Shiny and Gold

Another fresh batch of Cardinals from a fellow Cardinals fan. 

As a team collector, it rarely beats the feeling of dumping cards from a rival team on someone and getting some stuff from your team in return. For me, it's kind of like swapping a bowl of slimy mushroom and beet salad for a fresh brick oven pizza. (To be fair, I actually really like salad, but not so much those particular veggies.)

However, sometimes it's even better to swap items with someone who is into the same team as you. I end up with a crateload full of Cardinals doubles by the very nature of being a team collector, and I imagine Ray from All Cardinals All The Time is in a similar boat. 2019 was a very productive year for Cardinals-for-Cardinals trades, at least on my side, so I'm hopeful that I was able to add as much of the good stuff to his collection as he did to mine. He's a few highlights from an envelope received back in November.

There's an incredible amount of Bowman parallels, many with their own "flair" added to the color scheme. I'm just going to call this "blue wave" for now, even though it might not be.

I know that I figured out where the Kaminsky and Tilson cards belonged in the TCDB database back when I first opened this stuff, but again I'm just going to stick with "blue wave" for tonight. See, it's kinda wavy? I don't tend to open a ton of Bowman, and when I do it's pretty much always retail, so I only usually see the basic refractors.

Here's a nice trio of gold Bowman parallels, something that Topps has done away with in recent years. I don't necessarily love the gold look on these, but I feel that they have somehow made the Bowman product much more boring lately. I feel like I had a lot more fun with this pack break from 2007, for example.

Here's one last shiny parallel in the form of a Matt Adams "prism" refractor. These seemed destined to replace the "X-Fractor" at some point, but I see that they're still making those as recently as 2019.

Thanks again to Ray. I think I have at least another one of these packages from him to recap in the near future.