Cyber Week Breaks: Day 2

So it's Day 2 of breaking stuff from my Cyber Week purchases. Today's breaks include a box of 2016 Panini National Treasures Racing, another 8 packs of 2017 Topps UFC Chrome, and a box of 2017 Topps UFC Fire that came in the mail yesterday. The box of UFC Fire also had an unexpected bonus card packed with it, so I'll show that as well.

National Treasures is a pretty high-end brand, so there's a lot of fancy packaging surrounding 7 fancy cards. The wooden chest has a cardboard liner around it.

Once you remove the plastic and the cardboard liner, you get to the sealed case. It's kind of like a cigar box, I suppose.

Inside the cigar box, there's some fancy foam padding, some branding in the lid, and the cardboard box that makes up the pack.

The ends of the pack also have seals on them. Once you cut into those, the lid lifts up to reveal the stack of cards. We're expecting a total of 7 cards: 1 base card or parallel, 2 memorabilia cards, 3 autograph or autograph/memorabilia cards, and 1 booklet card.

The top card in the box is a Century Silver parallel of Rusty Wallace. This card comes from the Legends subset and is numbered # 18 / 20. Base cards are numbered # / 25, and the Century Silver parallel is the most common parallel.

 The second card in the stack is a Dual Materials card of Ryan Newman and Paul Menard. This is the Gold parallel, and this copy is numbered # 02 / 10. Newman's relic looks like a piece of glove, while Menard's swatch is a bit of tire. I especially like the glove swatch.

The next card in the stack is a # 1 / 1 Yellow Printing Plate of Austin Dillon's Timelines insert card. It's got a nice thick patch of what appears to be his last name, maybe taken from the belt of his firesuit. It's kind of hard to see what the card should look like on this Yellow parallel, so I pulled an image of the base card from eBay for comparison:

It's still pretty cool to pull a # 1 / 1  from a high-end box, though. And Dillon seems to be a pretty popular driver. I guess that completes the expected base/parallel card and the 2 relic cards. Next up should be 3 autographs of some kind and a booklet.

The first autograph is a Cahmpionship Signatures card of drag racing legend John Force. This is the Silver parallel of the card, numbered # 40 / 45. I was pretty happy to pull this card, even though it's one of the more common cards in the box. I follow most of the Force racing family on social media, and you may recall that earlier this year I picked up a booklet card featuring the signatures of two of Force's daughters, Courtney and Brittany. It's nice to add another signature from the Force family to my collection.

The next card is a Rookie Signature Materials card of Brian Scott. This is the base version of the card, and it is numbered # 08 / 25. The 2016 season was his first full season, and his last full season. He announced his retirement after the year was up, with a final placing of 31st in the standings. It looks like he did a partial season in the Xfinity series in 2017.

Ryan Newman hot box! This is the Silver parallel of Newman's Jumbo Firesuit Signatures card. It's numbered # 13 / 15. I wish the fabric piece had a little more color to it, but it's still a pretty cool card. I like that this card shows his car on it, as this is the first time we've actually seen a race car in this box. That does it for the promised autographs, so the final thing remaining is a booklet card.

And here it is. This is a Jumbo Sheet Metal Signature booklet of Joey Logano. This card also shows his race car on it, and carries a big piece of sheet metal in the right side of the booklet. The left side has Logano's signature on it.

This is the base version of the booklet, and it is numbered # 15 / 50. I'm not a huge Logano fan, but I'm not yet jaded to the point where I'll turn up my nose at a booklet card with a signature and a big piece of memorabilia in it.

That was a pretty fun box to break. I wouldn't say I got my money back out of it, but I pulled some nice cards and I enjoyed the experience of opening it and revealing the cards one by one like a group breaker. I don't have the stomach to open high-end boxes all the time, but this one was fun.

There wasn't a lot of excitement in the next 8 packs of Topps UFC Chrome, so I scanned some of the inserts. I pulled 2 Top of the Class inserts, a Museum Collection card, 2 Tier One cards, and a Fire insert.

Here is what the card backs on the inserts look like. Each of these inserts is a replication of another Topps UFC product, with the Chrome treatment added.

Like the Blue Wave Refractors which are numbered # / 75, the X-Fractors fall one per box, but these do not have serial numbers.

This is an Orange Refractor of Luke Rockhold. These fall 1:3 boxes, and this one is numbered # 14 / 25. I am 2/3 of the way through the box and still haven't hit either of the promised autographs, so I should be showing off two UFC Chrome autographs tomorrow when I open another 8 packs.

I also had a box of UFC Fire come in from Topps. They had these on sale for 50% off over the weekend, so I grabbed one of them along with a pack of the Topps Mini Baseball cards they had available. I am kind of wishing I'd bought more packs of Mini Baseball, but they are off the market now. I wonder if Topps will sell the remainder of the stock off to people like Blowout and Dave & Adam's?

The cards of note from this box were a couple of Red parallels of Chuck Liddell and Frankie Edgar. They are numbered # / 142. The one Fired Up insert in the box shows Dominick Cruz, and the promised autograph is a base autograph of Eddie Alvarez, numbered # 065 / 199. This was an okay box, but it didn't blow me away. I don't think I had an Eddie Alvarez autograph yet, so that was cool. I also like that Topps numbered all of the parallels in this set. I think that adds some perceived value over the High Impact cards, where only some of the parallels are numbered.

The bonus card was this '17 Cyber Weekend card of Carlos Correa. I saw that Topps was offering these on orders, but I didn't know if my order qualified for the bonus. Apparently it did, and I am happy to add another Astro card to my collection.

Have I mentioned lately that the Astros won the World Series this year? I fear I'm becoming as obnoxious as a 2016 Cubs fan. I'll be back with more breaks tomorrow, unless I skip out for some reason.