In da Club(house)

 

Another big batch of Cardinals cards from @flywheels Affordable Group Breaks. 

 

While the Cardinals season continues to circle the drain, I have continued to focus on piecing together my card collection, even though baseball as a whole hasn't been all that fun for me of late. In April, I had another bunch of cards from Colbey shipped my way, and there were lots of goodies to behold!

A number of Panini products were involved, including the always flashy Prizm set. Certain configurations (Quick Pitch?) have these numbered "donut" parallels, and I was fortunate enough to land a couple of them.

Donruss Optic, of course, has all kinds of colored parallels including this blue Goldy numbered to 149.

More numbered Goldy! Goldy Donut Goodness. This is numbered to 199.

Panini's Mosaic set is sort of a knockoff Prizm set. The International Men of Mastery set has the player's national flag in the background and this is a "mosaic" parallel of the regular insert.

Colbey likes to open a lot of older stuff (how else can you consistently keep it "Affordable"?) which resulted me in picking up a couple of these fancy looking base cards from the 1997 Flair Showcase set.

More logoless Panini stuff here. Dylan Carlson has a billion cards on the market for someone who has only been in the league since the pandemic-shortened season.

Speaking of players who have a billion cards, I snagged a couple of J.D. Drew insert cards from the 1999 Pacific set.

I'm definitely grateful for breakers like Colbey, because not many people out there will go near Pacific stuff. How else would I get a cool die cut crown card like this?

The latest and greatest at the time was the 2022 Stadium Club Chrome set. I never managed to find any at retail, but I think there's only 3 cards per pack, so it was probably out of my price range anyway.

I ended up with at least a half dozen base card needs, but my favorite was this Albert Pujols card from his infamous pitching appearance last season. Last season was so fun! This season... yeesh!

Night Owl is All About the Shiny

Surprisingly shiny stuff from @nightowlcards includes a batch of Redbird parallels. 

 

When most of us think of Night Owl Cards and baseball cards, the '70s immediately jump to mind. (Specifically 1975 and minis.) Imagine my surprise, then, when a bunch of sparkly new Cardinals fell out of an envelope I received back from the Dodgers enthusiast back in February.

I've never been one to desire to "chase the rainbow" (we should really call this "Skittlesing") because I consider myself a team collector before a player collector. The conundrum is that a team collector like me still feels the need to hoard every version of every card of every player in that certain uniform.

These red ice (or whatever... actually, Cardboard Connection lists these as "red foilboard" for some reason) cards are serial numbered to just 199 copies. I'm not sure if I've ever pulled one personally.

Topps uses that "ice" effect on their base cards and a similar effect on their fancy Chrome Sapphire sets (see below), but the way they name these parallel designs is maddeningly inconsistent. Panini also does a version of this, and a version of the same pattern you see on X-Fractor cards like Jon Lester here (Panini calls these "building blocks" at times.) It makes me wonder if anyone has any original ideas anymore.

Acquiring a Chrome Sapphire card is a fairly rare achievement these days. I'm always appreciative when someone sends me one out of the blue. Otherwise, I seem to end up with a few of the cheapest ones whenever possible, similar to how I've treated Topps Now cards over the years. I really have a hard time bringing myself to spend more than one dollar on any single card.

I don't think I've seen this particular parallel pattern out of Topps before, but it looks like something Panini has used quite a bit on certain Chronicles and Revolution cards. (Go back to Pacific Revolution to see its origins, I think.) I'm not sure if this was pack pulled or one of those factory set parallels that must drive rainbow chasers closer to the brink of card madness.
 

Of course, we also have the familiar Stadium Club parallels to contend with. At least these are usually easy to identify, with mostly a foil color change here (red, in this case) or a chromium finish there. I'm glad we got one last card of Adam Wainwright as a batter, now that pitchers mostly don't bat anymore.

We're finally back to familiar Night Owl ground here with this four-pack of Allen & Ginter minis. My stack of unsorted A&G minis is getting disturbingly big at the moment, which means it's probably time to do some more of that dreaded organizing soon.

