Surprise Visit from the DK

 

...no, not the Donkey Kong. 

 

A few months back, I got a surprise knock on the door from local area not-blogger The Diamond King, who dropped off an incredibly generous selection of Cardinals goodies. I had included my childhood (H)akeem Olajuwon rookie in a mailer sent his way sometime in the past year or so, but certainly wasn't expecting anything in return. We're lucky to have a semi-monthly card show in the area where I suspect at least some of these cards were procured from, and it reminds me that I wanted to make a concerted effort to go to more shows this year (I've already missed the first one.)

Heritage seems like it has such a high print run these days, so I'm always taken aback when I run across a variation like this B&W Arenado, as I never seem to pull stuff like this out of packs anymore. It seems increasingly likely that Arenado will be around for at least the first half of the year with St. Louis now, but I wonder if this card marks his final All-Star appearance with anyone.

The goofy, AI-"enhanced" 2022 Topps Chrome Platinum Anniversary whatever is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently. They really went nuts with the parallels on these. This one is numbered to just 25. Carlson still hasn't caught on with anyone for the coming season as far as I can tell.

Here's another one of the wacky parallels. This one with the free flowing hair of Ted Simmons is numbered to 75.

This Bud Smith card has an imprint with the National Sports Convention logo on it and is numbered 2 out of 5. Rare stuff here! I've always wondered how "official" some of the past cards with stamps from card conventions on them are, but they've mostly been treated as such by the major publications and databases I suppose.

Angel Rondon may have only had a cup of coffee with the Cardinals, but he still makes for a nice looking autographed card. Of course, almost anyone would look good on an Inception card like this.

Daniel Ponce de Leon was once seen as a key cog in the Cardinals stable of pitchers, but he had some tough breaks along the way including a much publicized scary head injury. When standing next to a comparable Topps high end card, Panini's unlicensed warts are pretty visible, though this does contain a nice chunky patch-looking thing in it.

We're back to the AI set here with a more normal parallel pattern. I think this is gold? This will look nice in my Waino collection and is numbered to just 50.

The red ice(?) sky on Lou Brock's card makes this one a bit apocalyptic looking. It's numbered to 100.

Last, but certainly not least, is this pretty slick looking bat card from the 2019 Topps Tier One set. I can't believe it's already been six years since the Cards brought in Goldy. I hope he does well with the Yankees. The Cardinals are really going to miss his defense at 1B more than anything at this point.

If you've got some time, I'd definitely suggest checking out The Diamond King's blog especially if it's been awhile. It looks like he's been generously giving out some impressive stuff, so I'm sure he'd love to get hooked up with something of his own interest.

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.

Pro Debut & Fire

New cards and some old Fire on last week's @CrackinWax #CrackinWaxMailDay includes a familiar design.

Topps Update isn't out yet, but this is about the time of the year that people really start to get sick of the base design. Many people were sick of it before the cards hit the street, of course, with the overall look drawing fair comparisons to recent Panini Donruss offerings. I haven't disliked it as much as I thought I would, and the annual Topps Pro Debut set usually offers a bit of an enhancement over the flagship set, with the player photos glossing on top of a matte background. I picked up a Pro Debut spot in a Crackin' Wax break (with another one on the way in the mail) and was able to add a few new things to my collection.

Ivan Herrera had a nice season at Springfield and was rewarded for his success by getting a late season promotion to Memphis, who like all AAA teams are playing until the end of September for the first time that I can recall. I don't remember if this is a permanent change or brought on as part of the delayed start to the season, but it's happening. I'd be thrilled right now if my hometown AAA team hadn't been run out of their own stadium more than a decade ago.

New in Pro Debut this year is a second design that uses the 1991 Topps look for some of its prospects. These are part of the base set. Along with some of the throwback inserts that you can find in Pro Debut boxes, the whole thing has a bit more of an Archives feel this year.

Most of the names were familiar to me, but Toerner's is not. This is my first card of the former 28th round pick, and is also his first Topps card. I have no idea why this didn't get a "Pro Debut" logo. Does anyone know what criteria Topps uses for this? Does anyone care? I know that Bowman 1st's are a thing, but I don't really think anyone cares about Pro Debut. I have a soft spot for the minor leagues, however, so I'm always going to be intrigued.

I also bought slots in a couple of Fire breaks (2020 and 2019) in advance of the 2021 release that hit Target's website recently. Nothing terribly exciting (for me) came out of the 2020 break, but I did get this Flame Throwers insert. This feels like it's auditioning to be some kid's bedroom Jack Flaherty poster.

Ditto this "Smoke and Mirrors" insert from the 2019 set. If only people still made "Magic Motion" Sportflics style cards these days. If you combined that idea with some of the artists behind Topps Fire, you'd have something intriguing, I bet. (Someone tell Fanatics about this.)

Here's my "hit of the week". I bought the last spot in the break and was rewarded with this sticker autograph of the former Cardinals first baseman Jose Martinez. He was a pretty cerebral player and a fun guy to root for while he was around.

Fortune Teller

Gaze into the crystal ball with another #crackinwaxmailday featuring Gypsy Queen. 

