PWE Round-Up: All Night Owl Edition

Three envelopes. One sender.

It's once again time to do a little round-up of some Plain White Envelopes that I've received in the mail. This time, all three envelopes are from Night Owl Cards. Since sports card shows locally have been completely overtaken by Pokemon, TCGs and the like, this is practically the only way I can add something unexpected to my collection these days.

The first envelope showed up back in May, and included this really nice Nolan Arenado jersey swatch, presumably from one of his own "Victory Blue" jersey that the Cards have been wearing on Saturday road games in recent years.

Here's a trio of sparkly parallels from 2025 Topps sets. I've been one of those lamenting the proliferation of shiny parallels in Heritage products lately, but at least they make solid trade bait. Besides the Burly Heritage card, there's also a couple of holo foil parallels from the flagship set.

Last year, Topps Heritage did some sort of tribute to itself by showcasing (current?) players on previous Heritage designs, which of course were just a tribute to the first Topps sets. It's been tough to get ahold of almost any inserts in recent Heritage sets, so this was certainly appreciated even if the set was poorly executed.

Envelopes number two and three both showed up at the same time around mid July of this year. One of these envelopes was stuffed full of Allen & Ginter minis. There are enough non-sport collectors out there to make these a bit tougher to acquire than the parallel minis. The warthog throws off the whole landscape orientation synergy that is going on here.

The other envelope was all about the Cardinals. Yadi is the first of a trio of pink ice Panini Prizm parallels from 2025. That's a lot of P-words!

Masyn Winn just returned from a stint on the IL recently. His Gold Glove work was certainly missed in his absence.

This one looks a little off to me, and I don't think it's just the straight-on shot of Gibby's blank cap.

Drew Rom's time with the Cardinals was cut short due to injury. He was part of the deadline deal dump of Jack Flaherty a few years ago. This one is numbered to 499.

Rookie Nathan Church appears here on a holiday parallel. He's had some fleeting moments of success with the bat this season and continues to be their most impressively speedy outfielder.

We finish things up here with Waino and some shiny blue little rockets. For some reason, these have become one of the most prevalent Donruss parallels all of a sudden. I'm not really sure what the appeal is there.

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.

A Yepez New Year

 

Group Break cards from Nachos Grande. 

 

This latest batch of Cardinals cards came from assorted group breaks held by Nachos Grande around the early part of fall. With one exception, these cards were mostly from breaks of products released in the past couple of years.

Juan Yepez was once an Atlanta prospect, but he didn't make it to the big leagues until he had established himself as one of the top bats in the Memphis Redbirds lineup, the Cardinals' AAA affiliate. While he had some bright spots in 2022 while Albert Pujols took him under his wing, Yepez didn't really get much of a shot last season and has since moved on to the Nationals organization. Of course, the framed Allen & Ginter mini card is going to get a lot more love than the generic looking Panini sticker auto, but I am happy to have added both to my collection.

Tommy Edman makes an appearance on another Panini product, this time a red, white and blue parallel from last year's Mosaic set. I don't believe there was a 2023 Mosaic baseball set as the number of Panini products in this sport dropped significantly after losing the MLBPA license.

The 2023 Finest break was one of the big highlights. I landed this Nolan Arenado green parallel that is numbered to just 99 copies.

Nolan's arm is bent at a very tough to look at angle here.

Another Arenado Finest highlight, this Headliners insert kind of reminds me of an old Fleer insert with a modern Chrome refractor flourish.

Apparently these 1994 style Draft Picks inserts from the 2021 Topps Archives set were quite a tough pull, landing at 1:24 packs or roughly one per box. I haven't found any Carlsons for sale on COMC since I ended up with this card.

It's back to the unlicensed realm here with a PPP (Purple Prizm Parallel.)

There's almost a good insert idea in here, but besides the obvious lack of MLB logos, there are some things I take issue with. I am not sure exactly what the weird angular pattern behind Goldschmidt's photo is supposed to represent, and that "Straight Fire" font is just hideous.

We travel all the way back to 2002 here with a second year Pujols card that mimics the original 1984 Donruss design. This would have been a fun set to collect back in the day, aside from it being marred by the typical short print confusion of the era.

I also added a numbered Stan the Man card to my collection from the 2021 Topps Gallery set. Gallery could be hit or miss for me (mostly miss), but I did like this particular year's design more than others.