Pack of the Day 150: Three Topps Holiday Wal-Mart Mega Boxes

I've seen quite a few posts about the 2016 Topps Wal-Mart Holiday Mega Boxes on the blogosphere, and I thought I would add the results of my break to the mix. I liked the idea of these cards, with 2016 Topps Baseball's 'fog' effect replaced by snowflakes, but I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to buy into. I saw some posts about the product on the Blowout Cards forum, including one that said the poster completed the 200-card base set easily from three boxes. That and the promised hit in each box prompted me to pick up three boxes from my local Wal-Mart.

The box front lets you know that this thing contains 10 packs of cards, including one relic, autograph, or autograph relic card.

The back of the box shows all of the cool stuff that might be found in the box, as well as pack odds and NPN information. This product has a pretty basic structure. You get one parallel to the base set (about 5 per box) and a mix of hits and parallels to the hits, with the vast majority of them being your basic relic cards.

The pack design mimics the branding on the box.

The cards mostly feature the same photos as the flagship Topps set. Some players got different photos. I anticipated getting a full set of base from my three boxes, but instead I got mostly triples and doubles across the boxes and wound up falling very, very short of completing a base set.

Here are some of the horizontal cards, as well as a card back. I didn't go through and check or anything, so I am assuming the card backs are mostly identical to their flagship counterparts outside of the card number. I believe the prefix on the card number is an abbreviation for Holiday Mega Box Wal-Mart.

I got the expected 15 Metallic Snowflake parallels. As others have mentioned, this parallel was created by affixing glitter to the card in the snowflake areas. It doesn't scan very spectacularly, and it isn't really all that impressive in-hand. I got some decent names among my parallels, with the best two probably being Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa.

Here are some more of the Snowflake parallels. I think the Granderson probably has the best photo out of this bunch.

I don't know what to think of Puig anymore. I was lucky enough to pull and sell a couple of nice photo variations featuring him back when he was a hot ticket, but his star faded pretty fast. I think he's still probably a serviceable player that you would want on your team, but I don't think he'll be a superstar. I'll erase this paragraph in a few years when he hits 40 home runs and leads the Yankees to a World Series alongside Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and a cybernetic replica of Brian McCann.

Here are the relics I pulled from my boxes. All feature plain white swatches of fabric. There are some pretty decent names among my pulls, but no one I really collect. The snowflake theme makes them kind of fun looking, so I guess there is that.

Here are the backs of the relic cards, for completeness' sake. Pretty standard stuff, with the usual congratulatory message and the small print disclaiming any real association between the fabric swatch and the pictured player.

That does it for this break. I was pretty disappointed with the collation, but I think that tends to happen in retail fairly often. The cards go in big runs without a lot of variation from box to box, and if you catch a bad batch of boxes you wind up with a lot of duplication. I found a base set really cheap on eBay a few days ago, so I guess now I have plenty of cards to send out in trade packages.