Back for its ninth iteration, the Topps Gypsy Queen set is by far my least favorite of their products of the many in its price tier. Sometimes, the cards do look nice, but it feels so unnecessary. Of course, I've heard of some of the same complaints about Topps Archives, mostly due to their endlessly recycled designs. The only time I've really paid full price for more than a couple of packs of this stuff was back in 2015, when I was temporarily hooked by Ozzie Smith on the pack wrappers. Still, I was more than willing to take the Cardinals slot in the Crackin' Wax group break. I ended up with multiple team sets (sans the short printed Mark McGwire) and some extra goodies.

There's a lot of tiny writing on these cards. I'm not sure what else to say about the design itself, though, but this indigo colored parallel (numbered to 250) does look nice.

Like most Topps cards these days, they take a closely cropped photo and apply some photo software filters on them to get the final product. This gets most of the Cardinals shortstop in frame, but unfortunately cuts him off at the ankles.

Box toppers are normal sized Chrome versions this year, but there's something strange about DeJong's card. They used an entirely different photo for it. This wasn't the case for the other Chrome box topper, which you'll see in a bit.

The reverse of the card that led off this post was Daniel Ponce de Leon's rookie card... except that it was actually this rarer parallel Bazooka back version. Neat.

This and its base counterpart are my first official Paul Goldschmidt Cardinals cards, which is pretty neat. I won't say the 'P' word, because I'm trying to keep things positive here.

I'm not a big autograph seeker as most of you probably know, but the autos in this set do look pretty spectacular. This makes me wonder if this was a rejected alternate design for the base cards. In any case, I was pleased to snag this Jose Martinez card as the centerpiece of my case break haul.

All the Series 2 Cardinals

It's a #CrackinWaxMailday with a case-load full of Cardinals from @CrackinWax to pore over. 

Occasionally it pays to think ahead. Since I've stopped buying the Topps flagship product in recent years, collecting the Cardinals stuff from these sets (still a priority) can become a bit of an afterthought. This is one of those rare times that I planned things out in advance, as I bought into a case break over at Crackin' Wax. I think I did pretty well for myself.

Of course, there are base cards. Many, many base cards. I believe I ended up with eleven total team sets. Fortunately, I should be able to dump a few of these on Listia, but if anyone here is interested in one, let me know. I do still need two cards from the (neglected) Series 1 team sets, plus a whole lot of inserts and special stuff.

This time around, there's only one player in the mix that's no longer with the team. We'll get to him in a moment. We also get a team card, some rookies and a rare Greg Garcia card. Seriously rare. This is his fifth season with the big league club and it's just his first Topps card. He also appeared in Bowman products in 2010.

Alex Mejia saw a bit of action late last year, but he's off the 40-man roster and back in the minors with the Cardinals organization. These are his rainbow foil and gold parallels.

It's an SP! I didn't know they were putting "legend" SPs into this set, so this was a nice surprise.

I still need a bunch of the "Topps Salute" cards from Series 1. In fact, I think this might be my first look at this design.

Carlos Martinez was well-represented, with his rainbow foil and vintage stock (numbered to 99!) parallels. The vintage stock card might be my favorite of the whole break. I wish the whole set could be like these. Only, you know, not so rare.

Paul DeJong should be back soon. Hopefully! This whole season feels like it's teetering on the brink of disaster.

Jack Flaherty has looked really good at times. The rotation appears to be pretty set for the future, at least, if the club doesn't end up making any significant moves.

Rainbow and gold Cafecito.

Here's the rainbow Matt Carpenter version.

Today's game seems to be steering back to homers! homers! HOMERS! This card just seems appropriate all of a sudden.

The tribute to the 1983 set continues with these All-Star inserts. I love new Ozzie cards!

Speaking of which, this is super awesome. I have one of these warm-ups (#1, of course) in my closet that I break out for special occasions.

This one had me stumped for a bit, because it's from the "silver pack" promotion. In Series 1, each of these had some fancy pattern on the card. Oh well, so much for continuity!

Great shot of Tommy Pham up against the Wrigley Field ivy. As much as I dislike the Cubs, every good outfield needs a photo like this on a card.

This is my first, er, negative photo parallel. I know these are hobby only, but I don't remember how rare they are.

This is another SP. This time, it's a photo variation.

Here's a Topps Salute card of Tommy Pham in his "Players Weekend" jersey. I feel like this was so hyped last season that it's probably coming back this season.

My collection is sagging under the weight of all of the different Pujols cards that I own, and Topps keeps finding ways to print them up in his old uniform.

I don't "PC" this guy, but I think he's up to #2 or #3 in total unique cards owned in my collection. Yikes.

Are these photos from the actual game they are commemorating? Of course they aren't.

The Pujols parade is over, and there's a new Sherriff in town. And that's the last time I ever make a Ryan Sherriff joke.

As mentioned earlier, Breyvic Valera is the lone Cardinal no longer with the organization that's in the base set. He was flipped to the Dodgers in a roster space crunch move right at the start of the season. Once again, these are the rainbow and gold versions, respectively.

At 15 seasons in the league, Yadi might just be a little tired of posing for dorky photos.

I also snagged Molina's gold parallel. I miss the old gold parallels, as I pretty much say every year now.

Apparently there was only one autograph pulled in the whole case (what?!), but I was lucky enough to snag two game used memorabilia cards. Here's DeJong in his former uniform number, which now belongs once again to Jose Oquendo.

And this is a black parallel (check the serial number!) of a Luke Weaver jersey card. Because everything needs parallels.

Feel free to hit me up if you have any 2018 Topps Cardinals stuff not pictured here. The want list will be updated shortly.