Contest Reminder and a PWE Round-Up

Cards from little envelopes.

Before I get into today's crop of cards, here is your final reminder to go and sign up for the College Football Postseason prediction contest. It's Year 16! Can you believe that? It's time to start getting those picks in as the first game kicks off around 9:00 AM PST tomorrow morning.

It's now time for a year end recap of PWEs (Plain White Envelopes!) received in the second half of the year, or thereabouts. First up is a single Victor Scott the Sequel purple Chrome refractor parallel from 2024 Topps Heritage High Number, courtesy of Matthew of Number 5 Type Collection. It feels like it's been a few years since I've bought one of those hot box blaster things that contains those purple parallels, assuming that's still how these cards are distributed. With the 2025 set just around the corner (I think?), I'll have to figure out the best (cheap) option for opening some of those packs for myself.

Next up is another fine envelope from gcrl of cards as i see them. Pittman is the younger brother of Colts wide receiver Michael Pittman Jr. and was a strange case of someone whose on-field contributions never quite rose to his talent level. I don't normally collect Oregon players who transfer out and finish school elsewhere, but Pittman is in a Ducks uniform, so it works.

In addition to the nice autograph above, I also received this Jake Woodford card that's headed to top loader status.

This shows why it gets a top loader. It's one of those odd "Advanced Stats" parallels. I like the different approach to the stats here, but I don't like that all of the player bios are replaced with a boilerplate explanation on what advanced stats are.

Purple Topps flagship parallels are a rare bird, at least around these parts, where we don't have the stores that supply these exclusives (Meijer, I think?)

I completely missed out on the Topps All-Star Game set and am not entirely sure how they were distributed (at ballparks?), so it was nice to snag a few inserts from it. These cards look like they're die-cut or acetate or something, but they are just extra shiny and have a lot of dead space around the design.

I haven't checked lately, but I think Albert Pujols is still in the lead for having the most unique cards in my collection, even though I've never really sought out his stuff. At least it's one of the game's great players and not, I don't know, J.D. Drew?

This may have been the first year since 2009 where I did not open even a single pack of the new Chrome set, so it's been nice to slowly pick off some of my needs from the base set. I'm not against Topps Chrome, it's just that it's priced itself out of my budget.

Like many of his teammates, Nootbaar's name has been discussed in the trade rumors circle, but it would definitely be a "sell low" situation and I've been told that you generally shouldn't do that.

The Hamm King also delivered more Hamm! Excellent.

The third envelope just contained one single item, but it is a great one that has been affixed to my refrigerator since September. This really cool stadium giveaway comes courtesy of Baseball Cards Fan (and great blue heron enthusiast) Peter.

The final envelope of the bunch comes from Night Owl Cards and includes more Cardinals and set needs. The Jesse Haines card is from the 1961 Fleer Baseball Greats set, which caused a bit of a stir from Topps and their monopolistic ways back in the day. The design is excellent, but you already knew that.

Speaking of excellent design, I've said this before and I'll say it again. These Rookie Performers cards look great. I rarely praise modern Topps stuff, especially in the Fanatics era, but I always enjoy what they do with their insert designs that are inspired by the main set and era they're paying tribute to.

Here's another four-pack of minis from a few different Allen & Ginter sets. This year's A&G set is finally out, but I've yet to see any blasters anywhere.

Panini's continuing legal fight with Fanatics has been in the news this week. Everything I've read about it has made my eyes glaze over (to be fair, most details of court cases will do this to me), but it's clear to me that at least Panini tries to do different things with their products, even if both hands are tied behind their backs over the whole licensing thing. Topps doesn't even try anymore.

Here's the kind of oddball food-related baseball card that I really love. Apparently this known as the 1997 Wheaties set, even though the cards come from all sorts of different cereal brands. When is the last time there was anything interesting to cut off of the back of a cereal box?

We'll end things here with a triumvirate of 2025 Topps Heritage short prints. I swear I'm going to focus on putting some of these Heritage sets fully to rest one of these days.

Nacho Value Meal

Catching up with some @Nachos_Grande group breaks. 

 

The only reason I haven't deleted the Facebook app on my phone once and for all (it's been deleted a few times) is because I belong to a couple of active card breaking groups including the excellent one run by Nachos Grande. It's another affordable option where you pay for breaks as you go, and decide when you want to have everything shipped. It cuts down on money spent on all sides. I still have a stack that I had shipped back in September that contains stuff from even earlier in 2022 and I'll show a few of the highlights here today.

