Basketball 10-Pack

I made a trip to Target the other day to pick up some padded mailers for a couple of packages I've been meaning to send out. Since I was already there, I had to check out the card aisle to see what there was to see. The shelves were pretty well cleared out of any baseball that interested me, so I had a look at the other options available.

I finally settled on a 10-pack basketball repack box, largely because of the Excalibur pack that was visible in the window. I figured the upside of a basketball repack was that they couldn't spring any Triple Play on me, but I forgot about Panini Complete, the low-budget set that Panini makes to appeal to set collectors. I got four packs of the 2016-17 version in this repack.

It's still a better product than Triple Play, though. It's got a large base set, which means that you get cards of many NBA players that don't appear in the standard 100-card stars and rookies checklists that dominate the landscape. There are a couple of insert and parallel sets to chase, including a Silver and Gold parallel system that brings to mind the old Collector's Choice formula. The best base card I pulled was probably that Kevin Durant card in the upper left. I got a No Back parallel of Meyers Leonard, a couple of inserts, and four Silver parallels. I guess the Vince Carter is my favorite of the Silver cards I pulled.

The 2016-17 Donruss packs held the hit of the break, with that Holo Laser Orange parallel of Frank Kaminsky. The card is numbered  # 11 / 25 and the shiny rays of foil look pretty neat. I'm not a Jazz fan, but I can appreciate how good Karl Malone and the Jazz were for such a long time. I'm still salty at them for beating the Rockets in 1997 and 1998.

The 2015-16 Donruss pack had an Anthony Davis insert and a Rudy Gobert base card. I know I just got done talking about how much I dislike the Jazz, but I like Gobert.

The most notable cards in the 2012-13 Panini NBA Hoops pack were coaches, with Gregg Popovich and a Glossy parallel of Scott Skiles. Vince Carter makes another appearance in the break, this time in a Mavericks uniform.

I am not a fan of Prizm, as it tends to be a wall of dull silver, but I got a couple of nice cards in the 2015-16 Panini Prizm pack, an All-Star card of current Rocket Chris Paul and a Point Men insert of Allen Iverson.

The 2015-16 Panini Excalibur pack wasn't all that exciting, but it had some good veteran cards, a Lakers rookie, and a Camo Crusade insert of Michael Carter-Williams. I especially like the picture of LaMarcus Aldridge in the camo Spurs uniform.

All told, this was a decent repack box. I could have done much worse for the money, and even the filler Panini Complete packs turned out okay.

Contested Shots 25: Cards on Cards NBA Fantasy League Prize

I received a package in the mail today from Cards on Cards. It was a prize for winning the fantasy basketball league he ran this year, as an incentive for people to keep playing next year. There were 10 teams this season, with the top six advancing to the playoffs. I spent much of the early part of the season at the bottom of the standings, but worked my way up to a #4 seed in time for the playoffs to start. Then I was able to defeat the #5, the #1, and the #2 seeds in order to win the inaugural Championship. The last matchup against Bob Walk the Plank came down to the last games on the last day of the season, and I barely got away with a 5-4 victory.

The prize had a note on it, and you can see that some of the ink on the prize transferred over onto the tape. It looks like it's something from Panini!

It's a blaster of 2016-17 Panini Donruss Basketball, with Anthony Davis pictured all over, 110 cards inside, and probably an autograph or relic card inside. I didn't post the side of the box with pack odds, because Panini doesn't do pack odds. I thought I'd look through the cards and scan players who appeared on my fantasy basketball team's roster during the year. Of the 39 different players who spent at least one game on my starting roster, I pulled 12 players from this blaster. How did they do for Manute's Glutes, my fictional basketball team?

Andre Drummond was my team leader in games played, with 76 appearances. For me he averaged 13.7 points, 13.7 rebounds, 1.6 steals, and 1.1 blocks per game. Here he appears on a Crashers insert, which appropriately highlights his impact in the rebounding column.

