April 2018 Loot Locker

I ordered another Loot Locker in April, again going for the Triple Play Baseball locker, which costs a little more than the All-Star Baseball locker and less than the Grand Slam Walk Off Baseball locker. The All-Star and Triple Play lockers have different amounts of the same products, while the Grand Slam has higher-end stuff. There are also basketball, football, and hockey versions.

As usual, the cards ship in a 400-count card box with Loot Locker branding stickers attached.

Here is what I got in my box of stuff. There were also a few pieces of candy, but I ate them before I took this picture. Every Loot Locker contains a package of Ultra Pro supplies, usually around 10 top loaders and some penny sleeves. One in five lockers contains a bonus hit of some kind, and mine was one of the lucky ones this month. It's a pretty decent hit, too, a 2015 Bowman Chrome Purple Refractor autograph of Wilmer Difo. He's been a fairly regular player for the Nationals this year, backing up second, third, shortstop, and center field. He even had a Topps Now card a couple of days ago, with a walk-off single to claim a victory over the Phillies. The card is numbered out of # / 250, and looks to be a $10-15 card on eBay. Pretty good stuff!

The packs for the month are two packs of 2018 Panini Diamond Kings, two packs of 2011 Bowman Platinum, and one pack of 2018 Topps Gypsy Queen. As usual, I like to break down the cost of the packs to see what kind of value I'm getting for my money. I couldn't find a lot of 2011 Bowman Platinum for sale, but I did find enough information to suit my needs. To come up with my numbers, I price hobby boxes on online card shops, divide by the number of packs in a box, and multiply by the number of packs in the locker. It may not reflect exactly Loot Locker's costs, but it kind of reflects what I'd be spending if I made the unlikely journey to my local card shop. I round the numbers, so some of the final math is off by a bit. Here are the numbers I came up with:

2011 Bowman Platinum: $113.33/box / 20 packs = $5.67/pack x 2 packs = $11.33

2018 Panini Diamond Kings: $75.95/box / 12 packs = $6.33/pack x 2 packs = $12.66

2018 Topps Gypsy Queen: $174.95/box / 24 packs = $7.29/pack x 1 pack = $7.29

$11.33 + $12.66 + $7.29 = $31.28

That's a pretty good value for $30 + $5 shipping, especially with the card supplies and the bonus hit. The last two lockers I priced out came in at $26.32 and $28.64, so this one was significantly higher.

Here are a couple of the key base cards from the 2011 Bowman Platinum packs. Giancarlo (Mike) Stanton is heating up in New York (bad news for my Astros), and Miguel Cabrera is breaking down but probably has the numbers and accolades to get into the Hall of Fame.

I did pull some doubles from my Platinum packs, in the form of Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins. First world problems, right?

One of the Bowman Platinum packs also contained a hit, this bat relic autograph card of Juan Miranda. It is numbered # 0704 / 1166, and features a guy who played in parts of four seasons with the Yankees and Diamondbacks. His last season in MLB was 2011.

I pulled another hit out of Diamond Kings, an Original Materials dual relic of Miguel Andujar. Justin Verlander represented the Astros in my packs, and I also got a Sepia variation of Aaron Judge, last year's Shohei Ohtani. Today was Tony Gwynn's birthday. He would have been 58, but he passed away in 2014. He blamed a chewing tobacco habit for the cancer that eventually took his life, and it looks like he may have a cheek full of chew in that photo.

The Gypsy Queen pack contained another Astro, Dallas Keuchel, and a Missing Nameplate parallel of Mike Trout. The Missing Nameplate cards are some of the more common parallels out there, but Mike Trout is still a big name to pull any parallel of.

This was a pretty solid Loot Locker for me. The pack mix was a good value, and I did pretty well as far as pulling some good stuff from my packs. The packs for May's Loot Lockers are all 2018 releases, with Diamond Kings, Donruss, and Bowman making appearances. I've just ordered mine for the month, as that's a pretty good mix of products. I'd like to see more Topps stuff because I like logos, but I doubt we'll see too much more until stuff like Series 2 and Allen & Ginter drop.

March Loot Locker

I ordered another Loot Locker in March. Just like in February, I ordered the Triple Play Locker, with a little extra stuff compared to the basic All-Star Locker. In addition to baseball lockers, they offer basketball, football, and hockey lockers. The draw with Loot Locker over a repack box is that all of the packs in Loot Lockers are from Hobby boxes. For people who don't have a local card shop, or people whose local card shop isn't all it could be, this is a decent alternative to a monthly card store trip to pick up a handful of packs and supplies.

The cards ship in a 400-count box, so even the packaging is useful to a card collector.

You get a couple pieces of candy, as well as some top loaders and penny sleeves.

This month's packs included 2 each of 2017 Panini Optic, 2018 Panini Donruss, and 2018 Topps Gypsy Queen. According to my calculations, my February Locker included $28.64 in packs. My method is just to take the box prices from a major card retailer's site, divide them by the number of packs in a box, and multiply by the number of packs in the Locker. Let's see what I counted up for this month's packs:

2017 Panini Optic: $89.95 / 20 = $4.50 x 2 = $9.00

2018 Panini Donruss: $87.95 / 24 = $3.66 x 2 = $7.32

2018 Topps Gypsy Queen: $119.95 / 24 = $5.00 x 2 = $10.00

$9.00 + $7.32 + $10.00 = $26.32

That really feels like it's a pack shy of what I'd expect from this box. The value on last month's box felt about right. This one has $2.32 less in calculated value, and it really felt like there was less there than last month's box did.

Another pack of Donruss would have been very welcome here, but an additional $3.66 might push this too high. Their model has been to include three products in each Locker, but I calculated about $1.50 for a Hobby pack of 2018 Topps Series 1 last month. That could close the gap without going over. Maybe last month just gave me an inflated sense of what I could expect to get in a Loot Locker.

I obviously don't know what Loot Locker's costs are on these things, so I can't really say what a true reasonable value band is for the included packs. They have to include the cost of the cards, supplies, shipping, candy, packing peanuts, ink and paper for shipping labels, payment processing fees, website hosting, labor, the cost of prize packs for the randomly-inserted extra packs, taxes, and maybe a little profit.

Not much came out of Gypsy Queen. I guess the J.P. Crawford Fortune Teller insert was the biggest hit. I also got a Lance McCullers Jr. base card for my only Astro of the entire break.

I got a couple of nickname variations, a Diamond King of Bryce Harper, and a shiny Stat Line parallel of Buster Posey numbered # 102 / 228.

The Optic packs didn't yield a whole lot of interest for me. The highlights were probably a Prizm Diamond Kings card of Dexter Fowler and a Prizm card of Ryne Sandberg.

That does it for this Loot Locker. It was kind of a disappointing month. It felt a little light on packs, and the packs I got didn't yield much of interest to me. The lack of exciting pulls probably accentuated the feeling of disappointment. I'll probably keep ordering Loot Lockers, but I may try dropping down to the All-Star Locker at some point. I like what Loot Locker does, and I think they provide a good service to collectors without card shops to visit. I feel like it's good to support them where I can.