One Card Only: While the Gettin's Good

Why wait until Update to get my first Joey Bats card as a Met?

I doubt whatever photo they use on it, if he even makes the checklist, won't be as emotional as his tip of the hat (helmet) on his return to Toronto.

Here's the back of the card. This joins Coghlan's dive last year and Pillar's 3-steal trip around the bases as my third Topps Now card.

Toronto Group Break Goodies

Back to the ol' mailbag today and some group break stuff from the two Toronto teams I root for - the Raptors and Blue Jays.

Here's the base design. Shiny, and I like the contrasting black & white/colour photos combined on the front. Sadly, it only really pops when they're wearing the red uniforms like on OG's card.

Excepting the Norman Powell, I also landed almost a complete set of the red parallels.

One insert.

Two inserts. That is a facsimile autograph on the License to Dominate, but these still count as case hits. So, while I didn't land an actual hit in this, I did land something relatively close.

Off to baseball, and a mixer of various products.

I'll go through this in relative chronological order, and start with some 2016 Bowman's Best. Only a pair of Joey Bats cards in this, but one was a nice shiny refractor. And yes, I did pick up the Topps Now card of his return to Toronto. Mainly because I thought that could be his only Mets card, since nothing is certain with Update. Then he got another Now card days later.

A nice selection of last year's Stadium Club, which like any year's release I can't really get enough of.

ThjA couple cards out of the rather odd Chronicles set, which was sorta like Rookie Anthology in terms of a base set, and a bunch of kinda Update-ish cards from various sets along with other unreleased Panini product lines. Spectra baseball?

The only hit in this post was an auto, with Anthony Alford experiencing some level of sticker woe.

2018 Bowman! Which I've busted a grand total of nothing of, but still have picked up a few cards through breaks and trades. A trio of Vlads? Yes!

And let's throw some parallels in with this. A shimmery parallel in Blue Jays blue is up first, with this one being 47/125.

While red isn't as important a colour in the Jays uniform, it is still there. This beauty is numbered to an ebay 1/1ish 5/5. Nice, but I'd put the odds at 50/50 that it ends up in my COMC sales account at some point. Since a blue Jays card is still nicer than a red. Unless they photoshopped one of the Canada Day jerseys onto Zeuch.

There you go. Assuming the mailman doesn't drop anything off in the near future, only one more envelope and I'm caught up! Yay!

2018 Adventures in Repacks - Part 15 - New Repack Type! And a 1:1773 hit!

Since it has been too long since I've busted a repack (it's always too long between repack busts), here's a new one that made an appearance on the shelves of Wally World. Whether you call it 15 packs, or 10 packs with 5 bonus packs, that's a lot of ripping. And these are the packs in question:

5 2013 Triple Play
3 2014 Prizm
1 2015 Stars and Stripes
1 2015 Elite
1 2016 Series 1
1 2017 Honus Bonus
3 2017 Series 1

And there was also a bonus Ohtani card contained within:

I guess unlicensed Ohtani is better than no Ohtani at all. Time to cover the rest of the packs chronologically.

I'm pretty blah on Triple Play, so here's the only PC card out of the 5 packs.

2014 Prizm was one of those sets that included some sort of starch in the packaging to make the packing out process easier. At least I landed something shiny in the first pack.

A die-cut insert in the second pack.

And a patriotic insert in the third. Despite the lack of licensing, that Reggie is a nice-looking card.

More patriotism from this Stars & Stripes set, including some cards of recognizable names in pre-MLB form.

Elite looks pretty dull, and I doubt even MLB licensing could make the base cards interesting.

2016 brought some inserts, including a new Votto for my CanCon collection and a Pressed Into Service insert I didn't already have. Plus there's another bat flip card. A good number of keepers from one pack!

Honus Bonus was there. At least I have some oddballs for the team collectors on my trade list.

And Series 1 from 2017. Inserts and parallels are always welcome, especially when they're new cards for my Blue Jays collection. And to Shoebox Legends, I've already looked. It is card #751, and that wasn't needed for the Frankenset.

This is a pretty good way to wrap up a repack post. A hit popped out of the 2017 pack, and it was actually the first pack I opened. I was kinda upset that I ended up starting with this pack, as I just knew it would be all downhill from here. The hit is even better when it is combined with a throwback uniform. If I'm reading the odds on the pack correctly, Salute autos fell at a rate of 1:1773 packs. What a great card to beat the odds with!

And there you have it! It is probably influenced by the hit, but I can see myself trying another one of these.

2017 Gypsy Queen 2 Box Break - Part 1

My boxes are here! I'm passing on flagship and Heritage for the GQ set-building experience this year. While there are SPs in this set, they're limited to retired players, and it seems less vital that I add these to the set, unlike with Heritage.

Just the first pack for the day. Very Blue Jays intensive with 2 cards of the locals, and I'm sure that was a Jays uniform at one point on Edwin.

Having the card number in the middle of the card is different. As long as it doesn't make collating the base set too much of an annoyance, I won't be that bothered by it.

