Contested Shots 5: A Little Win and a Huge Loss

This past year I participated in the official Press Pass Yahoo! Fantasy NASCAR league, and I did pretty well. I wound up finishing 6th out of around 100 participants. Sixth place wasn't good enough to win, but the 4th and 5th place folks never responded to requests for their shipping information and after a while I got an e-mail telling me I was next in line if I responded with my address. I didn't know what the prize would be, but I was sure happy to provide my information. It turned out to be a Hobby box of 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia cards. Five packs, with a hit in each pack. That's a pretty good prize, and this post was all set to be a happy and victorious post about my big win.

But now I have to address the loss part of the post title. Various outlets are now reporting that Press Pass is going out of business. It looks like the news started with a tweet ESPN Sports Business Reporter Darren Rovell, and then spread quickly to other collecting media outlets like Beckett. I guess maybe I should have realized something was up, since the last post on the Press Pass Facebook page was back around Thanksgiving, but a lot of smaller companies come and go on social media without going out of business. Press Pass put out a lot of really neat and innovative racing cards and with many years working with NASCAR probably developed a pretty good relationship with the drivers and teams.

If the news is true, the collector in me can't help wondering where I will get my NASCAR fix from now on. There are plenty of past releases out there for me to acquire for my favorite drivers, but I like new stuff just as much as the next guy. I hope that some company is able to pick up the license in time to put out 2015 sets, and I really hope that whatever company winds up with the NASCAR rights doesn't completely blow it. I like shiny new things, but I hate change.

Press Pass put out a lot of good products. Their flagship set each year was really nice for the couple years that I've been collecting them, and their memorabilia and autograph products usually were innovative and well-designed. Whoever picks up the license has a lot to learn. Maybe they will be able to pull in some of the Press Pass staff and glean their institutional knowledge to facilitate a smooth transition.

Enough about that mess. Let's see what I pulled from my prize box:

As far as base cards go, I just got one card that fits into my Driver Collections. Josh Wise is a driver for a lower-tier team, and got a bit of publicity in 2014 when the users of Reddit raised funds to buy a sponsorship for his car and then voted him into the All-Star Race over Danica Patrick. They also sold some t-shirts to fund the Dogecoin sponsorship for another race. I was able to add the Dogecoin die-cast model to my NASCAR die-cast collection when it was released near the end of the year. It's one of my favorite additions of the last few months. I am not sure if Wise will be back in 2015, but I guess we'll see how it goes. The last few spots in the NASCAR running order are kind of like your Quad-A guys in baseball, with a mix of older guys barely hanging on and your young prospects getting a chance to try their hand in the big leagues.

I got a couple of these shiny Black & White Holofoil parallels in the box, both numbered out of # / 99. Neither driver is anyone I have a lot of interest in, which was a theme throughout most of this break. The Elliott Sadler card is # 10 / 99 and the Ty Dillon card is # 46 / 99.

The Gold parallels worked out all right for me, with the big highlight being the Danica Patrick card there in the center. She is the main driver I collect, and this Gold parallel is numbered # 165 / 175. Kyle Busch isn't a bad pull either, as he drives the popular M&Ms (and sometimes Skittles or Snickers) car. The Busch is numbered # 087 / 175. David Ragan I don't really have an opinion on at all. His card is # 066 / 175.

Acceleration is one of the inserts in the product, showing off a couple pictures of the cars to go along with a driver photo. I got another Kyle Busch card here, along with another guy I like to collect in Jeff Gordon. There are a few other drivers here, but no one I really pay attention to. I guess I pay a little attention to Clint Bowyer because of his absolutely wooden acting in the 5-hour Energy commercials.

I guess if I am thinking about 5-hour Energy while I sit here and type this post, then Clint Bowyer did his job effectively as a shill for the company.

The other insert set in 2014 Total Memorabilia is this NASCAR Hall of Fame set. It's a shiny foil set with little medallion-looking illustrations for each driver. The Rusty Wallace appears to be some kind of holofoil variant, but I couldn't find much information about them online.

