2013 Press Pass Ignite Hot Threads Josh Wise

I meant to post this sooner, but I didn't get around to making a NASCAR post on Sunday after the AAA 400 Drive for Autism at Dover International Speedway. It was a pretty significant race for one of the drivers I collect, as Danica Patrick finished in 13th place for her best finish of the season so far and her 4th Top 20 finish this year. People are saying that she benefited from the wreck that involved 18 cars from the field, but the same could be said of anyone else who finished among the leaders in the race. Dale Earnhardt Jr., another driver I follow, wrecked out of the race and finished the race in 32nd place.

Lastly, Josh Wise finished in 36th place, taking his usual spot among the racers at the back of the field. It would be interesting to see what he might do with better equipment, but there aren't usually a lot of open spots in the big-name cars. I picked up a handful of Josh Wise cards a few months ago, and this 2013 Press Pass Ignite Hot Threads relic is one of them. It's a nice enough card. I opened a fair amount of 2013 Ignite and it was also among the first products I opened when I returned to collecting in 2013, so I've got a bit of a soft spot for these cards.

A Josh Wise Autograph Pickup

Most of my NASCAR content lately has been Danica Patrick-centric, but there are a couple of other drivers whose cards I collect. One of those drivers is Josh Wise, who currently drives the #30 car for The Motorsports Group.

2016 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, California18-20 March, 2016, Fontana, California USAJosh Wise and Michael Annett© 2016, Nigel KinradeNKP
Posted by TMG - The Motorsports Group on Thursday, March 24, 2016

Wise seems to be a pretty good driver, but thus far has only been able to get into some under-equipped rides and generally spends most races either not finishing or running in the bottom 5-10 cars. It's got to be tough to be out there at the end of the pack week after week, but I guess at least he's still getting paid to be a race car driver and not out looking for a 9 to 5 job somewhere.

I did a search for his cards a couple of weeks ago and found quite a few deals on some things, especially once I factored in combined shipping with people selling multiple Wise items. One of the highlights from my searching was this autograph card from 2013 Press Pass Ignite. The autographs from this set are designed to scan as poorly as possible, turning the card background into a murky dark mess while highlighting the signed sticker and whatever bits of stuff are on the scanner glass. This card is actually quite attractive in-hand, as the dark mess in the center is a silver sunburst pattern surrounded by a nice blue color. The card is numbered # 10 / 25, which probably makes it some kind of parallel. Ever since Press Pass went under it is hard to look up their checklists for print runs and parallels.

The back of the card features the usual congratulatory text and a cropped version of the photo that was on the front. Pretty basic stuff. Just as I hope Danica Patrick can move into consistent top 15-20 finishes, I hope that Josh Wise can progress with his new team and move up into the 20's with his car. Getting faster requires money, though, and you need sponsorships to make money. It'll be a tough road for him, but hopefully he can grind it out and stay in a car.

Josh Wise 2013 Press Pass Signings and Ignite Hot Threads

Here are a couple of Josh Wise items I've picked up. I got the 2013 Press Pass Ignite Hot Threads firesuit relic from eBay sometime during the last couple of months. I think multi-colored swatches are more common in NASCAR products than they are in the various stick-and-ball sports, but I couldn't pass on this three-color piece. I am not really sure where I got the autographed card, but I found it while sorting a bunch of stuff and figured I might as well scan it and put it up here on the blog. It's from some 2013 Press Pass product, and it is numbered # 15 / 25. You can tell by the relatively blank front of his suit that sponsors are hard to come by when you're a one-car operation without a superstar driver.

There isn't a race this weekend, so I can't fill space by talking about where my favorite drivers qualified and finished this week. I suppose I will just leave it at that.

MLB.tv offered a couple days' worth of free games to get people to sign up prior to the start of the baseball season. That was pretty nice of them. I still haven't decided if I will take them up on it or if I will just hold out for the price to drop a bit. It was fun to watch a couple of Astros - Royals preseason games, even if the Astros did lose both of the games I watched. I am trying to get excited about fantasy baseball this year, but I haven't been able to muster much excitement at all. I am in a few leagues still, but I usually prepare a lot more for my drafts and then go through my rosters all the time looking for updates and guys who are coming out of Spring Training with good numbers, but I have not done any of that. I even have a spreadsheet that projects what my league's numbers will look like that the end of the season so I can see what pace I'm on compared to everyone else, but I haven't even loaded the teams into it yet.