Thanks again to Night Owl and everyone else who has sent me some interesting parallels over the years.

More Affordable Breaks

Catching up with another bunch of @flywheels group break cards. 

 

My card purchases have nosedived in 2023, but I still have a cache of previously received piles of cards to go through before I'm all caught up. This latest bunch is from some Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks that I signed up for late last year.

Panini used an awkward time to debut a brand new baseball product, Capstone, with their MLBPA license expiring at the end of last year. It's possible there will be another Capstone baseball release someday in the future, but I'm expecting Panini to scale back their baseball release calendar significantly now that they can no longer use active MLB players in their sets. (Minor league prospects, apparently, are still fair game for now.)

This was my first look at Capstone (I've since bought a blaster of it), and it's... well, it's okay. All of the cards are thick, and the most commonly found cards from the base set has this extra glossy sheen on them that actually clouds up the scanned images. (See the Nootbaar card for comparison, which doesn't use the extra gloss and instead uses an etched background.)

I really enjoyed receiving this card from last year's Panini Chronicles set. Obsidian is typically a high end brand for Panini in other sports, but it doesn't have its own separate baseball release.

I signed up for a few football breaks (go Birds!) as well. It surely must have been football season. This Wendell Smallwood parallel from the 2016 Donruss set made me wonder what Smallwood has been up to recently. He was last scene a couple of years ago on Washington's roster according to the internet.

The 1999 Fleer Tradition set adds the conference logo to each card for some reason. I received a bunch of these Eagles cards that were new to me, and picked and old favorite of mine (the Duce is loose!) for the scan.

It's back to baseball with the 2003 Fleer Tradition Update set. Again, I was able to fill a number of team collection needs with this one. This Eduardo Perez card is actually a glossy parallel numbered to 100, which is nice. Perez was a key bench guy for four seasons in St. Louis but is perhaps best known these days for being part of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball announcing booth. (I rarely praise ESPN, but I really miss them having more baseball coverage. Now all we get are Sunday nights.)

This one has an insert-y look to it, but it's just part of the Update base set. I have so many Pujols cards, but I'm never surprised when I find one more.

I also believe I won some sort of giveaway during the breaks, as Colbey included a few extras. It's somewhat interesting that Bo's Topps football rookie card is significantly more expensive than his older baseball counterpart, but I think the general consensus is that there were vastly more Topps baseball cards produced than football cards in the same era. (Either that, or it's because the Raiders are cooler than the Royals?)

I was also gifted this Clint Frazier jersey card from the 2020 Topps Holiday set. I'll end up finding a new home for this one, I'm sure.

Spring PWE Round-Up

 Wrapping up 2022 with some sports cards from @Thorzul @OYERecs and more. 

 

It's fully springtime, but we're taking a look back at a few Plain White Envelopes that arrived at the end of last year.

First up are my returns from the annual Trade Me Anything affair from Death Stare Cards. I always look forward to this event where Thorzul opens a hobby box of Topps Update and trades off anything most anything not needed for his base set build.

This year's offering came up big in the Cardinals department, with a red jersey swatch of the reigning NL MVP and a short printed card of a Hall of Famer. These were definitely better cards than anything I personally picked up from my own experiences with 2022 Topps Update.

The second offering came from Dawg Day Cards. Angus, as many of you know, has sent a number of interesting cards my way over the years and this was no exception. Ifo Ekpre-Olomu is one of my all-time favorite Ducks football players, so it was great to add another signed card of his to my collection. I'm not really sure what jersey he is wearing here -- perhaps it's some sort of All-Star game thing?

If you're a fan of oddball cards and/or food issues, you're probably well aware of Post cereal cards by now. Did you know that there were separate Post sets issued just for the country of Canada? This is something I wasn't aware of myself until I started exploring the depths of the TCDB lists of sets. As usual with MLBPA licensed stuff, you get no logos with these cards.

Angus also sent along a nice six-pack of Panini stickers. These will head to my Cardinals albums, unstuck.

Last up is a couple of goodies from reader Neil. In 2015, Panini confusingly released a set called Elite and also included Elite inserts in their Donruss set with the exact same design. I believe this is from the regular Elite set.