And now we get to the hits. All of these cards are pretty thick, and the excessive foiling around the edges means that most of them come out of the pack looking pretty rough, with soft corners and chipping appearing pretty much universally. This Joey Logano card is numbered # 048 / 150 and features bits of tire and sheet metal from his car.

These two cards feature three swatches each, and are numbered out of # / 99. Brian Vickers' card has a pretty nice bit of firesuit, a piece of shoe, and a glove swatch. It is numbered # 57 / 99. Clint Bowyer makes another appearance, with his card featuring a firesuit / shirt / sheet metal combination. It is numbered # 32 / 99. I wonder if he is actually wearing a blank cap, or if the logos on his cap had to be airbrushed out for some reason?

I guess this would be the hit of the break, if we were trying to determine that sort of thing. It's an Austin Dillion Champion's Collection relic card, featuring a large bit of firesuit and numbered # 01 / 25. It commemorates him winning the 2013 NASCAR Nationwide Series Championship. One thing that would add immensely to this card would be to have some sort of color in the firesuit swatch.

And the final card to show from the box is this Rising Stars relic / autograph of Ryan Gifford. It's numbered # 60 / 99 and features a piece of glove. The autograph isn't really that fuzzy. It's just set back in a little shadowbox and my scanner has a hard time dealing with the change in depth. He races down in the lower circuits right now, but he ran a couple of Nationwide races last year and may eventually move up into the higher levels.

That's about it for this box. There wasn't much outside of the Danica Patrick Gold parallel as far as additions to my personal collection, and there weren't any mind-blowing hits. I'd say that the two boxes of 2013 Ignite I got from Blowout Cards' Black Friday sale offered much more in the way of excitement, but I can't complain too much because the box was free. If you kept the mix of cards the same and changed a few driver names around this could have been a really exciting box for me.

It's a shame that Press Pass looks to be done printing cards. I never really liked their sports cards during my first stint in the collecting hobby during the 90's, but their racing cards over the last few years have been really nice. I hope that someone else will pick up the NASCAR license soon and I really hope that whoever it is manages not to screw things up.

Quadzilla NASCAR Relic: Earnhardt Jr., Patrick, Gordon, Stewart

I picked up this card in March. I already had a more limited version of the card that I got in early 2014, but at the price this one surfaced for I couldn't let it go. It features sheet metal relics from four of my favorite NASCAR drivers' cars, with a nice variety of colors and some good paint scrapes on the Danica Patrick and Tony Stewart swatches. The other two featured drivers are Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This copy of the card is numbered # 79 / 99.

The set this card comes from is 2010 Press Pass Showcase, and the insert is named Classic Collections Fan Favorites. I still think it's a shame that Press Pass closed up shop and left the NASCAR license without a card producer. There is plenty of the older stuff out there on eBay so it's not like I am hurting for cards to chase, but as a card collector I do like to have new things to see and chase. A lot of the eBay stuff now is the overpriced Buy It Now auctions that have been cycling for the last three years with no change in the price tag.

I haven't sat down to watch a NASCAR race in a couple of months, but I do follow the races as they progress on the NASCAR.com leaderboard tracker. Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon seem to be struggling a lot this year. It's a shame especially for Gordon as this is his farewell tour before retirement. He's still just inside the Chase for the Cup playoff field, so he might be able to salvage a good end to the season with some strong runs in the last third of the season. Danica Patrick has shown fairly stead improvement year over year, but hasn't made the big jump where she is a week-to-week threat to win a race. She is more like a week-to-week threat to break into the Top 15, with finishes between 20th and 27th place being the expectation. Earnhardt Jr. is squarely in the top half of the Chase field with a couple of wins and plenty of Top 5 / Top 10 finishes on the year.

