Cards for Christmas Eve (A Tale of Two Breaks)

 

It's Holiday Time and time for another #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax -- throw another log on the fire.

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope everyone is hanging in there currently. I had some free time tonight and thought I'd show off a few cards from my most recent mailday from Crackin' Wax. This time there were two new products on offer, one that's never been a favorite of mine but other seem to like, and another one that's a bit of a debut.

Bowman Draft is the one I'm never all that enthusiastic about. It's usually the third time we've seen the exact same design, and this year it's really the fifth if you could both of the "1st Edition" releases. We've also seen a bunch of Nolan Gorman cards in past Bowman sets. In any case, it all seems rather unnecessary.

The people are here for the "1st Bowman" cards, though. (Not to be confused with 1st Edition Bowman.) I did end up knocking out both the "paper" team set and the Chrome team set, which is nice because I've never purchased a pack of Bowman Draft in my life, nor am I planning to.

You could also call this set Bowman Photoshop and you wouldn't be wrong even in years where there was a lot of professional baseball happening. I guess I prefer Photoshopped MLB uniforms over college and high school ones (wait... do I?) I think the sweet spot would be college/high school/minor league with big league logos, but there probably aren't a lot of people out there that would agree with me.

This one is a refractor. It shines.

Speaking of shining, the inaugural Allen & Ginter Chrome set is here, and it looks... really nice somehow. Topps was able to turn my all-time least favorite A&G design into something good here.

I like the way that the border goes from silver metal to light, and I also like the gold accents on the logo.

There are minis, too. They only come in the basic version and super rare parallels. There are no card back variations, in other words.

I do like what they did with the background, as well. If it wasn't for the cost being a bit out of my price range, this would probably be one of my favorite releases of the year.

My lone numbered card of the breaks is this Tommy Edman green parallel. There are 99 copies of this out there... well, 98 now.

Chrome, Mini, and Don't Forget the Donuts

A bunch of @CrackinWax breaks on the latest #CrackinWaxMailDay brings the shiny donuts. 

Last week was a bigger week for me in terms of buying into breaks. This latest crop from Crackin' Wax included purchases from the latest Chrome, Prizm and Optic sets (Optic not included!) as well as a cameo from a new Panini Absolute set and last year's "on-demand" Topps Mini product.

The Chrome boxes proved fruitful to me, as I was able to land a few refractors this time around. Let's just pretend that you can see the rainbow effect on the DeJong and Edman cards here.

This orange Jack Flaherty is numbered to just 25. Consider me very pleased with this one!

 

Rangel Ravelo is one of those career minor league types, but he showed a little bit of promise when he finally got the call last season with the Cardinals. In any case, autographed Chrome cards continue to look cool as they're all done "on card".

Panini's new Absolute set is weird in that it's both expensive and unlicensed (of course), but as part of a "mixer" (a box break with multiple products) I at least ended up with this one example from the set. It's a silver numbered paralle. If anyone actually has any of the base cards from this set that can be spared, please let me know.

Topps Mini, in its more recent "On Demand" configuration, is always a bit of a gamble considering that at it's base price point you just get one jumbo pack per box while the set is huge. I can't imagine putting together the entire set, which contains mini versions of all three flagship series sets, but people are spending crazy amounts of cash on cards these days. I was super fortunate to land this low numbered Ozzie Smith insert parallel along with a Tommy Edman Update rookie card.

A lot of the cards from this week's breaks came from the 2020 Panini Prizm set. I think this was my third attempt at trying to get some exclusive "donuts" parallels from the Quick Pitch version of Prizm boxes, and it finally worked out this time. This red Tommy Edman is numbered to 149.

I also ended up with a needed Goldschmidt insert. Not bad! Now I just need the 732 other versions of this card, probably.

My randomly assigned team in this break fared even better than the Cardinals, though, as I ended up with 3 different Diamondbacks numbered parallels. It's just unfortunate that I haven't really traded with an Arizona collector in awhile, to my recollection. This one is numbered to 199.

It's weird to think about Bumgarner in another uniform (and clearly he is still wearing the Giants uniform here), but that's life in 2020. There's only 15 copies of this card... wow!

Out of the three, this is the one I'm most likely to want to hang on to. Instead of donuts, this is actually some kind of snakeskin parallel. I like it! Gallen looks like one of the better young pitchers in the game right now, which makes it all the more unfortunate that he was originally a Cardinals draft pick. That Marcell Ozuna deal stings a bit. Of course, the Marlins flipped Gallen for a different prospect, so what do they even know?

Update Time

Closing out the baseball card year with a #CrackinWaxMailday featuring Tommy Edman. 

Once Topps Update hits the shelves, it means that baseball cards are pretty much done for the year. Sure, there will be other releases before New Year's Eve, but it's mostly peripheral stuff. A retail holiday promotion here, some high end stuff there. There's nothing left that I would pay much attention to, personally.

As the final release in my group break Crackin' Wax subscription, Topps Update leaves a bit to be desired for the Cardinals fan. With virtually zero trade deadline movement, a single All-Star Game participant and only a few rookies that didn't make the cut for an earlier set, there are only 7 Cardinals in the entire 300 card base set.

Paul Goldschmidt finally gets a non-airbrushed card, but even his inclusion wasn't all that necessary. Lane Thomas suffered an unfortunately late season injury and Andrew Knizner was relegated to third catcher duties, meaning that we only see three other playoff participants in the set, along with the requisite Paul DeJong ASG card. It would have been nice to see Tyler Webb in the set, but fairly anonymous relievers get overlooked even if they become a key component of a team's bullpen. Randy Arozarena and (probably) long-time minor leaguer Rangel Ravelo will end up getting held over as RCs until the 2020 set.

Here's a "150 Years" parallel of Paul DeJong's All-Star card. There are far too many parallels in this year's set.

I'm a huge fan of the hobby-only Topps Black parallels from over the years, so it was nice to get this Tommy Edman card numbered to 67. Along with his base and rainbow foil parallel, I went from zero Edman cards to three. Not bad.

More Rainbow foil parallel action. I feel like Goldschmidt has a lot of boring looking cards.

Here's a foil parallel of a guy who should be a key member of the Cardinals staff for years to come. Since he's a reliever, however, we probably won't see many cards of his in the future.

The 1984 Topps love continues. Here's a blue bordered parallel of an insert.

There was only one Cardinal in this set's silver pack promotion - the aforementioned Lane Thomas. Hopefully he recovers well for next season, because he was exciting to watch in his limited appearances.

More 150 Years of Greatest things... like Bruce Sutter. The design is a little busy, but I still don't mind these cards. I just wish there weren't parallels of them.

Thanks for reading!