patch cards compared to the past is the alarming change in weight. Usually, these cards are fairly heavy, depending on what's embedded in them, even when it's something non-metal like a cloth rookie card reproduction. These are not weighty at all. It's almost like they were made with Styrofoam.

Topps put "Redux" inserts in each of their flagship sets, apparently for people who couldn't get enough of Topps Archives or Topps Heritage. It seems very lazy and wholly unnecessary, but the cards at least are a decent reproduction of the feel of the original sets.

Bob (not actually his name) also sent over a couple of newer Bowman inserts, including this special "Mega Box" version of the Dylan Carlson Rookie of the Year Favorites. Considering that I never saw any regular variety Bowman on the shelf this year, let alone any so-called mega boxes, this was a welcome treat.

Matthew Liberatore's Scouts Top 100 insert has to settle for the indignancy of being a plain old insert. No "mojo" for Liberatore. At least the card is shiny, though.

A special box loader also fell off the plank and into my collection. I recall that these were actually inserted loosely into Stadium Club blasters, almost as an afterthought. The card inside the frame is much smaller than the regular base card, which sort of renders the idea of it being a "master photo" rather foolish. It instead ends up as a tribute to earlier Stadium Club sets. Hopefully, if you pulled any of these, they didn't end up with dinged corners. I was a bit alarmed when these fell out of the two blasters I ended up buying this year.

Nachos and an Update

Group break stuff from @Nachos_Grande and a Spring Cleaning update. 

 

When I announced the Spring Cleaning event in May, I knew that it was probably going to be a bit of a misnomer with summer around the corner. Now that summer is definitely here and I am staring at piles and piles of cards instead of sealed up packages, I know that I ended up missing the mark. The update is that I hope to resume sorting and packaging and actually start mailing things out in the first week of July. A few things happened to delay the progress, some foreseen and some unforeseen. If you have any additional requests (or haven't signed up yet?!), now is definitely the time. I am still planning on prioritizing anyone that specifically sent me stuff for this, but in any case I am going to get the packages moving out after the holiday weekend has passed.

In the meantime, let's check out some more cards. Everything seen here was acquired in a series of box breaks from the Nachos Grande Breaker's Club. 1998 Pacific Online was a pretty perplexing set. I still needed a bunch of base cards from it, and also needed (and gained) quite a few of these "web" parallels. The foil is gold instead of silver, and there's some sort of online code printed on the back of these.

Did anyone actually "get online" with these cards? I wonder how that would have worked. I definitely had dial-up internet back in 1998.

These Home Run History cards are very similar to the QVC box set that also included a bunch of Sammy Sosa cards. They're actually inserts from the 1999 Pacific Private Stock set, however. They're a bit thicker and have a holo foil overlay at the bottom.

Topps Tek was pretty much an anti-set. No right-minded set collector would ever dip a toe in here. On an individual level, the cards look really nice.

 

These are a good time for player collectors, as long as one of your players is actually on the checklist. 

My feelings on the Walmart Topps Gallery sets of late are pretty well documented here. They're not... good feelings. I also don't have good feelings about Marcell Ozuna, considering what he was recently arrested for. Barring something completely unexpected, this is probably the last you'll hear of him around this place.

On to much better things... it's mini So Taguchi! What a palate cleanser!
 

We'll end things with this Lou Brock card from the land of serial-numbered insert cards. There's a conspicuous space where you might expect Lou's signature to appear, and considering that these are actually called Prime Signatures, well... something feels like it's missing! This is just how things were done in the 00's, it seems.