The nice thing about these groups is that they lean towards older products that the fat cats at Big Breaker LLC won't ever touch. That occasionally means Pacific cards, which are weird and great! A long with some base needs, I snagged a pair of light blue parallels from the 1999 flagship set. 

Bazooka, you say? Yes, please! Again, I was able to knock off some base needs here, and I picked up one of these chunkier silver parallels as well.

There was also a pretty nice Albert Pujols insert to be found in the Bazooka box. These aren't super easy to come by, so this will be staying in a top loader instead of being used as the "stand-up" card the way it was intended to be.

Not all of the breaks were throwbacks, though. Here's a pair of Cardinals from the extra-fancy 2021 Allen & Ginter Chrome set. I haven't heard anything about a 2022 A&G Chrome set, but I suppose that's just as well because this stuff was stupidly expensive.

Next up we have a fake 1999 Donruss card. After Donruss went through their first bankruptcy and were dormant for a couple of years, the company that bought them revived the brand in 2001 and then made up some designs for the "lost years" where there weren't any Donruss cards. This Rick Ankiel "rookie" card was actually issued in the 2001 Donruss set. This company also eventually went bankrupt.

Speaking of weird fake card designs, I believe this Chance Caple card from 2000 Bowman is considered a "Retro Future" parallel. It uses a TV design on foilboard that completely fails to show up when scanned, although it doesn't look like much in direct light, either.

Last up is a rare autograph from the delayed 2021 Topps Big League set. I only say rare because I just haven't seen many autographs from this set at all, at least in comparison to previous seasons. Unfortunately, it looks like the Big League brand might be dead and buried, which is too bad considering that while it wasn't always the most attractive looking set, it actually felt like Topps put more than half of a second of thought into card design when coming up with these.

Prizm in Color

Panini Prizm's Baseball offering is colorful fun without logos. 

 

Panini's MLB sets always come with two strikes against them. The lack of MLB license (no logos) is the most obvious thing, but there's always been the mentality that Topps, with their uninterrupted run at baseball cards since 1952 (ish), is the one true brand to collect. That mentality is about to tested in the Fanatics era, of course. It will be interesting to see how history looks back at baseball cards from other brands that aren't Topps once Topps stops making cards (unless, of course, Topps is purchased and does the overlord's bidding.)

In any case, I like Prizm baseball. It's come a long way from the 2012 set (actually released in 2013.) The early Prizm sets are seriously ugly, even the ones where Panini held a proper license. I bought into a couple of breaks over at Rip City Cards for a reasonable price and feel like I did pretty well for myself. Let's check out some of the goods.

Much like the third-class citizen that it's treated like, the baseball version of Prizm always gets a leftover design. This is the same design as last year's NFL and NBA sets. In some other brands where designs are shared across sports, baseball leads the way, but that's not the case with Prizm.

I'm happy with any set that continues to casually toss in an Ozzie Smith base card in 2021. Someone at Panini loves The Wizard, because he's in a ton of their sets.

Prizm tries a little harder with their inserts than, say, Topps Chrome. I know that it's not completely fair to compare Topps Chrome to Panini Prizm, because Donruss Optic is a closer analogy as long as you consider Donruss to be Panini's flagship baseball set. (Is it?)

Here's the classic non-MLB license player photo. There isn't really a logo to hide here.

Here's Paul Goldschmidt, star player of the 46ers.

Okay, that's just weird.

I did pretty well with the colorful parallels in these breaks. This is a snaky snakeskin parallel of the Cardinals rookie, numbered to just 50. I pulled a rookie year Zac Gallen snakeskin parallel from last year's Prizm set which I think I might have hung on to. Gallen was a Cardinals draft pick originally that was dealt to the Diamondbacks, making his snakeskin version much more appropriate.

Here's a basic blue parallel, Flaherty syle.

And here's a red one. I don't really know the rhyme or reason or distribution odds for most of the Prizm parallels, except that they are numerous and attract only a certain type of collector. I don't think I have it in me, personally, to chase a "rainbow" of any particular card (...or do I?)

This KK "blue mojo" parallel has the same look as the Bowman "megabox" exclusive parallels that people also call "mojo". Who decided this was to be called "mojo" and who came up with this pattern first?

This is another rookie year numbered parallel. Woodford is at least temporarily in the Cards rotation again and has a big start ahead of him against the Mets tomorrow. He can do it! I believe in him.