New Address PWE Round-Up

 

Loads of Cardinals, football players, pink cards and mini cards (and pink mini cards?)

 

If you hadn't heard, I recently moved after being in the same spot for more than seventeen years. It was quite a chore! Thankfully, everything is done now and I had a number of envelopes with cards in them sent to the new place. Let's check out a few of them.

First up is a stack of Cardinals cards from gcrl / cards as i see them. I'm not sure how he ended up with so many pink parallels from the 2019 Topps Mini set, but I'm certainly glad they were sent my way!

As you may have noticed, all of these cards are numbered to just 25 copies. I don't believe the print run for the base cards from this online exclusive set was all that high to begin with, but this is still really cool.

Speaking of low print runs, I also found this Sapphire Chrome card inside the envelope. This is a set that I would never join a group break of, let alone buy a box. It's so expensive! That's why I enjoy picking up the odd common Sapphire card every great once in awhile. They're just parallels (or parallels of parallels?) but they at least look nicer than when they just slap a foil logo on the flagship factory set and call it good.

I think they dropped these Walgreen's exclusive yellow parallels after a time, which is too bad, because the pharmacy closest to me just started regularly stocking cards.

Next up was a cool batch of Redbirds from Marc Brubaker, another long time trading buddy. I haven't bought any of this year's Panini baseball products since they lost their MLBPA license, so it's always nice to pick up some of those Cardinals through trading channels.

Speaking of stuff that I'm not buying, it's the new Allen & Ginter set. I finally put my foot down and decided to end my run of trying to put together this set every year. It's not that I don't like the way these cards look. They just don't really look like Allen & Ginter cards anymore, so what drew me to this brand seems to have been totally lost. If you slapped the dreaded GQ logo on these, I'm not sure that most would really notice.

Here's a couple of really nice minis. Pujols has the A&G logo on the back, and Walker is, obviously, a black parallel. 

Speaking of sets I've been avoiding, well... here's another one. This is another "art" set where they take a photo of a player and add some effects to it to try to make it look hand drawn or something. Instead, it kind of looks like all of the photos are AI-generated. Has anyone played around with Bing's AI image generator to try to make fake baseball cards? I know what I'm doing tonight!

It's AI Arenado!

This last group of cards is from the football realm and comes from buckstorecards. I have come to really appreciate these Draft Pick sets that Panini churns out year after year because they feature players in their college uniforms. I think that tends to diminish their overall value, but it makes it really fun to collect for me, especially as I've always been a bit lukewarm on the NFL game. Here Christian Gonzalez is showing off the Ducks eggshell uniform that they break out a couple of times a season.

On this one, Gonzalez is wearing more of a classic green. I do like the all green look and wish we'd see it a little more.

These aren't Ducks uniforms, but they are (former) Ducks players! I always love getting CFL cards from across the border, since I tend to never know who is in them. Apparently Upper Deck also does an e-Pack line of CFL cards, which is something that I wish existed for baseball. (Well, maybe.)

If you have any spare Dodgers (gcrl), Astros (Bru), or whatever the heck buckstorecards collects (he has diverse interests!), definitely consider dropping them in the mail to these guys.

The Beginning of a Good Thing

My collection of the NFL's best rookie is off to a nice start thanks to @bgmartin76 box breaks. 

 

I try not to let anyone know that I collect football cards of any kind, but Oregon Ducks cards are my weakness as is well documented here. When the chance arose to jump in on some cheap box breaks hosted by Ben's Cards and Collectibles that featured 2020 NFL product, I also couldn't resist. Guess who my new favorite NFL team is? No, it's not really the (Los Angeles?!) Chargers, but for collecting purposes it really is whichever team Justin Herbert is suiting up for. At the time these first breaks happened, I was just trying to snag my first card or two of his. Now that we're at the end of the season, Herbert is in the books with one of the best rookie campaigns of all-time for a quarterback.

There was more than football (and Herbert) cards for me, however. I had a rare opportunity to claim the Cardinals in a couple of baseball spots. Usually those spots are already spoken for. Having not gone to a card show in about a year, I haven't had the chance to dig through boxes to find shiny Chrome cards for my team needs, so I've had to increasingly rely on breaks like these.

Ben even broke some basketball boxes at one point. He must be some kind of wizard. I had never seen this Aficionado Meteor insert before, so it was a really cool addition. You can tell this set is old as Dame is still wearing the Adidas jersey.

Here's another Dame from that 2016-17 Panini Aficionado set. I believe this is also an insert.
 

It's back to baseball here with a die cut Big Mac insert from the 2020 Topps Chrome set. Honest question here: Bonds and Clemens aside, how many players on the current Hall of Fame ballot were demonstrably better than Mark McGwire's peak? (I'm not actually advocating for McGwire's inclusion. I just find it interesting. Besides, I'd rather celebrate Scott Rolen and complain about Jim Edmonds getting booted off the ballot.)

The Jerk Store!

I feel like I picked up a ton of prospect Cardinals cards in 2020. Hopefully they will be fun to look at a few years down the road.

I also snagged the Eagles in a couple of the football breaks. My Eagles fandom really runs hot and cold (you can certainly guess what temperature it's at right now), but once I saw Randall Cunningham on the checklist, I knew I needed it.

I wish Alshon Jeffery had managed to stay healthy. Every team needs a huge receiver to bail you out once in awhile. This card is numbered to 100.

As mentioned, however, my favorite additions were my new Justin Herbert cards. It doesn't hurt that he's still in the Oregon uniform on these particular cards, but I'm sure I'll end up with quite a few Herberts in Charger blue... whichever shade they're happening to wear in a given week.