Breaking it Down 20: Cards from Cards on Cards

Cards on Cards recently held a box break featuring one box of 2014 Topps Mini Baseball. Unfortunately, the break faced some difficulties as he was the victim of some holiday mail theft and lost the original box for the break as well as some of the trade packages used as payment for the break. My outbound package was one of the ones that disappeared before arriving at his home. It contained a full Cardinals team set of Gold parallels from 2014 Archives, which I had acquired in my quest to complete the full Gold set. He was able to acquire another box for the break, and I finally got around to building a return package for him, which should be arriving at his new secret address in the next couple of days.

My team for the break was the Toronto Blue Jays, and I came away with one of the rarer hits in the set, a Black parallel of Moises Sierra. These cards are limited to 5 copies each, with this one being numbered # 5 / 5. Sierra spent a couple of years with the Blue Jays, but was selected off waivers by the White Sox in May 2014 and then selected off waivers from them by the Royals after the season was over. That's all I know about him. I also got a stack of base Blue Jays, which look like their counterparts in the eponymous Topps base set, only smaller.

Also included in the package were a number of cards featuring my favorite NBA team, the Houston Rockets. I believe this was part of his Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club, which is something we'd corresponded about but a trade had never actually occurred. I sent a few Clyde Drexler cards his way in my recent package, and I have more to send once I compare the rest of my collection to his Zistle list. I believe these two Hakeem Olajuwon cards were new additions to my Dream PC.

Yao Ming was set up to be a superstar for the Rockets, but nagging injuries prevented him from ever really getting things going. I don't have many cards from this era, as I got out of card collecting right around the time Hakeem went to the Raptors and then retired. It's a shame that the Ming/McGrady-era Rockets never lived up to their potential. 

That Craig Ehlo card makes me laugh. Shane Battier was Daryl Morey's poster child for whatever the basketball name for sabermetrics is. Then Battier went off to the Heat and got himself a couple of Championship rings. I included the other cards in these scans because I liked the designs or the pictures on them.

Here are a few Tracy McGrady cards I selected to scan from the stacks. McGrady is working on a new business idea, recently spent some time playing independent league baseball (he retired after the league's all-star game), and still thinks he has what it takes to make an NBA comeback.

Alongside a few more Ming highlights I've got some Rockets from the more recent iterations of the team. Chandler Parsons was briefly my favorite Rocket, but he followed the money and went to play for Dallas. That in itself isn't all that bad, but he keeps Tweeting and making references to how well he gets along with Mark Cuban, the Mavericks' owner. Maybe Mark Cuban runs his ship that way, but I don't like the idea of the players getting all comfy with the team owner. James Harden and his beard are pretty famous, but he and Dwight Howard came off as pretty arrogant during the team's offseason last year. I wonder if that attitude pushed away potential additions that could have helped the team. The current version of the team is pretty darn good, but they get beaten consistently by other good teams and I don't see them going far in the playoffs unless they get hot at the right moment.

It took me a while to get this post scanned and written up, but I really appreciated this package, especially with all the stress and confusion that Cards on Cards went through to get this group break done.