PWE Round-Up: All Night Owl Edition

Three envelopes. One sender.

It's once again time to do a little round-up of some Plain White Envelopes that I've received in the mail. This time, all three envelopes are from Night Owl Cards. Since sports card shows locally have been completely overtaken by Pokemon, TCGs and the like, this is practically the only way I can add something unexpected to my collection these days.

The first envelope showed up back in May, and included this really nice Nolan Arenado jersey swatch, presumably from one of his own "Victory Blue" jersey that the Cards have been wearing on Saturday road games in recent years.

Here's a trio of sparkly parallels from 2025 Topps sets. I've been one of those lamenting the proliferation of shiny parallels in Heritage products lately, but at least they make solid trade bait. Besides the Burly Heritage card, there's also a couple of holo foil parallels from the flagship set.

Last year, Topps Heritage did some sort of tribute to itself by showcasing (current?) players on previous Heritage designs, which of course were just a tribute to the first Topps sets. It's been tough to get ahold of almost any inserts in recent Heritage sets, so this was certainly appreciated even if the set was poorly executed.

Envelopes number two and three both showed up at the same time around mid July of this year. One of these envelopes was stuffed full of Allen & Ginter minis. There are enough non-sport collectors out there to make these a bit tougher to acquire than the parallel minis. The warthog throws off the whole landscape orientation synergy that is going on here.

The other envelope was all about the Cardinals. Yadi is the first of a trio of pink ice Panini Prizm parallels from 2025. That's a lot of P-words!

Masyn Winn just returned from a stint on the IL recently. His Gold Glove work was certainly missed in his absence.

This one looks a little off to me, and I don't think it's just the straight-on shot of Gibby's blank cap.

Drew Rom's time with the Cardinals was cut short due to injury. He was part of the deadline deal dump of Jack Flaherty a few years ago. This one is numbered to 499.

Rookie Nathan Church appears here on a holiday parallel. He's had some fleeting moments of success with the bat this season and continues to be their most impressively speedy outfielder.

We finish things up here with Waino and some shiny blue little rockets. For some reason, these have become one of the most prevalent Donruss parallels all of a sudden. I'm not really sure what the appeal is there.

Good Luck Ducks, Week 1: Student Orientation

Oregon begins another season with big expectations and dreams.

A new college football season is upon us once again! Dan Lanning begins his 5th (!) season at the helm of Quack Central with all kinds of expectations on his shoulders once again. For two years running, the Ducks felt like they were the best team in the nation for stretches only to find themselves unable to measure up to one of their own conference foes when things mattered the most (i.e. the playoffs.) Two seasons ago, it was the second meeting with Ohio State that clipped their wings. Last season, a second chance at Indiana was no more fruitful than the first one.

Nevertheless, Dante Moore, who some had pegged as a #2 pick had he decided to enter the NFL Draft even after some issues were exposed in the playoffs, has returned to lead a stacked Ducks team back to another hopeful playoff run. He's joined by a talented defense and some interesting offensive weapons as Oregon will make their season debut hosting Boise State of the new eight team Pac-12 Conference.

I have a lot more Boise State memories imprinted on my brain than your average early season nonconference opponent. We all know about the Smurf Turf, which they weren't allowed to bring on this trip. There was the glorious Statue of Liberty play, the hilarious Blount punch (not so hilarious for Blount, I suppose) and more recently a Raiders guy named Jeanty doing a modern day Bo Jackson Tecmo Bowl impression all over NCAA opponents circa 2024. This year's Broncos team is at least a couple of touchdowns of an underdog against the Ducks juggernaut in Eugene, but that doesn't mean that they can't make it interesting. After all, it was Jeanty's team a couple of seasons ago that really made Oregon sweat it out. It's difficult for me to have any expectations going into Week 1, especially in the era of shifting conference alignments, the transfer portal and the whole NIL thing.

Notes:

• Welcome back to football season, whether you like it or not! I took my now annual unplanned summer(?) vacation from regular posting here, but you can expect more activity around here this fall beyond the minimum of a post-per-Oregon game.
• With big success comes big coaching losses, and it will be interesting to see how Oregon deals with losing both their offensive and defensive coordinators. It's more than a bit scary to think about.
• Opponent fun fact: It may not be fun for the visitors, but weather here in the Willamette Valley took a strange turn this week when we were greeted with unseasonably cold and occasionally unstable weather. Our consistently dry season tends to run from the beginning of July through early October, so it's been strange. In any case, apparently Boise State's flight to Eugene was held up from landing multiple times before being redirected to Portland where the team had to wait for buses to show up to take them down to Eugene late last night.
• Opponent history: The Broncos lead the all-time series 3-1, with Oregon's lone win coming two seasons ago in a 37-34 squeaker at Autzen.
• Game time is 12:30 PM PDT on CBS in Eugene. Go Ducks!

Transitional Season

 

Shifting from summer sports to fall sports with help from a huge stack of cards from each.

