Still Group Breakin'

Checking out another batch of Cardinals cards from spring's group breaks.

While I'm not participating in card breaks at the level I once was, I still have a regular thing going on with a few low cost breakers. Tonight we'll take a look at some stuff I got earlier this year from the Nachos Grande breaks.

A good chunk of the cards that hit my mailbox this time around were from the then-new Topps Heritage set. As of this writing it looks like I may have finally finished off the non-SP base set, but Topps made it extremely annoying to collect the inserts this time around, getting rid of all of the usual concepts like Flashbacks and New Age Performers, sets that were small enough to complete in a reasonable amount of time. In their place are much larger insert checklists which are not commonly even found in packs. Annoying. They also spammed the whole product with Chrome and color parallels, when in the past one or two of these would suffice.

One of the boxes in these past breaks was something called Historic Autograph Company. It's a 2024 set featuring players from a long bygone era.

I had never heard of these things and they have a strange look to them: glittery and shiny but still trying to look "old" in a way.

They don't even put the player names on the front, but many of these guys are famous enough that you might recognize them anyway.

Speaking of a ridiculous number of parallels, well, that just seems to be Topps in the Fanatics era now. They decided to streamline by significantly cutting down on the number of releases per year but decided to cram even more, ahem, "value" into their core products that they kept around. That's how you get a special Miles Mikolas parallel card adorned with a whole mess of Topps logos.

This 2022 Topps Museum Collection card was a really nice surprise, as you usually don't see high end cards in these breaks. This one is numbered to just 99 copies.

A box of 2004 Bazooka was part of the fun, and among other things I ended up with a chunky red parallel of a Yadi rookie card. Nice!

These 1997 Pacific Prism Gems of the Diamond cards are really not very attractive looking. It's always nice to add another card of The Wizard to my collection, though, especially an older one.

Here's one of those new Topps Heritage inserts. We shall see if I ever track down a second copy of this.

To repeat myself for the billionth time: I miss Topps Total. And I don't mean that on-demand stuff that they put out several years ago. Nobody liked Topps Total because of the design, and that was really the only thing connecting the 2020 era cards with the 2000s product. (This one is a silver parallel.)

Will we see a tribute to the 1991 set in next year's Topps flagship products? Well, it's not like Topps is exactly known for innovation these days, so I'm going to assume yes.