Even with his retirement, I'm still able to keep with the tradition of ending many of my posts with a Yadi card. In this case, it's a fancy Tier One card of the Cardinals legend from 2019.

Neil operates a record label called Open Your Ears Records. Definitely check them out if you're into, you know, music and such!

Cards from The Lost Collector

Our favorite Yankees fan @Lost_Collector sends some Birds 'n Blazers. 

 

I finally busted out my Jack Flaherty shirt that I bought at Busch Stadium last summer yesterday, and Jack and co responded with a 2023 first: a series win. It's been a struggle so far in the young season for St. Louis, but hopefully the win over Colorado was a sign of better things to come.

This seemed like a good opportunity to show off a few things I received from The Lost Collector back around Christmas time. The holiday themed card would have made a seasonally appropriate post back when I first got these cards, but that is definitely a very busy time of the year.

It seems like Steven Matz has only been a Cardinal for a few months, but that's probably because he made 15 appearances with the team last season. He appears here on one of those gold-ish Topps cards that are becoming more and more difficult to come by as print runs spiral out of control.

A good chunk of the package was actually dedicated to basketball cards. I can always use more Bol Bol cards cards.

The Contenders Draft set gives us a throwback look at Dame Lillard.

This retail Absolute card of CJ McCollum gives us another glimpse of that awkward period where teams were playing in front of no fans.

We end things with a quad-pack of Bucks. All of these are Collector's Choice cards. The top two seem identical, but one of them is from the German set. There's also a nice "silver signature" parallel here.

Contest Winners and Cards from Oren

 

If you won something, say something! 

 

As of Monday, another college basketball season is in the books. That also concludes contest season here at Cards on Cards. Here is your big list of winners:

• 1st Place: bivlo (blitmeat)
• 2nd Place: rl16
• 3rd Place (tie): mds2942 (Chaos is a Bracket) and AngelsInOrder
• WoRsT pLaCe: mintxcore and josh.worley (Worley360)
• Championship Game Prediction: Brandon L (UConn 75, SDSU 62 - actual score UConn 76, SDSU 59)

If you are one of the winners (or "winners"), please get in touch with me as soon as possible so I can get your address and discuss your prize(s).

Meanwhile, here's another lovely batch of Cardinals cards from reader Oren. I was able to increase my Topps gold (the real gold) collection by a couple of notches with this package I got back in December.

Jack Flaherty has kept his ERA down over his first two (healthy, we presume) starts of the 2023 season, but he's been walking dudes at an alarming rate. Hopefully that doesn't become a thing.

Along with the tidy J.D. Drew autograph card is this striking blue insert from the 1999 Fleer Mystique set. I like it a lot.

More gold! Mooooore gooooold!

Tim Cooney made it to the big club in 2015, but my memory of this has more to do with remembering he has a card in Topps Update that year than of any recollection of seeing him on the field. Memory is weird that way.

Is this still the Players Weekend logo? Was it ever?

This insert from last year's Topps Chrome set leans a little too close to "Ben Baller" territory for me. It's always nice to get another Yadi insert card, though.

Last, but certainly not least, is this fancy encased Alex Reyes auto-patch card from the 2017 Panini National Treasures set. I wonder if Panini will continue to make sets like this in the future as they only have retired players and (apparently) minor leaguers to draw from now.

Thanks again to Oren and everyone who participated in my contests this year!

Another Contest? Another Contest!

Who is going to win the big game?

 

With no possible points left to score in tomorrow night's championship game, we already have a winning bracket in this year's March Radness contest. (Pre-congratulations to the winning bracket, blitmeat by bivlo!)

I did promise a separate impromptu contest that didn't require filling out a bracket or signing up with ESPN, and I just barely delivered. Tell me in the comments what you think the final score of the game will be tomorrow and how many points will be scored by the leading scorer. (Sample entry: UConn 80, SDSU 67, 24 points.) The winner will receive a new baseball or basketball value card pack of my choosing.

Make sure to get your guesses in before tipoff tomorrow (4/3) at 6:20 PM PDT.