Cramming a Few More Releases into America's Already Bloated Snack Hole

The latest @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay includes 3 more new baseball releases. 

 

It's been a bit, but I decided to jump into a couple more Crackin' Wax breaks while there were some available. First up is Panini's first Mosaic baseball set. Panini released an NBA version of this set during the absolute peak of basketball card mania and I feel that it actually hastened the decline of the market at the time (that and Zion Williamson being a bit disappointing.) The set is an absolute snore as it kind of resembles a bargain brand version of Prizm. Why make another Prizm-style set at a fairly expensive price point when you already have Prizm?

This new baseball release looks nearly identical to the 2019-20 NBA release, aside from using different fonts. It's another chromium-style set, but it's devoid of any real background and instead just uses a bunch of geometric shapes. There are tons and tons (this is Panini, so even more than you can imagine) of parallels, plus a bunch of inserts that seem to be really difficult to pull.

I only ended up with base cards, except for a single Giants silver parallel card as they were one of the teams that was pre-packaged with the Cards in the break. The non-Cardinal cards will all end up in trade boxes for a later day. (I have Marlins cards from this set as well.)

A new KK card for my collection rounds out the group of 4 Redbirds.

The second box break of the week was the online exclusive Allen & Ginter X. Boxes of this set were reportedly a lot more expensive this year than in the past, which means that I'll probably be sticking to picking up singles here and there.

I ended up with 3 base Cardinals cards plus a couple of minis. My other teams for this one were the Nationals and Tigers, so I have a few of their cards as well.

I also ended up with two free box break slots in a 2021 Topps Archives Snapshots break due to some success with my team in the Crackin' Wax fantasy baseball league. This is another online-exclusive set, but the design looks loads better than most of the flagship sets of late.

I was assigned the entire NL Central and NL West divisions for this. It's a small set (50 cards), and unfortunately the Cardinals have zero cards in it aside from an insert. So, no Cards cards for me, but plenty of trade bait.

This is a Tintype Titans insert. I'm not sure where the name comes from or what it signifies. The only time I'm really happy about posting images of Cubs cards here on the blog is when it's some Hall of Famer or retired player who played before my time, so this is cool.

There are parallels in this and I don't imagine the print run is very high on these. If Joey Bart ends up being a big time player at some point, I suppose that this could become a big time card. Big time!

I did end up with an autograph in this break (I believe there's one in every mini box). These are signed on-card and look really nice. I only wish it was someone I collect or at least not a player on an NL Central team that isn't the Cardinals.