Black Friday Blowout Part 2: More 2014 Press Pass Ignite

This is the second box of 2014 Press Pass Ignite that I got in the Blowout Cards Black Friday Doorbusters sale. It would be hard to live up to the first box in the break, which produced 3 relic cards, two numbered parallels, a 1/2-case special card, and a low-numbered autograph from one of NASCAR's bigger names. This box didn't quite match the fireworks, but I still pulled some good cards, including a very nice PC hit.

This is what the normal base cards look like. They are quite colorful, and feature the drivers in their best 'standing there' poses. I included Josh Wise in the scan because I became a fan of his this season after the big push from internet users to sponsor his Dogecoin car, which I was able to acquire in die-cast form a little while ago. Danica Patrick and Tony Stewart are mainstays on my top driver list, and Travis Pastrana is a crossover star from the world of the X Games, motocross, and rally cars who ran some colorful cars in the Nationwide series before leaving at the end of the 2013 season. He's got a couple of die-cast out there that I'd like to pick up some day.

I again got two each of the Turning Point and Convoy inserts, For Turning Point I got Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick, who won this year's Sprint Cup Championship. For Convoy inserts I got another of my favorite racers in Dale Earnhardt Jr. and also Kasey Kahne, a driver I really have no opinion on whatsoever. I will be sad to see the National Guard sponsorship of Dale Jr.'s car lapse, but I can see how taxpayers might not want their money funding a racing team.

I got the usual two Profile inserts, with this box yielding Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin. I used to like the FedEx car, but I don't anymore. Neither of these cards does a whole lot for me, but once I find the Ignite cards from previous purchases I can pool them and see how close I am to completing these insert sets. I got one Hall of Fame insert, featuring a guy named Buck Baker. I don't know a single thing about him.

Another insert in this box was a part of the Davey Allison tribute set, honoring the 20th Anniversary of his death in a helicopter accident. It was issued across 5 different Press Pass products in 2013, with two cards from the set found in each release.

Since this was a special Hobby box, it contained a Power Pack, which contained a Kyle Busch Power Picks card numbered # 29 / 99, and a Jeff Gordon Hot Threads relic card similar to the one that I got in the Power Pack from the last box, although this one has a plain black swatch as opposed to the two-color red/black relic on the other card.

My autograph for this box was a Scott Speed Ignite Ink Black card numbered # 62 / 99. It's not quite as exciting as the Kyle Busch autograph I pulled from the first box of this break. Speed was a transfer from Formula One racing, and didn't find a whole lot of success in the world of NASCAR. His last race was in 2013, and I don't know if he'll be coming back for another try.

My numbered parallel was a Clint Bowyer Yellow Color Proof, which is Hobby-Only and numbered # 5 / 5. Bowyer has had a pretty good career, with a whole pile of Top 10 finishes, a few wins, and a 2nd-place finish in the 2012 Sprint Cup Championship standings.

For me the big his of the box was the relic card, a Hot Threads Red parallel of Dale Earnhardt Jr., numbered # 08 / 10. It's a nice low-numbered card of one of my favorite drivers and it features a three-color relic swatch. It's pretty good stuff. This box probably still rates below the other one in terms of quality, but I only paid $20 each for them, and I think I definitely got my money's worth out of them.

Black Friday Blowout: 2013 Press Pass Ignite

I took a look at the Black Friday Doorbuster deals at Blowout Cards and saw a couple of things I was interested in. Since I was up all night doing homework, I was at my computer when they started posting the deals in the morning. I was hoping to snag some 2014 Bowman Chrome Baseball and there were a couple of NASCAR deals, including 20 2014 Press Pass Racing blasters for $40 and boxes of 2013 Press Pass Ignite for $15.

Unfortunately, the deals weren't all rolled out at once, so any deal you got also came with a separate shipping cost. So my plan for preloading my cart and hitting refresh over and over at the start time was foiled. When the Bowman Chrome deal came around it sold out in seconds and once you accounted for shipping it wasn't that great a discount. They reloaded it a few times during the day and each time it sold out extremely fast.

When most of the case deals were posted, like the 20 Blasters for $40 deal, there were usually just 5 put up and they went into the negative numbers almost immediately. Any deals that were posted showed the number in stock at that price, and on the really frenzied sales the number would go to -15 or more within seconds of the deal posting. There were a lot of complaints on the forum, but that's how Doorbusters go.

