The Last One

 

A huge group break acquisition to wrap up things here. 

 

With this last bit of cards from a couple of Nachos Grande box breaks, I'm finally caught up and ready to move things along... down the street, that is. I'll hopefully be back with the usual Ducks post sometime before the next football game a week from Saturday.

I usually let cards build up a bit more before I request a shipment, but there was a certain urgency to these cards that will make sense a little further down the screen here. The 2023 Panini Prizm break netted me some nice and shiny Cardinals cards including this Ice parallel of Harry Walker. If I'm not mistaken, I believe I was also randomly assigned the Rangers in this break and ended up with some Pudge Rodriguez cards for the trade boxes.

Silver Prizm cards are a bit hard to come by now that Panini figured out that people go crazy for them (well, in the NBA, at least.)

This green "scope" parallel of Tink Hence is numbered to just 75. It looks pretty nice in hand.

The biggest break (and the reason for the urgent shipment) was 2023 Topps Finest. I usually stay far away from Finest because of the cost, but I'm sure glad I didn't this time! I did get a couple of nice Cardinals, including the "rose gold" parallel of Matthew Liberatore at the top of this post, which is also numbered to just 75.

My randomly assigned team was the Baltimore Orioles, suddenly looking like the Kings of the American League these days. Adley Rutschman is my new secret player collection guy. I even kicked my musty old Mike Trout cards out of a box he shared with Shohei Ohtani to make room for Adley. The young catcher is from the Portland area and did a cool thing during the HR Derby this summer, so it wasn't tough to convince me to stash away some of his cards.

Well, this also certainly helps! I'm not one to have much luck with redemptions (who does?), but Topps really delivered the goods this time.

I spammed this picture around all of the Discord servers that I'm in weeks ago, so this probably isn't a big surprise to some of you. My first instinct is to sell anytime I come into an expensive card like this, but I might be hanging onto this one for awhile.

More Breaks from Colbey!

 

Cardinals and Eagles from this summer's Affordable Group Breaks. 

 

My box break participation has slowed down quite a bit this year along with my shrinking sports card budget, but that hasn't stopped me from picking up an occasional slot in the Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks Facebook group. Cheap breaks are really the only reason I continue to use that particular social media platform.

My most recent shipment (from back in July) saw a healthy amount of Cardinals I needed, including a Dylan Carlson rookie refractor from the 2021 Allen & Ginter Chrome set.

This one looks to be from a random giveaway. I'm definitely psyched to have a card documenting Minnie Minoso's solo season in a Cardinals uniform.

This is a very strange card. If you look at it from the side, it looks like two cards glued together, which I suppose was necessary to create the netting effect (you can see through the net.)

Here's a nice numbered Lou Brock insert from Panini's most recent (and final?) Donruss set. I feel like that company is on the verge of closing up shop in the USA with all of the recent news and loss of licenses, but you never know. I would certainly wonder what would happen to all of the brand names and trademarks they own if they suddenly stopped making sports cards.

I thought that I had most if not all of the 2002 Donruss Fan Club team set a couple of times over, but I definitely needed this die cut Fernando Vina parallel and the short printed J.D. Drew "Favorites" card.

If the price is right and the year is also right, I do sometimes snag the Eagles in an NFL break. I really like the look of these 1996 Donruss cards, from one of the last years of their vastly superior classic jerseys. I remember both of these guys from Tecmo Super Bowl III on the Super Nintendo.

Here's a newer (2022) card that looks like it's straight out of the '90s.

Irving Fryar certainly looks strange to me wearing the Eagles current uniform look, which must have debuted around the time these cards were being produced.

Sketchy Leaf Stuff

More @CrackinWax break stuff from Leaf and small Topps. #CrackinWaxMailDay 

 

I don't know the full story, but I seem to recall that the current incarnation of Leaf Trading Cards came about because some guy with money bought up the unused rights to the name, and at least the logo used from the classic 1990 baseball set. I'm sure there's more to the story than that, but it feels like trying to make a clone using just one or two components of something's DNA and hoping everything works out alright.

Leaf Draft cards were on the menu at a recent batch of Crackin' Wax breaks, along with another new "on demand" Topps product. Actually, my biggest gripe with "new" Leaf is that they have put out so many sets with very little checklist information online. I wanted to add a bunch of their sets to my want lists just in case someone had some, but for the most part it was a futile exercise. This box break contained the complete set plus some autographs, so at least the want list is a little smaller this one time.

With the release of the 2021 Topps checklist today, we are officially done with Dylan Carlson prospect cards. It's not that he was stuck in Bowman Purgatory all that long, but considering that he was batting cleanup for the Cardinals in the playoffs last year, I am good with it finally being the end of "pre-rookie" Carlson cards.

One of the random autographs happened to be a Cardinals card, which is very cool of that box. I wouldn't have any idea who Tink Hence belonged to if he wasn't included in the recent Bowman Draft set. I probably chuckled at his name on draft day and then completely forgot about it. I'm sorry, Tink.

The Yankees were randomly assigned to me as my second team, which must mean that they were intentionally not available for purchase. The Yankees are a popular team, or so I've heard. This means that I landed my first Jasson Dominguez card, which might be something fun to put away and look at again in 5 (?) years. I'm at least glad to finally see a card that doesn't have that creepy kid photo of him as this is the first time I've actually seen him look like an actual baseball player.

The internet tells me that Beck Way is a Yankees prospect, which makes sense because -- see above. His signature tells me that he's probably not that into, um, writing. Who writes with pens these days?

The other break that I was in on involved Topps Mini once again. This time, the Cardinals luck came through for me as I scored a few cards from the team set.

I know, I know. These look like they are the same size as the regular flagship set. I could always make the thumbnails smaller if you want. Do you want that? You'll just have to trust the subtle change in design (the non-foil Topps logo.)

The Mini set always includes the Update cards, which is incredibly frustrating considering that Topps considers the "complete set" each year to just be Series 1 and 2. I know the only thing preventing them from doing the logical thing and start calling Update "Series 3" with appropriate card numbering is that they couldn't put the factory sets in the stores in time for the holidays or something to that effect. It's either that, or no one wants to manufacture a 1000 card box.