A Holiday Weekend PWE Round-Up

 

Fun things come in small envelopes.

 

It's time for another round of small trade envelopes and things of that nature. This bunch is pretty baseball (and Cardinals) heavy, which is just about perfect for this time of year.

First up is the first of two envelopes from gcrl (cards as i see them). This one has been sitting on my shelf since February according to the postmark. A pair of obscure Cardinals pandemic relievers still look good in red, even with the blue background design that accompanies the red bordered parallel card from 2021 Topps Heritage.

Panini's Donruss product sprang forth this strange little die-cut card with a giant Rated Rookie logo on it in 2016. The nostalgia for the Rated Rookie logo supersedes what little Panini actually does with its Donruss brand, which is typically underwhelming if not just outright boring.

I think at this point I have more Tim Cooney signed cards than the total number of times I can recall seeing him actually pitch, but that's fairly typical for certain players who get featured in Bowman. I didn't have this blue parallel, of course!

This Career Year insert is apparently from the 2022 Topps flagship set. I don't really remember it at all, and I bought a decent amount of this Topps stuff that year. Pujols certainly looks much younger here in his 2009 state than he did during his memorable 2022 Cardinals comeback.

Ah, who doesn't love a good Stadium Club photo? When do we get Stadium Club this year? This month? September? December? Never?

Until they also lost the Players Association license, Panini continued their tradition of numbering all of their inserts to 999 copies, like this one. You could still find unnumbered parallels in their various retail configurations, though.

I kind of miss the dumb fake relic cards that they put in Topps blasters for many years. I believe this year (2023) was the last year that they did something like this. The rubbery hockey puck-shaped thing in the middle of the card is certainly memorable. It almost totally obscures the player.

Further cementing gcrl's status as Hamm King were this pair of inserts from the 2015 Topps set. I now own 17 of these by my count, and others will have their work cut out for them if they want to catch the leader.

Next up is a very coveted card from noted author and Brewers fan (and the two do intersect) Matthew Prigge. I did not know that a Jim Edmonds Brewers card existed until recently, which made me highly interested in obtaining a copy. After Edmonds was traded to San Diego (for future World Series hero David Freese), he went on a whirlwind tour though the NL Central, playing for every team in the division aside from Pittsburgh before winding up his career. Cubs and Reds Edmonds cards are readily available in some major sets, but the existence of a Brewers card was news to me.

I had to scan the back because I'm highly interested in police/team issued cards and wanted to check this out. I believe there are actually a bunch of different versions of this set, at least according to TCDB. I'm assuming that the main different is the presenting sponsor on the back.

Matthew also included a few shiny bonus cards that I had been hesitant to write about for some time now. I believe he was the first person that I knew of to discover this weird bootleggy looking set/box thing that was briefly available on Amazon. I was hoping someone else would discover more info about this set and maybe even put a checklist together for TCDB, but as far as I know no one has bothered to undertake this.

Here's a couple more. I have a whole stack of these that I also purchased from Amazon a year or two ago, but I don't know if what I ended up with was a complete set. I ended up throwing a few of these into envelopes for others myself, so I wouldn't even be able to attempt a checklist anymore. I'll probably toss the rest of these up on the blog as a giveaway at some point this summer because they've been sitting on my desk far too long. The set is full of weird errors and has a strange checklist, but the Cardinals were more than fairly represented.

Here's what all of the card backs look like. Ah yes, it's the Patriotic Baseball Eagle. The cards are are extremely thin and sharped like playing cards/TCG cards, except that they're all shiny gold... and probably very toxic. Don't eat these. I believe they're Korean in origin, from what little research could be done from when they were available for sale.

The third envelope comes from gcrl once again, who comes out swinging with this amazing autograph of one of my all-time favorite college football players. LaMichael James' Press Pass autograph card is numbered to just 99 copies, and I don't even mind that he's been cut off at the shoulders here.

From Duck to Duck, this is a pro rookie card of another Oregon running back who had a pretty solid run with the Seahawks in the '00s. I've never been one to root a ton for the NFL team up north of here in Seattle, but Mo Morris gave me a reason to check in on them from time to time.

The bulk of the envelope was comprised of a bunch of 2025 Topps Heritage needs. I'm pretty close to being done with the (non-SP, non-insert) set now, but there's a few stragglers as usual.

