Radness is Coming; A PWE Round-Up for Monday

Look for a new contest sign-up next week! For now, let's check out some cards from plain white envelopes.

It's time to recap a few of the sneaky white envelopes that trickled in over the past few months. I actually have been getting a ton of these in the mail lately, but at least 95% of them are part of TCDB trades. I've made sure to set aside any others that come in so I can show off the cards here. (I'd love to show off all of the TCDB trades, but I can just barely stay on top of getting them logged in and sorted.)

Padrographs sent me one of my first looks at the 2024 Topps Archives set, which was released very late in the year. Topps caught a lot of flack, at least among the online circles I spend time in, for their terrible attempt at the 1970 design. The biggest issue was the player name font, which bears no resemblance to the original design. It's even more silly when you consider that it's essentially the same font used on the 1994 design (which looks fine!) and was featured as recently as 5 years previously when its turn came up in the Heritage set. It was obviously a choice, and people have opinions about that choice, but I've never really heard a definitive, satisfying answer. What I do know is that while they do try to replicate a lot of the design elements for the Heritage sets, Archives often ends up becoming a more cheaply made, fun house mirror version of the original cards they're attempting to emulate.

Nachos Grande is a big Barry Larking collector, and I recently pulled one of Larkin's shiny parallels from the 2024 Panini Prizm set and sent it his way just for fun. I wasn't expecting anything in return, so I was pleasantly surprised when he hooked me up with some of his Allen & Ginter mini extras. The two Luis Castillo cards (black border and Allen & Ginter back) join up with Tyler O'Neill's mini to head to my Ginter set binder.

These two Brendan Donovan minis (A&G back and black border) are headed to my Cardinals binder. Unlike O'Neill's card above, I didn't have a single copy of either of these.

The biggest of the three PWEs came from frequent flyer gcrl, who sent over a fat stack of Cardinals cards and set filling needs. Alec Burleson's second year Topps card is a sparkly purple parallel numbered to 799. Do people still say "second year card"? I'm guessing not, unless you're trying to scam influence someone on eBay or somewhere of the like.

Chrome Sapphire cards are a pricey thing, so I am always thrilled to snag one for my team collection. Most of the ones I do have seem to be of the reliever variety like Gallegos here, but I'll surely take any of them.

This one is a Halloween-ish holiday parallel of Cardinals speedster Victor Scott II. Any time someone insists on going by "II" as a suffix instead of Jr. makes me tempted to call them The Sequel. I know that Topps was thinking "orange and black" when they designed these parallels for the Topps Update set, but they really made it look weird instead of spooky or whatever.

Here's a couple more parallels (rainbow foil and royal blue) from last year's Topps sets. I believe royal blue has been phased out in favor of even more foil this year.

Speaking of foil, here's a parallel of Jordan Hicks' rookie card from the inaugural Topps Big League set from back in 2018. It's numbered to just 100. Hicks finally successfully converted from a reliever to a starting pitcher last year with the Giants after the Cardinals had attempted it a few years back.

The set needs came in various flavors. Here's a couple base cards from the 2004 Topps Heritage set plus an insert from the 2020 set.

Alec Mills is not exactly a household name, but he did notch a no-hitter in that 2020 quasi-season. The Carlton Fisk card is a big get, since I'm very close to finally finishing off the 2014 Allen & Ginter set. This is the last set I haven't completed aside from the first two (and the last two where I decided not to pursue them anymore.)

The last grouping of cards are all from the 2003 Topps Heritage set, one of my personal favorites. I love the logos, the multiple photos and the green card backs. Of course, I like the original 1954s that they represent, but they're not always so affordable.

Cardinals! Blazers! Football Guys!

Three PWEs from @collec_sport run the gamut of the big three sports. 

 

I'm back from an unplanned layoff... nah, let's just call it a short period of inactivity for the blog. I hadn't intended to take the entire holiday week off, but that's how things played out. I may have had a different title for this post if life had gone differently (I'm Thankful for PWEs?) Tonight I'm taking a look at three envelopes of the plain and white kind sent from The Coffee Card Guy (aka Sport Card Collectors aka Cards Over Coffee.) These were some seriously loaded envelopes as you'll see shortly.

If 2019 was a lost season for Jordan Hicks, 2020 was... well, it was kind of lost for everyone. Hicks was one of the first names to officially opt out of the season, but he was unlikely to pitch regardless of his status considering the combination of factors including his young age, his incredible velocity, and his long road to recovery from Tommy John surgery. I sincerely hope we're talking about him a lot in coming springtime, because he was fun to watch.

I do not have many (if any?) gold Chrome refractors, so it was really cool to land this Marcell Ozuna version from the 2018 Topps Chrome Update set. I haven't heard anything about there being a Chrome Update set for 2020, but considering how underwhelming the regular Update set is, that's probably for the best.

It's Big City time! I actually really like the way these Stat Line parallels scan, compared to some card that have a primarily foil finish.

