Bubbling Up

The latest in a long line of excellent trade packages from Too Many Verlanders.

The year already feels like it's slipping away from me, so I know that it's well beyond time that I finish up some posts about trades I've received in 2025. I really don't want to head in 2026 talking about something I got, like, last summer. Since the vast majority of what I add to my collection has been coming from TCDB for the past few years, the bubble mailers full of surprise goodies have been something to savor. This particular one came over from TMV back in June, when things were finally starting to heat up here in Portland. Of course, we're now well into November and I've been looking for breaks in the gloomy weather all week to just to have a few moments to sweep a bunch of leaves off of my deck.

Anyway... cards! David Freese cards! While Randy Arozarena's 2020 playoff Babe Ruth act wrecked a lot of Freese's postseason records, he was pushed down the lists a bit more by some prolific players this year.

Vintage Blazers?! Nice! I am fairly certain that a bunch of these are going to end up being upgrades over what I already owned when I finally crack open the Blazers binders again.

A Bol Bol rookie rookie? I'll always take these! He may not have spent more than a blink at UO, but I'll always be fascinated by him.

It's a 20 year old parallel of a Hall of Fame Cardinals player? You can't knock that.

Three Blazers, er, legends all signed this slab of wood, or so the scan would have you think. They actually signed clear stickers that were affixed to this wood-like card-shaped object. I did like Jarrett Jack for a time, but he was made expendable when Brandon Roy came around.

Dion Jordan seems to have a ton of "hit" cards from his rookie year, or at least I seem to own a disproportionate amount of them. I will never mind this as he will always remind me of the tremendously fun Marcus Mariota era.

I think Jalen Reagor was supposed to be a speedly slot receiver type when he came to the NFL out of TCU, but he didn't seem to progress beyond a third option to pass two and made some costly errors on the field in his two seasons in Philly. It looks like he is out of the league now. I kind of like the design on this relic card, however, or at least the placement of the Eagles logo.

There's that man again (and his signature!) 

Jordan Matthews played more football for the Eagles than Reagor. However, after being a heavy target early in his career, he eventually became more of a guy you call up on the phone when you run out of healthy players.

The early 2010s will always be a special time for me and watching Oregon football, even though Chip Kelly is kind of a turd. Kenjon Barner was a huge part of that, and it was fun to hear him join the broadcast during a Ducks game earlier this year.

Jimmy Baseball! Now that he's been off the air for a full season, it's easier to enjoy his baseball cards and playing career.

Arik Armstead is with the Jaguars these days, and has certainly come along way from his days at Oregon when he was a two-sport player (football AND basketball... both kinds!)

The last one up is certainly the most special one, at least for me. As I continue to contemplate how I want to spend my card budget dollars, I know that excellent cards of the Wizard need to take precedent over any random blasters I decide to buy on a whim.

Bootleggin' with Panini: Baseball Edition

 

A look at the new Donruss baseball set from a @nightcapcards box break. 

 

The latest, and apparently last Donruss baseball set from Panini dropped recently, offering another somewhat affordable alternative to the usual churn from Topps. The cards are always a mix of cringe/tacky and fun, and this year is no exception.

This year's set features loose tributes to the original 1988 set. The blue bordered "holo" parallels (see Wainwright at the top) look a bit more like the original, but the font used and the always jarring lack of team logos makes these feel like they were produced in some dark alley.

The Diamond Kings subset design varies from year to year, and I feel like this is one of the better ones in recent sets.

Here's the actual base design for the set. It has a bit of a '90s science class feel to it.

And here's the Rated Rookie design. It's not exactly iconic, but it works within the framework of the base design.

The red bordered cards are serial numbered to 2022. Given that I picked up three of these in this break (and added a fourth in another break), I have to assume that these are much easier to come by than the Topps gold bordered base cards that are similarly numbered. If someone wanted to crunch the numbers, I think it would be fairly simple to discover that the print run for this set is much, much smaller than Topps Series 1 (with good reason.)

The red bordered "Retro 1988" cards don't look as good as their blue bordered counterparts.

Here's the third of those red numbered cards.

Hobby inserts are all numbered as far as I can tell. There's a lot happening on this card.

I was also able to snag a "Retro 1988" jersey card in this break. There's a whopping 97 cards on this checklist, so I feel very fortunate that the one pulled was a Cardinal.

A Four-Sport Blowout

I'm not worthy! 

One of the unfortunate things for me about the global health crisis we're still living through is that I've received a few extremely generous packages from regular trading partners that I just haven't been able to fully reciprocate just yet. I am still waiting until it's safe to go to the card shows. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this pales in comparison to almost literally anything everyone has suffered through, but it still bugs me. This latest example of generosity is one I've been sitting on for quite awhile: a big envelope stuffed full of eye-popping cards from buckstorecards. As usual, there was a generous share of stuff from all of the major sports.