This is a super cool card to get. I like these multiple relic cards for NASCAR drivers, although they usually come with a price tag that matches their awesomeness. It's especially nice because if I had to pick four drivers to appear on a card, these would be the ones I'd choose. It's like Press Pass read my mind three years before I got back into card collecting. This one slipped through at a discount, maybe because the seller was trying to clear some stuff out or because it's got some rough corners. I think if the seller had put it out for auction rather than Buy It Now it might have fetched double what I paid for it. At least that's what I tell myself.

Pack of the Day 137: Hobby Box of 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR

Like I mentioned yesterday, I found a new (to me) card shop here in Dayton, Ohio, and while I was there I bought a box of 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR. This is the first NASCAR product from Panini, and the first NASCAR product since Press Pass shut down. I think that was in January of 2015. So it's a pretty big deal if NASCAR trading cards are something you're into. Each box has 20 packs and 4 cards per pack, for a total of 80 cards in a box. 

I got 54 base cards in my box, with no doubles. The checklist is 100 cards deep, so you're going to need multiple boxes if you're trying to complete a set. The set starts out with your fairly standard driver cards. The first 22-ish cards run in numerical sequence based on the driver's door number, but then I guess they ran out of door numbers and things get a little random. Drivers like Josh Wise don't have a stable number all year, so they don't even get their numbers on the card. The card backs are pretty bare-bones, with very basic height/weight/birthdate information and a paragraph about the driver.

After the driver cards is a subset showing the cars themselves. The backs of these cards feature a paragraph about a particular achievement that driver has accomplished, usually a victory, a pole, or a run of good finishes at a particular track.

Following that, there are several more subsets. One features Champions, the next has Driver Introductions, then there are a few Hall of Fame cards, and finally there is a card for the 2015 Chase for the Cup with the final Chase standings on the back.

The most numerous parallel is the basic rainbow-hued Prizm. I got ten of these in the box, although there are also Prizm parallels for all of the inserts that I am not counting in that number.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out what these are. Apparently there is a short-print base variation set featuring eight drivers. I pulled a Rusty Wallace base version and a Mark Martin Prizm variation from this group. They are numbered as if they came from the base set, but they have a checkered flag background to differentiate them from the base cards whose numbers they share.

I pulled 5 inserts from three different insert sets. The first is Competitors, next is Qualifying Times, and last is Winner's Circle. I think Competitors is an insert for drivers who are popular to get a few more cards in the set. Qualifying Times talks about drivers who qualify first for a race, and Winner's Circle is a set that honors each race winner from 2015. There are a couple of other insert sets that I didn't pull any cards from, like Champions and Machinery, as well as retail-exclusive inserts for Wal-Mart and Target.

I pulled three basic Prizm parallels for insert sets. They are just like the Prizm parallels for the base cards.

There were three colorful serially-numbered Prizm parallels in my box. All come from the base set, although I believe most of the inserts have parallels. That Rusty Wallace is a Green Flag parallel numbered # 031 / 149, Denny Hamlin is a Blue Flag parallel numbered # 37 / 99, and Jamie Mcmurray is a Rainbow parallel numbered # 19 / 24. I guess it is just because of good branding, but I can't see a rainbow parallel without thinking of Jeff Gordon.

Each box doesn't guarantee three hits, but it does tell you to look for three hits, on average, per box. I got three in my box. Here they are in the order they were pulled. The Kyle Busch Firesuit Fabrics card is the only numbered parallel in the box. It is a Green Flag Prizm parallel, numbered # 56 / 99. The autograph is a Driver Signatures Prizm of Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. and the Race Used Tire relic card features Kurt Busch. I can't say I am blown away by these hits, but they are nice enough. I've seen better breaks out there, but I would imagine mine is about the average you might expect to see from this product.

I was happy to find some of this in a hobby shop, and overall I think it's about what you would come up with if someone asked you to describe a Panini Prizm NASCAR product. I would like to see more cards per box. The price would probably feel a lot better with 100 cards in the box as opposed to 80, even if you don't increase the hits per box and just add another 14 base cards and 6 inserts/parallels.

