What's in the Box 4: August 2016 Baseball Loot Locker

I've been watching The Loot Locker on Facebook and Twitter for a while, and in August I finally went ahead and ordered one. For $20 + $5 shipping, you get 3-6 Hobby packs of cards and some hobby supplies shipped to you in a 400-count card storage box. They offer Loot Lockers for Baseball, Football, Hockey, and Basketball. One in every 25 Loot Lockers comes with a bonus of $10+ in extra packs, and 1 in every 250 Loot Lockers contains some sort of high-end bonus product. 

Loot Locker has some kind of partnership with Ultra-Pro, so they feature their logo on the box label. Other than the label, it's a pretty standard 400-count card box.

Here is what I received in my Locker. The Ultra-Pro baggie contains some top loaders, some team bags, and some card sleeves. I got 2 packs of 2016 Allen & Ginter, 2 packs of 2016 Topps Chrome, and 1 pack of 2016 Panini Diamond Kings. I guess my Loot Locker was one of the randomly-seeded bonus lockers, as I also got a box of 2016 Onyx Authenticated Platinum Elite, which is admittedly a product and company I wasn't familiar with.

Not much came out of the Allen & Ginter packs. These are the most interesting cards that came out of them. Most of the Allen & Ginter cards in the two packs had that ding in the upper right corner that you can see on the Rollie Fingers card. It's impossible to know if that came from the manufacturer or the shipping process.

The Topps Chrome was a Nick Markakis hot lot, as I pulled the base and the Prism Refractor versions of his card. Outside of that, Max Scherzer was the most interesting base card.

Diamond Kings featured a couple of familiar faces in Luis Severino and George Springer. 

It also contained this Alex Bregman Diamond Kings Materials Framed dual relic card, numbered # 71 / 99. It's a pretty cool card and features a player on my favorite team, the Houston Astros Baseball Club. That's about it for the regular stuff you can expect from a Loot Locker.

I was kind of interested to see what this Onyx Authenticated Platinum Elite stuff was all about. I have to admit that I am pretty skeptical about 'off-brand' cardboard. This isn't something I would go out and purchase on my own. The front of the box promised four cards total, with two autographs. The base cards (Alex Reyes, Yeudy Garcia) look pretty much like the autograph cards, but without colored foil. Both of my autographs were the basic Blue Foil variety, which supposedly are limited to a print run of 200. There are other colors of parallel with different print runs.

My autographs were Alec Mills and Anderson Espinoza. I had to look them up. Both are promising players, I guess. Prospecting isn't really something I do, so these aren't names I am familiar with. This was a nice bonus, but I'm not really in the right demographic for this product. None of the autographs or base cards feature much information about the player, just an advertisement for the various colored parallels you can pull.

Obviously the cards you wind up pulling have a big impact on how much you like a Loot Locker or similar product. After accounting for my state's tax and a couple dollars in hobby supplies, I wound up spending about $4.25 per pack for the Allen & Ginter, Chrome, and Diamond Kings. I guess that's all right for Hobby packs. I am not accounting for the Onyx box in those numbers, but the chance at getting something extra in your Loot Locker probably plays into the decision to buy it.

I would probably buy another Loot Locker, but it's not an every-month purchase for me yet. My collecting habits these days don't leave a lot of room for opening random wax. At the moment I find better value for myself chasing singles and collated sets over opening packs and hoping for big hits. Every month Loot Locker posts a list of the packs that will ship out that month, so you can pick and choose based on the products you like. They also let customers vote on what packs might appear, so you can campaign for a product you want to try out.