A #CrackinWaxMailDay from @CrackinWax to close out October in black.
While I didn't receive any cards for my birthday, I managed to avoid splurging big on cards for myself as Halloween came and went. I did go for a few more box breaks from our friends at Crackin' Wax, with a couple of new products dropping as they say.
Fresh on the heels of this year's delayed Allen & Ginter release is the online-only Allen & Ginter X, one of Topps's more shameless cash grabs year after year. They toss aside basically all of the insert cards, re-do the set in black and add a shot at a few low numbered minis and autographs. I don't mind this set usually, because it's not the type of thing I see a lot, but this year in particular just kind of bugs me. Maybe it's the player names, which instead of being white-on-black are just outlined in a little bit of white.
Perhaps my dislike of the 2020 Allen & Ginter design is also making me like these less than usual. The base cards really stand out (and not in a great way) next to the minis, which are black bordered this time instead of completely blacked out (see Flaherty at the top of the post.) In any case, it was still cool to pick up a few cards for my team collection that aren't sold in traditional stores. (Although, for the most part, everything is "online only" for me this year.)
The other breaks I bought in to in the last week of October were for the 5th and final wave of Topps 206. This set did not get a lot of love from the fans this year, perhaps because there were scarcely any "hits" to speak of. If you recall, all of the cards are tobacco mini sized, which I feel is an excellent choice relative to the full sized sets that popped up a few times in the '00s (2003, 2009 and 2010, I think?) And each card comes with an array of parallels, but they all look the same on the front, which probably scares away the rainbow chasers. Ah well.
While I didn't get any of the Cardinals parallels this time around, I did end up with two cards of who we now know to be the AL Rookie of the Year runner-up. One of them was even a Piedmont parallel. The White Sox were unavailable for sale and could only be assigned as a random team, which for one of the breaks happened to fall in my lap. I have a small stack of LouBob rookie year cards that I'll probably pull out some other year to see if they're still sought after. Selling cards right now just seems to be a bit too intimidating.
Happy belated birthday! And congratulations on landing the White Sox and that Roberts. I like putting rookie cards away too and then digging through my box when they've gone on to make a name for themselves.
ReplyDeleteIf the year weren't on the front, I probably wouldn't be able to tell the X cards from one year to another. That being said, I do really like the Bob Gibson.
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