LeBron James was my 2nd-best player (behind Damian Lillard, who didn't appear in this blaster) for the season, playing in 74 games and averaging 1.7 threes, 26.4 points, 8.7 rebounds, 1.2 steals, and 0.6 blocks for me.

Brook Lopez also played in 74 games for me, with an average of 1.8 three-pointers, 20.6 points, 5.4 rebounds, 0.5 steals, and 1.7 blocks for the Glutes.

I had Aaron Gordon on my team for 71 games, and he contributed 1.0 threes, 13.1 points, 5.0 rebounds, 0.8 steals, and 0.5 blocks to my team. That rounds out the players from this blaster who played more than half a season for me.

Monta Ellis and Rajon Rondo both played 29 games for Manute's Glutes. Ellis gave me 0.6 threes, 9.5 points, 3.1 rebounds, 1.0 steal, and 0.4 blocks, while Rondo chipped in 0.6 three-pointers, 7.2 points, 6.6 rebounds, 1.3 steals, and 0.21 blocks.

Jahlil Okafor is the last 20+ game contributor from this box. He gave me 24 games, with averages of 11.1 points, 5.1 rebounds (fewer than Rajon Rondo!), 0.3 steals, and 1.0 blocks per game.

Andre Iguodala, Andrew Bogut, Tony Parker, Kyle Korver, and Bismack Biyombo all made just a handful of starts for the Glutes, either because they weren't working out for me, or because I just picked them up to get a few stats in a particular week.

The league was a 9-category league, including Field Goal Percentage, Free Throw Percentage, Three Pointers, Points, Rebounds, Steals, Blocks, Turnovers, and Assist/Turnover Ratio. When he set up the league, madding asked if there were any requests for categories. I proposed replacing Turnovers with Assist/Turnover Ratio, but we wound up replacing Assists instead. I think my request could have been worded better. I might suggest that change for next season, if the league plays again.

The blaster had three parallels in it, with one of them probably being the pull of the box. D'Angelo Russell and Jake Layman are Holo Orange Laser parallels. They look pretty cool in-hand. Serge Ibaka is a Holo Purple Laser parallel, numbered # 08 / 15. I tried to target Ibaka in our draft, but didn't get him. His shot-blocking ability used to be amazing, but now he just cracks the top-10 in blocks.

The box offered a quartet of various 'Kings' inserts. Court Kings feature players who are currently playing, with cover boy Anthony Davis and Paul George as my pulls. I like Anthony Davis, and I would probably start a player collection for him if I weren't already stretched way too thin. Hall Kings features Hall of Famers, and my pull from that set was 'Zo, who was a pretty big deal back when basketball was my main collecting focus. I also got a Rookie Kings card of Jakob Poeltl, who is a guy I've never heard of, probably because no one can pronounce his last name.

I got an All-Stars insert of Scottie Pippen, who is a guy I never really liked, even though he played for the Houston Rockets at one point. Sometimes it seems like I'm the only person who didn't like the Jordan-era Bulls (outside of Horace Grant). Probably I'm just jealous. At least my team won a couple of titles while Jordan was off playing baseball. I also got a Mike Conley card from The Elite Series. Fancy! One thing I like about Donruss is the photography. Too many basketball sets cut the player out and put them against a plain background. I like to see some game action on my cards, especially in basketball, where you can often see the crowd or the other players in action.

I pulled a couple of Rockets from the box. No James Harden, but I got Sam Dekker and Clint Capela, as well as a Rookie card of Gary Payton II, who never actually made the team before he was released.

My promised hit was a Rockets card, at least in name, as Gary Payton II makes another appearance. He played for the Rockets' D-League team for a while, but got released and signed with the Milwaukee Bucks. He appeared in 6 games for them this year, and may get more playing time next year as a back-of-the-bench player. It's still pretty cool to get a Rockets hit in a blaster, as the odds of pulling a hit with your favorite team's logo on it are pretty slim.