Closing out the run of Cardinals cards is this Trevor Rosenthal gold parallel from 2015 Topps, the last year that Topps truly created a gold bordered parallel. These parallels have looked pretty unimpressive lately.
 

Each envelope had a theme, and the second one featured Trail Blazers cards. I really like some of the basketball designs that Panini used in the years where they were still figuring things out before they settled in to the mess that they are today. (Granted, it's a mess that clearly makes them tons and tons of cash.)

LaMarcus Aldridge went full Beast Mode in the first two games of the 2014 NBA Playoffs opening round, setting a tone for the Blazers to pull off their first series win in fourteen years. I owned the card from Game 2 of that series against the Rockets and now have a copy of Game 1. Even if we hate how Aldridge left the team, Blazers fans will always have fond memories of him for this.

Ah, more Aldridge. I think I said my piece already. Moving on...

It's back to one of the present stars of the team with this CJ McCollum "Lord" parallel from the 2016-17 Panini Excalibur set. It wasn't too long ago that you could find stuff from this set cheaply, including repack packs. Now, of course, you can't find anything basketball card-related cheaply anymore. (If you can, please tell me about it... and don't tell anyone else! Shh!)

This is a nice card of Sabas, one of my all-time favorites. It's a blue parallel from the 2017-18 Donruss Optic set (powered by Panini!)

Last up is the envelope from the Eagles/football guys envelope. De'Anthony Thomas was never an Eagle, of course, but he is a big part of my Oregon Ducks collection. In case you wondered about my football collecting hierarchy, it goes something like this: 

Oregon Ducks cards ---> Oregon Ducks alums in pro football uniforms ---> pineapple on pizza* ---> certain Eagles cards ---> getting run over by a bus ---> Michael Vick Eagles cards

I'm actually finally organizing my Eagles cards and adding them to my collection on TCDB, so I will have an updated Eagles trading page here shortly. I'm going to keep all of the cards in boxes, though, but at least they will be in some sort of order with the dupes filtered out. Speaking of dupes, let me know if someone out there wants any of my excess Eagles cards. I really don't have room for a lot of football cards in my life.

And speaking of uninspiring Topps gold parallels (I did... really, I did!), these football gold parallels from 2014 are sort of oddly colored. They strike me as more of a yellow/beige than a true gold. Both of these numbered cards are of players (Ertz and Foles) from the Super Bowl winning team, though, so that's a big positive for me. Again, watch this space for more on my NFL collecting quirks if you're interested.

If you had asked me who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018, I would have said, "who?" And if you had said "Jordan Howard", I would have said, "oh, that's weird, I forgot about him." But you would have been wrong, because he didn't lead the Eagles in rushing in 2018. He led the Bears in rushing that year. And now I still don't know who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018. It probably wasn't Darren Sproles because he was a myth.

Kenjon Barner was actually an Eagle for several seasons, but this holds a loftier place in my collection because it's a Ducks card. In fact, it's a Ducks card featuring a throwback uniform from the '90s, giving it several more cool points. Cool points are all that matters in cards. They're way more important to me than "slabs" and "grades" and "pop" and all that nonsense.

I may seem pretty ambivalent about Eagles cards at times, but I definitely need to get my hands on all of the The Champ Is Here inserts from that Super Bowl winning team. That was a fun team and a fun game.

Even More Breaks

Another @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay is loaded with autographs. 

While I was fortunate this week to find some unopened baseball cards in the wild, most of my purchases in the last six months or so have come in the form of group breaks. Last week, another box showed up from Crackin' Wax with the latest results of a week of breaks.

 

The 2015 Bowman "Asia Edition" was an intriguing slot to buy, mostly because it contains a bunch of exclusives that you can normally only find in... well... Asia. I ended up with two of these black refractor prospect cards.

As promised, there were autographs, like this one of a guy who didn't make it past his age 24 season and topped out in the mid-minors. Still, it's a start!

I have all of the Series 2 that I need (except for those pesky Turkey Reds, of course), but I still snagged a spot for... reasons? I'm not sure. I did get this gold Jordan Hicks parallel and an autograph for my randomly assigned team.

It's interesting that this is a Series 2 card and Trent Grisham is still shown with his former team instead of the Padres. I guess it's because of the length of time needed to get the player to sign the cards (no sticker!) This is headed to my trade box.

I'm always interested in Topps Gold Label, because the cards just look really nice. I believe this was the final Class 1 card I needed from the 2017 product.

Even better is this chunky gold framed Aledmys Diaz autograph, which is numbered to just 75. Amazingly, I already had a Luke Weaver card in this format. These are very luxurious looking, with a solid metal border all the way around the card.

Topps brought back their homage to the T206 set once again this year, only as an online product. I skipped out on the first wave of these because there were no Cardinals in the set at all, but wave two includes Stan the Man and The Wizard.

