Half a Blaster Case of 2018 Donruss Racing

I recently made a decent-sized purchase from Blowout Cards. Part of the buy was a couple cases of Panini racing card blaster boxes. The first case was 2018 Donruss Racing. Not a super exciting product, but at $5 per blaster I thought it would be pretty fun. I'll show the hits from half the case at a time, just to keep from having the post be too long for me to deal with.

Those are the base cards from the entire case. I got 3 full base sets out of it, and 6 or 7 copies of many base cards. I actually sat down and sorted all of it this weekend, which was quite a project.

You're going to get plenty of parallels in Donruss, mostly identified by a slight color variation in the foil. This Austin Dillon holofoil Press Proof was the lowest-numbered card of the break, at /49. It's a lot shinier in the picture than in real life, but I'll take it.

This Jamie McMurray car card was the only /199 card in this half of the case. I averaged just over one numbered card per blaster, which is decent at the price point I paid. I bought this on sale at $100/case, and it's currently listed on Blowout at $400/case. I wouldn't recommend buying it at $400/case.

Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano make up the /299 parallels from these 10 blaster boxes. The Hamlin card shows the Race Kings design from the base set, which I think is pretty good. The Joey Logano card is a variation. The photo/nickname variations in the set aren't short-printed, appearing just about as often as their base counterparts. I sorted them as part of the base set rather than putting them in the back of the box with the parallels and inserts.

I pulled five /499 Gold parallels, with the Chase Elliott car card probably being the best of the bunch. Corey LaJoie and Carl Edwards are part of the Retro 1985 portion of the checklist, which all told is 175 cards deep.

Most of your insert parallels are going to be the Cracked Ice /999 variety. I don't really care about the numbering that much, but I think the Cracked Ice foil treatment is pretty sharp-looking. It's not really evident in this photo, but the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Studio card is particularly striking with its dark blue border and the foil.

Big hits out of this product are rare in retail. This is one to break for fun rather than for money. I suppose that should be true of all products, but some lottery tickets have bigger prizes than others. This is the low end of the trading card lottery pool, where the $1 scratchers are. The Brendan Gaughan card is a parallel of the 1985 relic design, numbered /99. I believe it's the only numbered relic or auto from the whole break.

This AJ Allmendinger Racing Relics sheet metal card was the lone representative from Racing Relics to come from the entire case.

The majority of hits from Donruss Racing come in the form of tire swatches in the Rubber Relics set. I got some good names in this batch, like Kurt Busch and Martin Truex Jr.

The lone signature from this half-case was Spencer Davis.

That does it for half a case (10 blaster boxes) of 2018 Donruss Racing. I got a handful of relics and inserts that fit into my various collections, and a whole ton of base cards that I can use as fortifications when the world ends. At $100/case you could do worse than this. At $400/case you should probably look at something else.