Pack of the Day 145: One 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR Blaster Box

I went to Target the other day on an errand, secretly hoping to find a blaster box of Panini's new 2016 Torque racing cards. I didn't find those, but I did pick up some Pokemon cards for my kids and a blaster of 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR for me. My kids have begun to collect Pokemon cards, which is a pretty cool development. They've got binders and card sheets, and they enjoy sorting and flipping through their cards. We had to ban them from trading outside of the immediate family, though, as they have a cousin who was taking advantage of the younger kids. My eldest son even dug out his Cincinnati Bengals collection and spent some time going through those cards, so I am making some headway with them on the sports front. Hopefully the cardboard habit will mean they never have money for getting into drugs or other vices. The younger boys haven't picked favorite teams yet, but I imagine that once they do I will try to get a couple of card lots together for them.

Blasters of Prizm are kind of like blasters of Chrome. You don't get a whole lot of cards per box. One good thing about these Panini racing blasters is that they promise a hit per blaster. Nine times out of ten it's a relic of someone you've never heard of before, but I guess that's better than nothing. I am not really chasing anything here besides inserts, parallels, and the hit, as I picked up a complete set of Prizm recently from eBay.

I try to scan a couple of base cards any time I do a break post. I enjoy shiny cards and hits just as much as anyone, but I think the base cards deserve some limelight as well. The Kyle Busch card is a standard base card, while the Kyle Larson card belongs to the Driver Introductions subset. I think I chose that card because he's got the Target logo on his uniform and I bought the blaster at Target. I ought to give that Busch card to my son, as he was excited to rediscover some of the M&M's race car cards I gave him among his football collection.

I still miss the garish green and orange of the GoDaddy cars, but Danica Patrick's new Nature's Bakery colors are pretty nice-looking as well. I've got some pretty cool new Danica cards in-hand and on the way to me, so I'm looking forward to writing those posts. The Kevin Harvick card is part of the Champions subset.

I was disappointed about not pulling any of the colorful Prizm parallels, settling instead for three base Prizms and an SP Prizm of Mark Martin. I don't have the base SP of the Martin card, but this is the second Prizm version I've pulled. I've got it earmarked for Billy Kingsley of Cardboard History, as he's one of the most prominent NASCAR collectors on the blogosphere.

I was happy to pull a couple of inserts for drivers I collect, Danica Patrick and Dale Earnhardt Jr. The Danica is a Qualifying Times insert and the Dale card is a Prizm parallel of the die-cut Machinery insert. I didn't pull any of the die-cut inserts from the Hobby box I opened, so I was glad to make up for that here. In looking at that previous post, it appears that the Qualifying Times insert of Danica is a double.

Here are a couple more inserts. The Jimmie Johnson Raising the Flag insert is another die-cut card. Die-cut cards are still cool to me after all these years. I guess it takes me back to my 90's days as a card-collecting teenager. The Winner's Circle insert is pretty cool, as it features a card for each 2015 race winner. Other major sports just have too many events for this to be an option (although there are days when it seems like Topps NOW is trying to highlight every baseball game), but with 36 races in a season, it is pretty feasible to put out this sort of insert.

edit: I guess 2008 Upper Deck Documentary actually did put out a card for each game that each team played that season (so two cards per game played, one per team), in a behemoth 4,890-card checklist. The quality control was poor, though, so they didn't actually use pictures from the games in question or even pictures of players who had appeared in the card's featured game.

The promised hit of the box is a Landon Cassill autograph. This is the base level autograph. Cassill tends to run in the back half of the pack, with a 2016 average start of 31.6 and an average finish of 26.5. This isn't the most amazing hit in the world, but I was happy to get an autograph of a current full-time driver. Overall I was happy with the break.

Yesterday my wife and I went to see a local music theatre's presentation of The Little Mermaid. Musicals aren't usually my thing, but it was pretty good and my wife was happy that I agreed to go with her. I guess it counted as our anniversary date, as we are a couple of days away from our 12th anniversary.