Pack of the Day 156: A Box of Panini Prizm NASCAR from Steel City Collectibles

Happy Valentine's Day! I don't like Valentine's Day, but I know there are probably some people out there who like it. To me it just seems like a way for marketing folks to extract money from people's wallets. In spite of those feelings, I picked up a couple of things for my wife. I try to show my appreciation for her every day, but you kind of have to do something on Valentine's Day because everyone else is doing something on Valentine's Day. It's a social expectations thing, even if you oppose the commercial aspect of the thing.

We took our kids to see The LEGO Batman Movie this evening. It was a pretty good film, although there were some slow parts to it. I think the kids liked it, and we enjoyed it as well. I ate too much popcorn, and that hasn't settled well. I do that every time I go to the movies.

A couple of months ago, I bought several boxes of old WNBA cards from the Steel City Collectibles website. I haven't sorted, scanned, or posted about those cards yet, but I'll get around to it. Included in the package was a scratch-off card that got me $10 off my next order. I debated for a while on what to get, and eventually settled on a box of 2016 Panini Prizm NASCAR.

This stuff is prototypical Prizm, although if you're used to the baseball version you might be shocked by all the logos that appear on the NASCAR cards. So many logos! A logo-less NASCAR set would be pretty silly. Just a bunch of folks standing around in onesie pajamas, and pictures of brightly-colored cars. I don't even know if they could leave the numbers on the cars, as many of them seem to have a particular font or style to them. Anyway, Panini has the NASCAR license, so we don't have to worry about that. I think I got around 55 base cards in the box, which leaves around 25 inserts, parallels, and my three promised hits. Much of the base set is your basic driver card, as illustrated by fan-favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr. up there.

There are also a few pictures of actual cars in the set. Danica Patrick announced today that Aspen Dental is taking on more races and becoming the primary sponsor of her # 10 car after the legal dispute with Nature's Bakery over payments owed to Stewart-Haas Racing. Kind of a messy ending to what seemed like a pretty good pairing of driver and sponsor. Unfortunately, money ruined that relationship and it looks like it isn't something that can be repaired.

The Daytona 500 car looks all right. I do wonder how far ahead Panini is in the planning cycle, and how long it will take them to make the sponsor switch on Danica's cards. I'll be keeping an eye out for that.

The Champions subset appropriately celebrates people who have won the NASCAR Championship. Pretty self-explanatory. I think most of the photos in this subset are similar celebration shots.

Driver Introductions is the subset that shows off waving, high-fives, and low-fives, as exhibited by Tony Stewart here. It's also an excuse to get popular drivers into another card on the checklist.

The final subset in the checklist features some NASCAR Hall of Famers, like Terry Labonte here. The final card in the set features all of the 2015 Chase drivers and the final standings, but I don't think I pulled that card in this box.

I pulled ten basic Prizm parallels. I scanned them all individually, probably with the intention of eventually filling in any hole I found in the Trading Card Database photos. I may have even uploaded some of them, but I can't remember at the moment if that is the case.

These are your pretty standard holofoil parallels. They are shiny and prone to picking up visible fingerprints when you handle them. I hate fingerprints on my cards, but it seems like any time I handle a shiny card I wind up getting at least a fingertip somewhere on the surface. I'm not going to wear cotton cloves while handling my cards, though. I'll leave that to other folks who are more uptight than I am.

I am running out of stuff to say, and there are still like three more rows of these things. This is where I begin to question some of my decisions. I could just delete a few photos (I deleted the scans of the card backs a few minutes ago - they look like the regular base cards, except they say PRIZM in that little box under the Panini name), but that feels like wasting the effort it took to scan and crop them. And what if there is someone out there just aching to see what a Matt DiBenedetto Prizm looks like? I have to please that person, because there probably aren't a lot of folks who are going to pull any of these cards and run them through the scanner for all the internet to enjoy, They are too busy looking for sick mojo hits and looking at pricing on bulk cotton gloves.