Thanks for running this league, madding, and thank you for this awesome prize! I had a lot of fun playing throughout the year, and I got pretty lucky just to make the playoffs, let alone win the whole thing.

A Clear Case of Black Friday Excess

My big Black Friday purchase was an 8-box case of 2015-16 Panini Clear Vision basketball cards. Blowout had them on sale at a pretty big discount, and I thought it might be worth the gamble. I experienced buyer's remorse pretty much as soon as I completed the purchase, but at that point I was pretty much stuck with it. The price seemed pretty good.

Here are a couple sides of a box. The boxes are made of clear plastic, the kind of packaging material that will slice your finger if you handle it wrong. Each box has 20 cards in it, and you are promised two rookie cards per box, two parallels, and one insert. Outside of that I don't think there were many other guarantees.

Here's what a pack looks like. Pretty standard shiny fare. Each box has five of these, with four cards each. In reality, a few of my packs had an extra card in them, so I wound up with three cards more than expected out of 8 boxes.

The cards are made of acetate and cardboard in layers. The player silhouette and that grey area in the center are a layer of cardboard that's been glued to the acetate background. Quality control was an issue with these cards, as most of the cards had gouges and scrapes on the plastic, and some had glue residue on them. Kind of disappointing, really.

Here are some more of the base cards. In all I got 93/141 (65.96%) of a base set, with 34 doubles, 11 triples, and 4 quadruples. I thought about posting about this break box by box, but I don't think that would have been very interesting.

There are a couple of subsets in the base set. Frank Kaminsky and Kristaps Porzingis are examples from the Rookie Card subset. They are distinguished by the RC logo and a different background. The other subset is called Rookie Revision and takes a look at what some star players' rookie cards might have looked like in this design. In the case of Rookie Revision, the cardboard section runs north-south instead of east-west like on the base cards.

These Blue parallels are the most common parallels. I got eight of them in this break. None of these first four guys are huge names. I saw Kenneth Faried play during the Jazz - Nuggets game I went to earlier this month. He struck me as kind of a cheap player. I saw at least one egregious flop from him. Maybe it was just a one-game sample and my assessment was off, but it seemed like he was pretty well-practiced in taking little cheap shots at guys, tripping people, and flopping when he could get away with it.

This group is better than the first group. The Blue parallels are all numbered # / 149. I guess my favorite card out of my Blue parallels is the Jason Kidd Rookie Revision.

I pulled four Red parallels from the base set. These are numbered out of # / 99, and that Grant Hill is easily my favorite of the bunch. There is plenty of star power here, with Russell Westbrook churning out triple-doubles seemingly at-will this season. I've never liked Pau Gasol.

I also got one Purple parallel, which is a Christmas card with the serial number # 12 / 25. Unfortunately it pictures DeMarcus Cousins, who has been in the news lately mostly for things like a profanity-laced tirade against a reporter and for being involved in a nightclub fight where he and Matt Barnes are accused of doing things like choking a woman and stomping on a guy who was knocked to the ground. Classy stuff. They are innocent until proven guilty, I guess, but this isn't the first time that these players have been involved in this kind of story.

I got two cards from the Standouts insert set, a base insert of LeBron James and a Red parallel of Kevin Garnett. The Garnett is numbered # 30 / 99. These are all right. I guess my one complaint is that the inserts look like just another subset of the base set. There isn't really anything that sets them apart.

I pulled four cards from the Visionaries insert, with a base card of Clyde Drexler, Blue parallels of Gary Payton and Karl Malone, and a Gold parallel of David Robinson. This is probably my favorite group from the break, as it features the players who were stars during the peak of my NBA fandom. The Payton and Malone cards are numbered # / 149, and The Admiral is numbered # 10 /10. The David Robinson is probably my favorite card of the break.