And now if you'll excuse me, I still have 47 more packs and 2 box toppers to bust.

PWE Chronicles

And now, a couple of PWEs that risked Canada Post's labour situation (as opposed to just general incompetence) to send me some cards.

This was the card I was most excited to receive, having it show up in a PWE from Shoebox Legends. I'd sent out an alert that I really wanted this card, but shipping from the states on ebay was well beyond what I wanted to pay. If you're wondering why this was such a want for me, it is because Bloomberg is a 2/14 baby. He's now the 180th different person in that collection.

The rest of the envelope saw some more cards for my other collection. Sure, this shows as a Nationals card, but it is still an Expos card for me. In fact, it was Sledge that brought down the curtain on the Expos in Montreal, as he was their final out at Stade Olympique, popping up to third to end the game.

Sens content? Sure!

David Wright content! Also quite welcome.

Even some golden Jays content.

But, to wrap things up, here's some Bills autos for the collection.  And two of these guys are still on the team (Easley and Gragg)! Bonus!

The first PWE started with a 2/14 card. I might as well do the same with this one. This is the 33rd Drew Bledsoe card in that collection, placing him in 4th place overall (behing Jim Kelly's 58, Alshon Jeffery's 42 and Steve McNair with 41).

Boy, those two mid-round draft picks that the Bills got in exchange for Beast Mode really turned the franchise around. At least Chris Hairston played some games for them. As for Tank Carder, he played as many downs for the Bills as I have. But he was named Tank, so there's that.

Shiny Joey Bats!

And a pair of colourful Sammy Watkins relics to end this post. Thanks to Shane and Mark for these great PWEs!

And now, I await the start of the regular season.

OrlandoBolts goes Out of Bounds

Even though the Canada Post situation was questionable up until a couple days ago, I still had a couple packages show up lately. One was from frequent zistle trade partner OrlandoBolts, who dropped some baseball and hockey on me. Today, the baseball. Tomorrow the hockey. I'll definitely be searching the bins at the next show for some Guelph Storm alum to fire back.

As the title of this post indicates, the Out of Bounds parallels from 2013 were a nice part of this package. I'm calling this one as a hit going into my CanCon collection.

And I'm calling these as hits for my Blue Jays collection. Sure, they're not really hits in the traditional meaning of the word for collectors, but they are my binders.

 And here's one more parallel from last year's release. This is certainly a photo choice worthy of showing up on a SP'd card.

2013. 2015. Time for a 2014 variation with the Saberstats of Juan Francisco.

And back to the CanCon portion of this envelope with a pair of Russell Martins. While the photo is spectacular on the Stadium Club, how can I vote against a WBC card where he's sporting Team Canada duds?

Finally, some pre-Joey Bats cards of Joey Bats to close the baseball portion of this envelope.

Tomorrow, the hockey!

Father's Day with Milwaukee

Yesterday, one of two packages that I was waiting for in advance of a possible Canada Post work stoppage arrived. Today, the second one did. This one contained goodies from a group break at mojobreak.com over the Father's Day weekend. It was a basketball mixer that included Father's Day packs.

The packs didn't land me a hit, but at least I got some nice cards. The Joey Bats, is, of course, my favourite, but there are still some other notables. The Teddy Bridgewater salutes the sub-zero temperature game they played in the playoffs last season. After seeing this over at Raz Card Blog earlier this week, I remarked that it really should have featured a shirt-sleeved Bud Grant doing the coin toss.

And now, the break itself. It included boxes of Revolution, Limited, Gold Standard and Luxe. I landed the Milwaukee Bucks in the random. Considering that Panini is pretty good for having retired/legend content in their basketball products, I was hopeful to land a nice card from that portion of the product. And it came through.

Revolution is a gaudy set that was a Pacific release in other sports, but I believe this was the first basketball release from any company. These were the base cards in the set, and you can really tell this set had its origin in a late 1990's Pacific release.

I didn't land a base card of the Bucks' 2015-16 rookie Rashad Vaughn but I did land one of these in an infinite parallel (1:6 packs).

And here's a nice legend card like I was hoping for.

And here's the end of the Revolution with an insert and a parallel to the insert. The louder of the two is a Galactic parallel. They're kind of a tough pull, falling a rate of 1:288 for the base portion of the set, likely higher for the inserts. But that rate is still 1 per 2 cases.

I didn't land anything in the Limited boxes.

Gold Standard did land me one card. Eventually. The other Rashad Vaughn cards in this set look to be live at this point, so I shouldn't have to wait too long. This will be numbered to /49 and should include an on-card autograph to go with a green swatch.

In the meantime, this ebay 1/1 of Vaughn will suffice. Although I do think this one will be part of my next shipment to COMC, since I really don't want to store a framed card that isn't part of my PC.

And the final card, and my favourite, came from the exact same box as the framed Vaughn. And it definitely falls into the legend category.

An on-card autograph from one of the greatest of all-time! Yes, please! A beautiful design and penmanship to match. That's a nice way to wrap up a break, and if I chose not to keep the card, (I'm keeping it), it would easily pay for the break.

And there you have it.