Last up is this single card from Damon Holtz, a great Bluesky follow who gives away cards on his feed there pretty frequently. This is one of the "silver pack" box topper insert cards from the recently released Series 2 set and also shows Pujols in his original run with the Cardinals. This is actually the second card I've snagged from the very generous Damon, but I think I ended up only posting on Bluesky about the other one. I'm not going to try to convince anyone of the merits of Bluesky (or any social media in general), but if you're over there, feel free to give me a follow!

It's Inevitable

Cards from buckstorecards turn the heat up!

We're passed the point of no return and there's no coming back. Summer is inevitable. It's busy. It's impossible to stop. There's a lot going on right now, both in and out of the sports realm. Baseball arms are falling off, as they are wont to do. Video game consoles are being cranked out to the masses. Rock bands are doing their band things. While I have a minute to stop and take a breath, let's check out another bundle o' cards from the Dollar Store (note: not actually a dollar store.)

It's a side-by-side look at a pair of Victor Scott Stadium Club rookie cards. On the left is the sepia parallel and on the right is the base card. I'm not totally sold on Scott as being a future cornerstone of the franchise out in CF yet, but he's swiped enough bases to stick around my fantasy team's lineup at least.

Here's another pair of Cardinals cards, this time from different eras. I was surprised to learn that I didn't yet own this Co-Signers Chris Carpenter card. Cards from the '00s are starting to become tougher to come by these days.

I also landed a copy of one of these wacky Topps Tek cards. It's some sort of "blue rainbow diffractor" parallel (whatever that means) with a print run of just 75 copies.

Kwame Evans Jr. kicks off the duck-billed portion of the trade package. Evans carved out a nice role as a sixth man type last season and is expected to be back with the team's second season in the Big 10 after making it to the round of 32 in March Madness.

I also got hit up with this two-packs of Oregon autos from the 2023 Topps Chrome McDonald's All-American set. I don't have a formal collection of Oregon women's basketball player cards (yet!) aside from a very tiny amount of Sabrina Ionescu cards, but I will definitely start looking for more and more of these especially with the WNBA set to return to Portland very soon.

A 20+ CFL card?! Yes, please! McCullough took over as the lead back at Oregon towards the end of my time in Eugene, and he doesn't have many cards, so this is a treat.

Of course, this is a much newer CFL card (check the date!) of another Ducks alum. Upper Deck started "game dating" their photos in some sets back in the latter half of the '90s, and I really wish that this had become more of a common practice over the years as it's always nice to know what specific game a given photo comes from. Of course, with most of the stuff that Topps puts out these days, they've completely washed out or cropped out the backgrounds so as to make the event they came from fairly meaningless.

(New) Leaf puts out some weird stuff, but here's a perfectly colored autograph that goes quite well with the green on Breeland's uniform here.

I just discovered recently that Panini put out an "Unparalleled" brand NFL set for a number of years that closely mirrors the Revolution brand they use for basketball. I'm not sure why they chose different brand names here, but it's always tough to figure out what Panini is doing.

Speaking of which, Chris Boucher seems to be standing in front of some sort of planet-shaped energy orb here on this parallel Recon card numbered to 199.

It's a token Blues card! Shattenkirk was with the Blues during a good chunk of time in the 2010's and just announced his retirement late last year.

The last card up is one of the best, with a nice addition to my Randall Cunningham PC. This one is from 2012, but I've noticed he's found his way to some more recent checklists, which is always a nice thing.

Cheesin' It

 

Cardinals box break cards featuring Nolan Arenado (still a Cardinal!) and more.

I've slowed down lately in my participation in group box breaks for a variety of reasons, but there's still a few things here and there that have been coming in. Nachos Grande is still hosting regular breaks and has just recently moved to a Patreon-hosted subscription platform that I am eager to check out. Basically, you "subscribe" to your team's tier (if available) over at the Patreon site, and by paying a monthly fee you get all of the cards for your team for the box(es) opened that month. I'm curious to see how it works out.

These cards are from breaks prior to moving over to Patreon, mostly from late 2024 and early 2025. I was only able to find Panini Crusade cards briefly in the wild, but the ones I did open have been very popular on the trading market (i.e. TCDB) for some reason. I feel like it's actually one of Panini's stronger looking baseball products of late, but they generally have a low bar to clear for that.

These are actually silver/grey Crusade parallels, but the base design is essentially the same but with less grey. Chase Davis was the Cardinals 1st round pick a couple of years ago and has worked his way up to the AA level. Could a late season call-up be possible for the former college star?