I beat the odds a little bit on the autograph front. I think autographs are supposed to average one per 8-box case, so I got double the expected number. That probably means that someone out there busted 8 boxes and didn't get anything. Both cards are from the Clear Vision Signatures set, and feature (partially-obscured) autographs on a layer of acetate embedded in a thick cardboard sandwich. The D'Angelo Russell card is numbered # 68 /94 and Marcus Smart is numbered # 007 / 117. The Russell card is actually a pretty strong seller, so I should really put it up on eBay real fast and get back half of what I paid for this case.

My impressions from this break were that even at about $21.75 per box, this product feels like a bit of a letdown. I can't even imagine busting this stuff at full MSRP. Panini's online store has this at $75/box, and that's ridiculous for a box that usually turns out to be something like 15 base cards, two rookies, a parallel # / 149, a parallel # / 99, an insert that averages about # / 149, with an outside shot at an autograph replacing your insert card.

Clear Vision seems to me like someone took Topps High Tek and removed the variety, parallels, and hits that make that product fun, then tried to sell what was left at the same price. The damaged cards throughout the case made it even worse. It was exciting to have a whole case of cards to bust open, but in the future I would probably choose a different product.

I am glad that I pulled the Gold David Robinson parallel and the D'Angelo Russell autograph, because without those two cards this case would have been miserable. Those two cards really made the break. I think the three extra cards in the case came from the packs with the autographs and the David Robinson pack, so I guess you can determine packs with what you would call hits will have an extra card.

Pack of the Day 136: 2015-16 Panini Excalibur Retail Pack

I was in Target the other day and I decided to pick up a couple packs of cards for some blog material. One thing I've been looking at on eBay recently is the extremely hard-to-pull Kaboom! inserts from Panini's Excalibur product. The prices on these things greatly exceeds my budget, but I am hoping that someday one will fall into my price range. I am not even too particular about which player is depicted on it, although I obviously favor some over others. With that in mind, I grabbed one pack of 2015-16 Panini Excalibur from the gravity feed box in the card aisle.

Well, there's not a lot to say here. It was nice to pull a Dwight Howard card, as the Rockets are my team. The Clutch City sleeved jersey he's wearing is an interesting look, too. Design-wise I can't say these are all that exciting. They look to me like every other fancy-pants set on the market.

That Anthony Davis card is a Team 2020 set. If I were made of money I'd collect his cards because we both have unibrows. The Ben McLemore card is a Light Blue parallel, which is distinguished by the color of the foil. The bottom cards in this scan feature players on the two NBA Finals teams for this year. By the time this post goes live the Game 6 tip-off will be about 26 minutes away, with Golden State looking to win the Championship and Cleveland hoping to force a Game 7. I wish Panini would put full career stat blocks on their cards instead of these truncated 'last season plus a career line' stats they are fond of. Sure, you can get that information and much more from multiple online sources, but I want it on the back of my sports cards.

Well, that wasn't the most exciting of packs, but I did at least pull a Rocket and an Anthony Davis insert. I would have liked to pull a Kaboom! or Crusade insert, but if wishes were fishes we'd all open aquariums or something.

Pack of the Day 109: 2014-15 Panini Donruss Basketball Box Break

I've finally reached the final post about my Dave & Adam's Card World order, with a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball from Panini. This product has a ton of inserts and parallels, so this will be a fairly long post, one of the reasons I've held it for last.

The base cards feature a similar design to the baseball set, with the little baseballs in the colored stripe exchanged for basketballs. I'd rate the photography as pretty good especially as you can actually see some of the action surrounding the players, something you lose out on in the many sets that feature the player cut out and placed on a background. There is a Rated Rookie subset, which I believe is short-printed, although not horribly so.

These parallels are called Swirlorama, apparently. The base set and most of the inserts have Swirlorama parallels. There were a fair number of Houston Rockets in the box, so that was a bonus for me. There are a lot of players who I don't really recognize or whose names are familiar to me but I couldn't tell you much else about them. The NBA is mostly relegated to various cable / satellite channels, so I don't ever watch games. I have to watch the box scores and the occasional highlight video to get my fix.