I ended up with two different Ozzies (one is a Piedmont back), but there was nothing really fancy to see here. These cards are much thinner than the 206 revival from around a decade ago, and all of the cards are tobacco mini-sized.

Rounding things out is easily my top acquisition of the year. Sure, it's a sticker auto, but it's a really nice fancy high end card that includes a bat chunk and everything. I'm not usually much of a Tier One kind of collector, so I was really excited to get this because I probably won't have many opportunities to do something like this again.

I also get to add this to my stash of custom cards of online card people. It's not signed, though. What's up with that?

Group Break or Trade Post?

Cardinals cards from @batcavelv to celebrate a great day in the playoff race. 

The Cards won a day game rubber match over the Nationals today while the Cubs and Brewers both dropped games at home, so I thought I'd celebrate a bit with... you guessed it... some more Cardinals cards! Back in May, I received a bunch of goodies from Tracy's Box Breaks. I believe this was part of his group break that was announced in April, but with so many extras it can easily pass for a beefy trade package.

While they're no '59s, I always love getting cards from 1960 Topps. Ron Kline only spent a single season with St. Louis, and was new to the team when this card was made as the jerseys in these photos are not recognizable.

I had never seen one of these "hot box foil" Allen & Ginter cards in person until I got this rookie year Luke Weaver card. Like most foil-backed cards, this pretty much looks exactly the same as his regular base card counterpart when scanned.

Tracy included a bunch of cards from the 1992 Upper Deck Minors set that I was missing, including what surely is now my oldest John Mabry card. All that hard work at putting together my Cardinals minor league want list is starting to pay off!

2019 Opening Day mega boxes were part of the break. I'm not sure if I ever saw one of these in the stores, so it was great to pull a couple of these exclusive red parallels. Red looks good on this team.

A new Rick Ankiel card! In 2018! This is an exciting development. Along with the former lefty hurler-turned-slugger, several more cards from this fancy Topps Archives Snapshots set were along for the ride. I really like the idea and the design of these and will happily give anything like this a home. I've had a really hard time motivating myself to buy into to the Topps online exclusive products, but stuff like this makes it tempting.

Finally, it's a shiny refractor of the Cardinals mending flamethrower. These look a little nicer than normal this year on the 1970 Topps design, especially when given a fairly blank background that this Hicks card has.

Breakin' Series 2: Electric Boogaloo

This #CrackinWaxMailday is rated G for Gold. 

Topps has been doing this phased rollout of its flagship set for quite a few years now, but the second series always seems to fall short of the initial excitement of the first. We already know the design, and we already know what most of the inserts are going to look like. Still, we need the rest of the set, don't we? Or, in my case, we need the rest of the team set, which is why I've been signing up for pick-your-team group breaks of late. Here are some of the highlights of my stash of Series 2 Cardinals, which came from another Crackin' Wax case break.

Dexter Fowler's photo is heavily zoomed in and laser focused on the player, which has been one of my chief complaints of recent years. I tend to like a variety of photos, okay? Fowler's arm seems to be in a weird position here.

Did I mention I snagged a small handful of gold parallels? John Gant has been one of the Cards most valuable pitchers since he was called up last season, and his success has translated well to the bullpen for this year (just don't look at last night's box score, please.)

Marcell Ozuna is putting up MVP type offensive numbers right now after an injury-weakened debut season in St. Louis. Maybe it's actually because he ditched this horrible neon compression sleeve.

Yairo Munoz has been a replacement level utility guy since he joined the big league club last year. I think that's about where you need a utility guy to be, to be fair. You get the feeling that he might string together a solid stretch of games if he just got consistent playing time, but nah, it's not gonna happen.

Speaking of not happening... RIP Jordan Hicks's maximum pitch speed. He was diagnosed with a torn UCL today, which means he's headed towards the dreaded Tommy John surgery that is so popular with the kids these days. While most pitchers seem to regain their original velocity after this surgery, it seems super doubtful that anyone will tell Hicks that it makes sense to try to throw 105 with some random replacement tendon in his elbow. Also, RIP my fantasy team. The Cardinals bullpen will probably be okay, though, with Gant in there along with Carlos Martinez and John Brebbia. (And sort of Andrew Miller.) It's the rotation that I'm worried about.

Anyway, this is a cool black parallel of an insert that is numbered to 299. Of course, I still need the base insert and probably a whole host of other color versions.

Like the Hicks card above, I missed noticing that this Big Mac 150 G-g-g-greaaaatest Moments is a black parallel numbered to 299 until I had taken at least a couple of passes through the stack of cards. Once again, I need the normal version of this and many other inserts from Series 1 and 2.

Crackin' Wax is super cool about including the extra hobby bonus packs in their breaks, which meant that I was able to add a couple more "silver pack" Chrome 1984 style cards to my collection. Daniel Ponce de Leon may actually be one of the answers to the rotation problem, but it seems like the team doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of the broken Wacha (or the ghost of Wainwright, or whatever's gotten into Mikolas...) and actually do something about it.