I do like it when card makers actually feature the cars on their cardboard. Ideally, the set would be a little bigger (or I guess Donruss NASCAR could do this) and feature cards for all the drivers and all the cars. They could even do the triptych idea from like 2011 Press Pass Stealth, where there are three cards for each team, featuring driver, car, and crew on the fronts and a puzzle that shows the team hauler on the back.

Here are the last two base Prizms. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is not waving, high-fiving, or low-fiving anybody in his Driver Introductions photo. That's not gonna win the hearts of the fans, Ricky. You've got to know what to do with your hands if you're going to be a race car driver. Darrell Waltrip closes this section out. He looks relieved that I'm done talking about these things.

Darrell Waltrip hot box! In addition to the regular base cards, there are these SP base cards featuring famous racers of the past. Darrell Waltrip shares the number 17 in the checklist with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. There are also parallels of the SP base cards.

There are various colorful parallels in the set, like this Blue Flag Prizm of Tony Stewart. It is numbered # 20 / 99. It's nice when one of your better parallels in a box happens to be a person you collect. My Tony Stewart collection isn't something I really work on actively, but I am happy to hold on to any of his cards that I come across.

I also pulled this Gold parallel of Richard Petty's SP base card. It is pretty rare, numbered # 03 / 10. I'm not a huge Petty fan, but there's no mistaking his fame and his results on the track. It's pretty cool to get such a low-numbered card, though. It could have been like a # / 199 card of Keselowski or something.

I got two regular Competitors inserts and one Prizm parallel. Danica Patrick was one of them. I think this is probably a double or triple of this card. I don't know for sure, though.

Denny Hamlin was the other I got. I have a love/hate relationship with FedEx. I worked for them for a couple of years in between my first overseas deployment and being hired on in the building where I currently work. I liked working there for the most part, but when the economic downturn happened things changed a lot and it seemed like the company did a 180, and not in a good way. So that comes up when I see Hamlin's cards.

Logano was the Prizm parallel. I don't really have an opinion on Logano.

I got two Qualifying Times inserts in the box, one regular and one Prizm. Jimmie Johnson was the regular one. This insert features drivers who have won the pole position at some point. I like that these cards feature the driver and the car, and I kind of like the diagonal slashes in the design.

Danica Patrick makes another appearance here, with about the thousandth card to bring up her 2013 Daytona pole. It was a pretty big deal, but you'd like it if your highlight reel featured something more recent.

Winner's Circle is an insert that features every race winner from 2015. This is a good idea for an insert set in a NASCAR product. I hope it continues from year to year. 

I got two regular and two Prizm cards from this insert. I got one of each with Joey Logano on the front, although they are not duplicates. They highlight different victories. This one is for a victory at Talladega.

Here is a Jimmie Johnson Prizm. He figures pretty heavily in the checklist for the year as well, with a handful of race wins to his name for the year.

Finally, the last non-hit card of the post is the other Logano I mentioned above, this one for a win at Watkins Glen in August.

My first hit is a basic race-used tire relic from Kasey Kahne. It is not numbered or anything. The back of the card describes his performance in one particular race from 2015, but doesn't really mention whether the tire comes from that race. So maybe it did and maybe Panini just selected a race from 2015 to recap so that there would be something interesting to read on the back of the card.

The second hit of the box is a Matt Kenseth tire relic. This time it's a Red Flag parallel, numbered # 23 / 25. It's a pretty shiny card, and has a nice low print run. Too bad it's a driver that I don't have any feelings about either way.

The final hit of the box continues the Matt Kenseth trend. It's an autograph card, and again it is a parallel. This is the Green Flag version, numbered # 35 / 75. It's a pretty nice card, but again, it suffers in my book by featuring a driver that doesn't do much for me.

Overall this was a pretty solid box. I got a couple of PC cards, including a Danica Patrick Prizm insert and a numbered Tony Stewart parallel. Two of my hits had print runs under # / 100, and I also pulled a # / 10 parallel of Richard Petty. That's a pretty good bunch of pulls. I enjoy this product in spite of the relatively boring 'Wall of Silver' Prizm-ness of the base set. It's even better when I can get a discounted box.