My wife picked up two packs of 2015 Topps Stadium Club at Target for me. I've read about this stuff quite a bit on blogs, but I hadn't seen any of it in real life.
The cards are nice and thick, and they feel like the premium cards issued in the 90s. As someone else mentioned, they even smell like premium 90s cards. The first card out of the first pack was Daniel Norris, a guy who I almost began collecting. I bought a few of his cards and then realized that I don't have enough money to add another player to my player collections list. So I will take his cards when I can get them, but I can't be scouring eBay all the time. The photography is quite nice, and the design does a pretty good job of staying out of the way of the pictures. The first pack also contained a Gold Foil parallel, this one featuring Monte Irvin.
One thing I don't remember seeing is a scan of the card backs. Maybe someone posted one, but I didn't remember seeing one so I scanned the back of the cards, too. The backs feature a little bit of demographic information, a head shot photo, a snippet of biographical info, 2014 stats for current players, and a career stat line for everyone.
My packs didn't contain any of the really cool or oddball photos that get featured in most of the set review posts. About the closest I got to something non-standard is that Jay Bruce high five on the dugout stairs photo. It was kind of a disappointing pair of packs, to be honest.
The Lorenzo Cain horizontal shot is decent, but not extremely memorable like the Bip Roberts sombrero card. I would like to get the whole 2015 Stadium Club set, but I probably won't be able to build it through pack busting. Even with perfect collation it would take 3 Hobby boxes to build a set, and that just isn't in the cards for me this year. I am hoping that set prices on eBay come down enough that I am able to score one for less than the price of a box of cards. My pack busting and single purchasing have slowed down quite a bit in recent months.
My wife and I have been trying to get ourselves into a better position financially and that has meant doing things like closing credit accounts and tightening the budget quite a bit. I still haven't been able to pick up a base set of Archives and now I have Stadium Club on my want list, with Allen & Ginter's and Topps Update still on the way this year. I may be able to get those all as complete sets, but I won't be able to bust much wax like I have in previous years.
From reading other blogs I know that many collectors face the same sort of decisions from time to time as their collections move up and down on their life priority lists. With fewer new cards coming in, I will probably be reaching more into stuff that's already in my collection for blog material. That should be okay, as there is plenty of stuff that I didn't get around to scanning or posting as it came in.
I got into the bad habit of wanting to build every set that I busted a box of. At the beginning of the year I told myself I was going to stop and so far I've been pretty good. Like you I will scour eBay for the sets I'm interested in. Not the most fun way to do things, but in the long run it pays of. You have to think each time you do buy a set you are probably saving your self over $100.
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