This time of year can always sneak up on a person. The Boys of Summer are winding down while the gridiron lines have been painted and are ready to go. Full-on hoopin' is just around the corner. Let's check out some cards from the fall sports and a few baseball ones from buckstorecards, with the typical several months time delay you're used to seeing around here.

Cooper Hjerpe starred locally (at Oregon State) and wound up drafted by the Cardinals, which means that they are actually some intentional Beavers cards in my collection. Hjerpe (pronounced JER-pee) is on his way back from suffering some major injuries in his pro career and could look to make a big league impact at some point.

Here's a Triple Threads card with that canvas-y feel of old Eagles favorite Brian Westbrook.

My Ducks collection gets another fairly low numbered card in this Luke Ridnour "Proof" from 2009-10 Studio.

A pair of Ducks football players team up here on a Playoff Contenders inserts from around 20 years ago.

Kramer Robertson only had a single plate appearance in the big leagues across two games and would end up hanging it up after that final season (2023).

Oregon has always been successful at placing quarterbacks in the pro ranks, although for a time many of them were journeymen like A.J. Feeley.

This might be my first and only Harry Giles Blazers card, but it's a good one!

Here's a numbered (to 100) Reuben Droughns card from Score Select, capturing his move from the Browns to the Giants.

Speaking of Cleveland Ducks, Dillon Gabriel started about half of his pro team's games in his rookie season but is caught in the middle of the drama where his team's position group also includes the son of Deion Sanders and a sex pest (to put it mildly.)

Demetrius Williams seems to have a ton of football cards for his era and the impact he made on the game, but I'm not complaining. Of course, these days he'd probably have more than three hundred thousand Wild Card so-called one-of-ones.

Although the orange clashes with the lime green here, it's always fun to end up with a shiny new Prizm Troy Franklin card.

This one fits Dolphin colors a bit better.

Panini Origins has long been a hobby exclusive, so any chance at snapping up a single or two of someone I collect from these sets is a nice deal.

The Eagles haul continues here with one of their best all-time running backs, LeSean McCoy.

I'm not really able to place the name Ed Reynolds anymore, but I thought the pink tint of this autographed Prizm card is interesting. Check the breast cancer awareness ribbons as well.

This is another four pack of lesser known Eagles guys on numbered cards (plus another McCoy.)

As is typical, I also ended up with another stack of St. Louis Blues cards. I chose this one from 1991 to scan. I mean, his name is Zombo after all.

Wrapping Up Breaks from the Spring

More Cardinals cards from some box breaks.

We're back with another bundle of Cardinals cards from Nachos Grande and his box breaking program. These came to me all the way back in April of this year, which means they probably cover some ground extending into the end of last year. I subscribe to the Nachos Grande Patreon and am also a frequently participant in the Breakers Club over on Discord, so after setting stuff shipped I usually end up with a treasure trove of things I had mostly forgotten about.

I don't think buying hobby boxes will ever be part of my collecting journey, so these kinds of breaks give me a chance snag some hobby exclusives like Finest. (I think there might have been some kind of retail mega box format for Finest this year, but let's not get into semantics just yet.) Masyn Winn's purple parallel from last year's Finest product is numbered to 200. Let's hope he can come back off of the IL sooner rather than later, because he's fun to watch at SS.

This chunky thing comes from the Panini Boys of Summer set, which is definitely not something I've ever opened before. Chase Davis has progressed steadily through the minor league system, getting his first shot at AAA this year.

A nice chunk of the cards in this shipment were from the 2025 Donruss set, something that is readily available at the retail level year after year. However, I actually needed a bunch of these, like this low-numbered Elite Series parallel of the one and only Albert Pujols.

Here's a holo parallel from said Donruss set of Tink Hence, once one of the club's top prospects. He was taken off the 40-man roster earlier this month but still remains in the organization, where everyone is hoping he'll finally have one of those bounceback seasons they've been anticipating.

Speaking of prospects, here's a few from the 2025 Bowman Chrome set, including a mega box parallel.

These cards (or really most art cards in general) are not my thing, but I'm glad that they exist because certain people do seem to love this type of stuff. The more collecting options out there, the better.

Thomas Saggese hasn't had much of an impact on this season, but he did recently get called up due to a rash of injuries and picked up a few hits yesterday.

Here's a red Stadium Club parallel of a past Cardinal and future HOFer.

I completely missed out on last year's Topps 205 set(s?), so there's a more than decent chance I am going to need anything from this in a Cardinals uniform.

By now, I'm sure everyone is more than familiar with the 2025 Topps Holiday set and I bet a new one is just around the corner. Here are some parallels of the team's former closer and current masher, the latter of which is enjoying his first career 100 RBI season.

Lastly, this Hit List insert from 2025 Donruss seems to be a tough pull, at least by looking at online availability. I know that I never pulled one of anything I opened last year.

Topps Hoops

A look at Topps in their first year of their new NBA deal.