Allen & Ginter was another one of those "released later than it should be" things last year. I was super happy to add this to my Masyn Winn collection, as despite my overall feelings about this brand of late, the framed minis always look really nice.

Topps Archives was another late 2024 release and featured its usual bevy of base cards and inserts that feature past designs. This one is based on a 1995 Topps Traded set design that I wasn't terribly familiar with. This is another nice Winn card, which happens to be a green parallel numbered to just 99 copies.

Continuing on with the late season stuff was the popular Stadium Club product. This was an incredibly botched release with collation turning me off from being interested in buying more than the one blaster I tried (basically every box seemed to only contain cards from a small handful of teams), but the on-card autographs always look really nice.

I actually landed two (!) of these signature cards. Good Cardinals luck here! I'm sure quite a few other team slots got screwed here.

Of course, the main impetus for me getting these shipped out was the brand new (at the time) 2025 Topps flagship release. We've moved into the '90s as the Topps 35th Anniversary tributes seem to have no sign of slowing down. I ended up with both this fancy Chrome Arenado as well as the slick signed card at the top of this post.

Topps brought back their First Pitch inserts after a number of years. Jayson Tatum joins Jon Hamm (obviously) and John Goodman in the pantheon of interesting people who have been featured at Busch Stadium on these cards. Unfortunately, Tatum recently tore his Achilles and probably won't see the basketball court for quite some time, but he'll have his championship ring from a year ago to comfort himself with I suppose.

Here's one from an older set. I think there are literal millions of Mark McGwire inserts from this era and I probably only own about 1 percent of them. Someone might want to check the math on that.

Last up is a pair of inserts from the 2024 Donruss set. There's not much to say about these, but I know Panini continues to put whatever effort they're allowed to into cranking out a Donruss baseball set every year as the next new one is going to be the first Nachos Grande box break of the Patreon era.

Batch o' Breaks

Some new (to me) Allen & Ginter cards, a bunch of green Birds and even a Trail Blazer. 

 

I took a bit of a break from the Meta apps awhile back, but I still had some box break cards to sift through from over in the wild wilderness known as Facebook. I had only been hanging onto that specific app for its "Groups" feature, where there were a couple of low-key super cheap break groups I was involved with.

One of those groups should immediately be familiar to readers here, as it was Colbey's Affordable Group Breaks. This batch of stuff came from a few of those breaks earlier this year, and of course, I'm just now getting around to showing this stuff off.

I felt pretty good about my decision to end my idealistic Allen & Ginter collection with the 2022 set proper, and the 2024 design did nothing to dissuade me. I still do need to track down all of the Cardinals needs from this set, however, and I did like a couple of the insert concepts as well. I even opened a couple of blasters of the stuff at one point.

In any case, the design sort of has a leather / belt buckle look going on with it, which is to say that I don't exactly think it's a bad design. It just doesn't feel anything like the Allen & Ginter sets I started collecting back in 2008.

I'm not sure I had this card on my want list, but it will head to the binders anyway. All I know of Metro Boomin' is that he was in the middle of a big event promoting the debut of the Cardinals first City Connect jerseys last summer, which he is also modeling here. I can't say I'm very up on current hip-hop, give or take a Kendrick Lamar or a Travis Scott. (I can't say I can name a single song by the latter, unfortunately.) I do known that Metro Boomin' is a local STL guy, which makes sense that he was there for the big jersey reveal party.

One of these breaks was a rare NBA break, where my sole need was current Blazers fave Toumani Camara. I'll take all the cards of the Belgian-born defensive wizard any day.

With exclusivity licenses looming in football and basketball, Topps has been putting out a bunch of unlicensed garbage that people always used to make fun of Panini for doing. That being said, I collect all of this stuff, so what do I know? I don't have a ton of Donovan McNabb cards for being the Eagles fan that I am, but I've been slowly adding some Eagles stuff to my TCDB want list lately.

Panini still has the NFL license for now, so we get logos here. Lucky us. A.J. Brown is one of the latest to enter the circle of Eagles I need more cards of, with Brown & co. coming off of a big Super Bowl victory.

Panini rolls out the 1989 Score design year after year, with Bo Nix being one of the latest to get this treatment on a faux-rookie-insert type card. Nix has an absurd number of cards for a guy that's played a single year of professional football.

Last up is this four-pack of Eagles base cards from the 2024 Score set. Again, Panini does a decent job with this low cost set year after year, coming up with a new basic design that still feels like "classic" Score in a way.