With Bowman Chrome not falling beneath my threshold when accounting for shipping and the big 20 blaster deal going so fast, I preloaded a couple boxes of 2013 Press Pass Ignite in my cart and waited. It was mid-afternoon before that deal got posted, and when I refreshed my cart and saw the price drop I checked out immediately. Then I went to look at the product page and saw that the quantity left was 18, so I had probably been the first to check out. I also noticed that there was a 1 Box Per Household limit on the deal. I had ordered 2 boxes and I knew that the Doorbuster rules were that any orders exceeding those limits would be cancelled. So I sent them a note through the website apologizing for my oversight and saying that I would be happy to just have the one box and a refund for the second box.

They responded a while later saying that although I had broken the rules for the product, they still had processed my order and shipped both boxes. So I can't complain about that. Blowout Cards could have cancelled my entire order, but they took care of me and they'll be seeing more of my business in the future. Their forums are a pretty good resource, too, especially if you want to research box breaks of a particular product.

Their shipping was also pretty quick. My order was sent out the same day, and arrived within a week. My Cyber Monday order from Dave & Adam's didn't even ship until Friday evening, and isn't scheduled to arrive until Wednesday. They are different companies, but quick processing is definitely a plus in my mind.

Here's what came out of the first box:

This is one of the subsets in the base set. The cards show the speed the drivers attained on their qualifying runs for the Daytona 500. The cards are pretty colorful and busy, which I kind of like in this case. The backgrounds have a matte finish while the pictures have a glossy sheen to them. I chose to show off the cards from a few of my favorite drivers; Danica Patrick, Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

There are a few insert sets, which fall about 2 each per box. The Turning Point set discusses key moments in a driver's career. Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are pretty good pulls for me. The Convoy insert set highlights each driver's team hauler. I like seeing the semis, even though I am still in a very frustrating battle with my insurance company and the insurance company of the truck driver who used his lug nuts to push my car out of my lane in October. I don't have much hope that I will see any insurance settlement without a lawyer, and I don't know if it's worth getting a lawyer for a couple thousand dollars. I've wasted a lot of time and energy being mad about it already, and I imagine I will waste more before it's all done.

The Profile insert set is a pretty generic set that basically has the same paragraph on the back of each card: [Driver] races a smooth line, driving as fast as [s/he] can and passing cars until [s/he] is at the front of the pack. [Driver] knows what it takes to earn points and win. There are variations on the theme, but that's the basic gist of it. The Hall of Fame insert is an ongoing series that is inserted across multiple products and years, so it doesn't usually match up with the rest of the cards in the packs.

Because these were special hobby boxes, they each contained a Power Pack, which contains special cards. I guess it would be similar to the Panini Black Friday Packs or the various special Topps packs that get released at hobby shops, like the Spring Fever and Father's Day promotions. Apparently each Power Pack from Ignite contains one Power Picks base card and a Hot Threads firesuit card. This box's Power Pack contained a Joey Logano Power Picks card numbered # 15 / 99 and a Jeff Gordon Hot Threads Firesuit card with a nice red stripe on it. It looks like maybe it's part of the piping on his shoulder. The Jeff Gordon DuPont firesuit cards were apparently exclusive to the Power Packs.

Each box appears to contain one numbered parallel, and promises one relic and one autograph. My numbered parallel was a Kurt Busch Black Color Proof parallel numbered # 27 / 50. These ones were Hobby only. I was lucky and got two relic cards in this box. First up is a Paul Menard Blue Holo parallel (the base level, Silver, is unnumbered) numbered # 24 / 99. It's a plain black swatch. The other card is a pretty good hit, being a Jeff Gordon Hot Threads Patch Edition. The Hot Threads Patches only come in one level (Red) and are advertised as being numbered out of # / 25 or lower. This Gordon is numbered # 10 / 20. So far this has been a pretty good box, especially if you like Jeff Gordon.

I got a bonus insert in the box. This was a special Danica Patrick # 0 card that was inserted one in every 200 packs, or once in every 10 boxes. It was apparently a pretty tough pull. I think I may have purchased one when this set was pretty new. It only pulls a dollar or two at auction these days, but I probably paid some multiple of that for my first copy.

My autograph from this box was pretty good, a Kyle Busch Red parallel numbered # 2 / 5. It looks a lot better in-hand than it does in the scan, which really accentuates the junk on my scanner and the sticker, which is relatively transparent when looking at the card in person.

After shipping these boxes cost me just under $20 each, and this box was certainly packed, with 3 relics, two numbered parallels, a rare special insert, and a nice low-numbered autograph of a top driver. The other box wasn't quite this good, but it was still definitely worth the $20 I paid for it. Once again, I enjoyed watching all of the Doorbuster deals throughout the day and I was pleasantly surprised that Blowout processed my order and sent me both boxes.