Vladimir Tarasenko has had difficulty staying on the ice since his Blues won their championship. He returned to action for his first game of the season (and only fifth since 2019.) Apparently he has some serious shoulder issues that are threatening his career. This card is actually sort of a half-acetate look to it.

Next up is baseball and an Ozzie Smith card from the always classy Triple Threads - 2020 Edition. I should probably make more of a point of finding some of the singles from these sets of the players I collect.

Here's a strange case of a player who never appeared in a game with the Blazers (or any NBA team for that matter), and was undrafted, yet spent enough time on the roster to get his own card. Morgunov had a lengthy pro career, playing for more than two decades in Russian leagues and others.

Nassir Little is starting to look like the next young Blazers player to start to make some gains on the court in his second year, a la Gary Trent in the latter portion of last season. It's really cool to this jersey swatch from last year's Court Kings set.

No one else sends me CFL cards besides buckstorecards. You can't really find CFL cards in the US, of course. I wouldn't have even known that Josh Huff was still playing football if it wasn't for this card. It's really cool.

Another Duck appears! Actually, it's no mere Duck, it's the NFL's offensive rookie of year, Justin Herbert... on a green parallel, no less. Herbert's cards are often expensive now, so I don't expect I'm always going to be successful in prying them away from other people.

It's back to baseball. This David Freese card from the very first Prizm set doesn't seem to be listed in TCDB. Is it "cracked ice" or something? I'll have to do some more research. (edit: It looks like it might be a National Convention exclusive with a 25 card print run? Wow!)

It's tough to tell the difference between Triple Threads and Museum Collection at times, although I feel like Museum Collection's design varies wildly from year to year (at least in baseball.)

Now that Jalen Hurts is apparently the Eagles #1 quarterback (until the draft, I guess?), it'll be interesting to see what happens. If he had a good group of veterans around him, I'd certainly think he has the talent to succeed, but it looks like the team is pretty much in full rebuild which doesn't bode well for a young, smaller QB.

The last one was too big to contain. I could have scanned this, but its hugeness wouldn't have translated. That fancy new card stand can barely hold it, even. It's basically an 8x10 signed photo with official Panini branding and all that.

Throughout the past year, I've tried to pay it forward as much as I can with some giveaways and PWEs. Hopefully we'll get back to a place where I can send out larger packages with better content on a regular basis soon.

Chrome, Mini, and Don't Forget the Donuts

A bunch of @CrackinWax breaks on the latest #CrackinWaxMailDay brings the shiny donuts. 

Last week was a bigger week for me in terms of buying into breaks. This latest crop from Crackin' Wax included purchases from the latest Chrome, Prizm and Optic sets (Optic not included!) as well as a cameo from a new Panini Absolute set and last year's "on-demand" Topps Mini product.

The Chrome boxes proved fruitful to me, as I was able to land a few refractors this time around. Let's just pretend that you can see the rainbow effect on the DeJong and Edman cards here.

This orange Jack Flaherty is numbered to just 25. Consider me very pleased with this one!

 

Rangel Ravelo is one of those career minor league types, but he showed a little bit of promise when he finally got the call last season with the Cardinals. In any case, autographed Chrome cards continue to look cool as they're all done "on card".

Panini's new Absolute set is weird in that it's both expensive and unlicensed (of course), but as part of a "mixer" (a box break with multiple products) I at least ended up with this one example from the set. It's a silver numbered paralle. If anyone actually has any of the base cards from this set that can be spared, please let me know.

Topps Mini, in its more recent "On Demand" configuration, is always a bit of a gamble considering that at it's base price point you just get one jumbo pack per box while the set is huge. I can't imagine putting together the entire set, which contains mini versions of all three flagship series sets, but people are spending crazy amounts of cash on cards these days. I was super fortunate to land this low numbered Ozzie Smith insert parallel along with a Tommy Edman Update rookie card.

A lot of the cards from this week's breaks came from the 2020 Panini Prizm set. I think this was my third attempt at trying to get some exclusive "donuts" parallels from the Quick Pitch version of Prizm boxes, and it finally worked out this time. This red Tommy Edman is numbered to 149.

I also ended up with a needed Goldschmidt insert. Not bad! Now I just need the 732 other versions of this card, probably.

My randomly assigned team in this break fared even better than the Cardinals, though, as I ended up with 3 different Diamondbacks numbered parallels. It's just unfortunate that I haven't really traded with an Arizona collector in awhile, to my recollection. This one is numbered to 199.

It's weird to think about Bumgarner in another uniform (and clearly he is still wearing the Giants uniform here), but that's life in 2020. There's only 15 copies of this card... wow!

Out of the three, this is the one I'm most likely to want to hang on to. Instead of donuts, this is actually some kind of snakeskin parallel. I like it! Gallen looks like one of the better young pitchers in the game right now, which makes it all the more unfortunate that he was originally a Cardinals draft pick. That Marcell Ozuna deal stings a bit. Of course, the Marlins flipped Gallen for a different prospect, so what do they even know?

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?