Wrapping Up Breaks from the Spring

More Cardinals cards from some box breaks.

We're back with another bundle of Cardinals cards from Nachos Grande and his box breaking program. These came to me all the way back in April of this year, which means they probably cover some ground extending into the end of last year. I subscribe to the Nachos Grande Patreon and am also a frequently participant in the Breakers Club over on Discord, so after setting stuff shipped I usually end up with a treasure trove of things I had mostly forgotten about.

I don't think buying hobby boxes will ever be part of my collecting journey, so these kinds of breaks give me a chance snag some hobby exclusives like Finest. (I think there might have been some kind of retail mega box format for Finest this year, but let's not get into semantics just yet.) Masyn Winn's purple parallel from last year's Finest product is numbered to 200. Let's hope he can come back off of the IL sooner rather than later, because he's fun to watch at SS.

This chunky thing comes from the Panini Boys of Summer set, which is definitely not something I've ever opened before. Chase Davis has progressed steadily through the minor league system, getting his first shot at AAA this year.

A nice chunk of the cards in this shipment were from the 2025 Donruss set, something that is readily available at the retail level year after year. However, I actually needed a bunch of these, like this low-numbered Elite Series parallel of the one and only Albert Pujols.

Here's a holo parallel from said Donruss set of Tink Hence, once one of the club's top prospects. He was taken off the 40-man roster earlier this month but still remains in the organization, where everyone is hoping he'll finally have one of those bounceback seasons they've been anticipating.

Speaking of prospects, here's a few from the 2025 Bowman Chrome set, including a mega box parallel.

These cards (or really most art cards in general) are not my thing, but I'm glad that they exist because certain people do seem to love this type of stuff. The more collecting options out there, the better.

Thomas Saggese hasn't had much of an impact on this season, but he did recently get called up due to a rash of injuries and picked up a few hits yesterday.

Here's a red Stadium Club parallel of a past Cardinal and future HOFer.

I completely missed out on last year's Topps 205 set(s?), so there's a more than decent chance I am going to need anything from this in a Cardinals uniform.

By now, I'm sure everyone is more than familiar with the 2025 Topps Holiday set and I bet a new one is just around the corner. Here are some parallels of the team's former closer and current masher, the latter of which is enjoying his first career 100 RBI season.

Lastly, this Hit List insert from 2025 Donruss seems to be a tough pull, at least by looking at online availability. I know that I never pulled one of anything I opened last year.

Contest Alert!

A new contest is around the corner! Plus-- group break goodies!

We're deep in the thick of the various college basketball conference tournaments right now, which means March Radness is just a couple of days away. I should get this year's contest group operational at some point late Saturday night in anticipation of Selection Sunday. I've watched next to zero college hoops this season (oh, my poor, poor Ducks), but I'm not going to let that damper my fun in picking the games.

Today we have a fun little batch of Cardinals cards from Nachos Grande breaks. I'm pretty sure there are still teams available for his monthly subscription through Patreon and he also still has his Discord group going for other breaks as well. I recently signed up for another "breaker's club" batch of a bunch of breaks, so there should be more good stuff like this to show off later in the year.

At 25 with 19 big league starts under his belt, Michael McGreevy already feels like a cagey veteran in the Cardinals rotation pool. That's how young this team is going to be, folks.

Masyn Winn is still running hard around the basepaths while dodging an onslaught of squares and rectangles. It's a stormy one out there.

I'm not sure how these Chrome "lightboard logo" cards are distributed, but they look pretty decent with the old STL logo in the background.

I am a sucker for a nice acetate card, and this Paul Goldschmidt from the 2019 Topps High Tek set does not disappoint.

Let's hope this is the year Tink Hence figures it all out!

Stamped buyback cards are as silly as ever, but they're still always a nice find for my top player collections.

Check back on Sunday for this year's contest details!

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.

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.