I have to admit that I didn't have a ton of nostalgic feelings for Topps basketball cards when their returned to (licensed) cards was imminent. I know a few people posted images of their Steph Curry rookie cards when it became clear that the Fanatics-owned company was coming back to the league in full force, but NBA cards were not very popular in those days. Their original vintage era was before my time, and they didn't come back to the hobby until I was starting to bow out during their comeback season of 1992-93. Everything that's come out out since then has been a bit of a curiosity to me and nothing more as I didn't collect at all from 1994-on until I started the blog around 2008, at which time Topps NBA cards were once again on their way out. Since Fanatics apparently couldn't help themselves and wait until Panini's clock ran out, there were actually unlicensed NBA sets going back at least a couple of years prior to this past season, and they looked... well... terrible!

Here's a look at a card from the 2024-25 season. Instead of merely Photoshopping out the licensed markings, they decided to move the player's jersey number up and embiggen it to make it the central focus. It just looks weird, and all of the various flourishes they added to the design and their various parallels did not help in any way.

I'm actually here to talk about the fully licensed sets, however. For the flagship 2025-26 set, they copied the baseball design. I don't actually have a regular (non-parallel) base card scanned at the moment, so try to imagine Deandre Ayton's card at the top of the post has the expected solid white borders and such. The real travesty here is, well, two-fold:

1. Aside from rookies with their expected photo day/draft day poses, the player photo selection typically dates back to the beginning of the 2024-25 season, about a full calendar year before these hit the streets on October 23 of last year. Topps refused to do the Panini thing (update the team logo, but use an old photo and indicate the date the player changed teams) and also refused to do the, uh, Topps thing and just Photoshop the player into his new uniform. This third option seems like the laziest and worst. (Ayton spent this season with the Lakers.)

2. The backs of the cards have been Panini-fied in that there's just a single line of previous season stats along with career totals. Market research must have indicated that basketball fans don't care about stats. This is also the first release that I'm aware of that actually carries the "Flagship" branding on the back instead of Series One or something similar. Strangely, cards that have a vertical/portrait-oriented photo on the front have the same sort of orientation on the back, while horizontal/landscape-oriented fronts come with a horizontal/landscape back. I don't really understand the justification for this, and I'm sure it annoys the heck out of anyone trying to build these sets.

Topps also released a Holiday version of this set a week later, complete with similar design and parallel concepts that the MLB set used, only with no updates to player photos or teams.

Topps dropped their third NBA product of the year around Christmas time in Topps Chrome. I was able to afford precisely one hanger box, and only because I had a coupon at GameStop. These things were very expensive. You might expect some updated photos/teams here like they do with baseball, but you'd sadly be wrong. Here's a Prism parallel of that same Ayton guy from 2024. Different photo, but same old team.

On April 22nd, Topps released their first licensed Bowman basketball set to feature pro players in quite some time. This set also included a select group of college players on NIL deals as the "prospects" portion of the set. Similar to the baseball sets of the past, there are Chrome parallels to collect. Topps also screwed up the Blazers logo for certain players. Check out how dark this looks in comparison to Shaedon Sharpe's card below:

Strangely, I noticed they actually fixed the "dark logo" issue with these cards in their digital app (NBA Collect), which is about as close as you'll see to Topps acknowledging any errors these days.

No stats, but you do get a "Bowman Briefing". It probably goes without saying at this point, but there were no updated player teams or photos in this set as far as I can tell. Both Henderson and Sharpe are still with the Blazers at this time, though.

Fast forward to May 14th of this year and you'll see the first Topps-branded release of NBA Hoops. I was actually pleasantly surprised in a way with this release as the cards are more substantial looking than most past Hoops releases. They are thick and shiny as a sort of "elevated" foilboard set. Unfortunately, well, there was zero effort made on the checklist as once again we are treated to 2024 player photos and teams.

The backs fit in well with previous Hoops releases.

On May 28th, with the league already very deep in its playoff schedule, Topps released the first licensed Signature Class set in retail formats. Again, they used 2024 photos. Simons spent last season with the Celtics before being shipped to Chicago at the trade deadline. I also don't have a scan of any of the base cards from this set, but just imagine this design minus the shiny boxy look as this is a Chrome style "Pandora" parallel. There would be no stats on the back.

Topps also put out a handful of hobby-exclusive releases during the past season-plus, including stuff like Chrome Cosmic, Finest, and Midnight, but these all similarly had a low effort vibe to them. There is a forthcoming Chrome Update set coming out in about a week which will finally feature some player movement over a year in the making, but a quick glance at the checklist shows a ton of overlap with the original Chrome set. It seems like the primary reason for putting this out in the wild is to feature Luke Doncic cards, who was apparently left out of the main set, as well as getting a second crop of the same rookie class into the mix.

Will this time-delayed, low effort vibe continue into the next season? Will this also be applied to their NFL sets? I think I know the answer to those questions already.