A Quick Turnaround Deserves a Quick Blog Post

A free @flywheels Donruss Optic group break fell in my lap. 

I was staring at my phone Saturday morning (as I often do) when I found out about a free (cost of shipping only!) group break put on by Cardboard Collections. I didn't even feel I had time to read the details because I noticed that the Cardinals were still, inexplicably, not taken. Four days later, the cards are already in my hands. I felt like this was as good of a reason as any to let these cards jump to the front of the queue.

Two boxes of Panini's 2016 Donruss Optic were opened, and in addition to polishing off my base team set (only needed Yadi's regular card), I was able to snag quite a few parallels and one insert card.

This is Jeremy Hazelbaker, of early 2016 season fame. He didn't quite catch fire with the fanbase like Bo Hart once did, but I definitely saw a Hazelbaker jersey (or shirsey?) on my trip up to Seattle that summer to see the Cardinals/Mariners series.

Purple Hazelbaker. He went on to put up great numbers as a Diamondbacks pinch-hitter last season, but has struggled at AAA in 2018 as he's passed through a few organizations.

It's always great to get a card I needed of one of my favorite players of all-time.

Here's the insert card as promised. It's... something? I feel like Panini can sometimes put together an acceptable base card with their licensing restrictions, but the inserts are usually pretty wretched.

There were tons of Yadis in the batch, and Colbey even gave me a sneak peak on Twitter. Two of the Molina cards were numbered (to 299) Aqua parallels, which look a lot nicer than I would have expected, even though the border color doesn't really blend well with red. Two copies of a rare Yadi card is a perfect number for this household.

Here's the purple version of Yadi's Diamond Kings card. Maybe Panini should stick to sets featuring catchers, because you're not going to see a lot of logos anyway.

In addition to pulling the needed basic version of this card, I also snagged the "holo" (i.e. refractor) version. Nice!

Thanks again to Colbey and his generosity with this essentially free break. Be sure to check out his blog and/or Facebook group and/or Twitter feed for more Affordable Group Breaks, although few are sure to be as affordable as this one.