Most (all?) of the parallels outside of the Swirlorama cards are serially-numbered. With the amount of stuff in this set, the print run on Donruss must have been about 65 million cases. Up top are a couple of Stat Line parallels, which are numbered based on some statistic the player has put up in their career. The Purple Press Proofs down on the bottom are all numbered out of # / 199, and there are a few other tiers of Press Proof available. Many of the insert sets also have Press Proof parallels.

The Rookies is an insert focused (duh!) on first-year players. I don't think any of these guys are big names. In my limited exposure to basketball I usually pick up on the bigger names, and these guys aren't them.

The Production Line insert set features players who excel at Scoring, Rebounds, and Assists. All of my cards in this box came from the Scoring subset. Up top are the regular inserts and along the bottom are a Swirlorama of Kevin Durant and a Press Proof of DeMarcus Cousins. The Cousins Press Proof is a Blue Press Proof, which is limited to 99 copies.

Court Kings is an insert featuring various star players. It's got a textured face and filters applied to the photos. It seems like James Harden popped up in just about every group of inserts I pulled from this box. He is the #1 player on the Rockets and arguably in the league, but I don't know if he's my favorite Rocket. I think I would be hard-pressed to choose a favorite player on the team right now. It might be Dwight Howard.

Finally we get into some players that I know and like. Clyde Drexler is a favorite. With his receding hairline and mustache he always looked like someone's uncle who just happened to be a ball player on the side. I guess you don't have to look a certain way (or even bathe) to be a ball player, but I always thought Clyde looked a bit older than he should to be flying so high. Kiki Vandeweghe's name always stood out to me when I would see his cards as a kid. And it was nice to snag a Hakeem Olajuwon Blue Press Proof from the box, as I always like to grab cards for my Dream PC when I can.

Elite is by far the biggest insert in the product. I just picked a handful of the many cards from this set that came out of the box. Robinson and Olajuwon will probably always stand out in my mind when I think of the NBA, as they had some titanic matchups while I was at the peak of my fandom. I guess Patrick Ewing was also a rival to Olajuwon and had a more compelling narrative with the NCAA Championship going to Ewing and the NBA Finals going to Olajuwon, but I liked David Robinson more. The Elite Status Die-Cut parallels are have varying print runs, with the Jonas Valanciunas card I pulled being numbered # 48 / 83. 

The Elite Dominators set seems to be numbered awfully high for a rare pull with a big checklist. There are 50 cards in the list and there are 999 copies of each one. I pulled Derrick Rose, who is injured yet again. It's not his leg this time, though, so that's a change. He just seems to be snake-bitten when it comes to injuries.

There are a fair number of hits in the product for the price point, although for the most part they aren't super exciting. I got a couple of PWS (Plain White Swatches) of Derrick Favors and Carl Landry. Carl Landry has had a pretty decent career after breaking out with Houston over his first few years. He hasn't been a superstar or anything, but he has been serviceable. Derrick Favors was the third overall pick in the 2010 draft and has emerged as one of the statistical leaders of the Utah Jazz.

The final hit of the box is a pretty decent one, especially at the price point of this product. It's a Signature Stars autograph card of Elfrid Payton, the 10th overall pick in the 2014 draft. Although his averages from last season weren't outstanding, he did put up some very good games including some triple doubles. This autographed card is numbered # 07 / 40.

Donruss is a fun break because there are so many inserts and parallels that come out of the box. There isn't much in the way of big hit potential, but that keeps the box prices down. I need to collate what I've got so far to find out how close I am to a complete base set. It would be fun to chase a mini-master set with all the base cards and easy inserts, but I don't know if I would want to focus on that at the expense of other collecting goals.

It looks like the Cubs have advanced in the NL Wild Card game with bit of drama and a bench-clearing beaning of their star pitcher after he hit a couple of Pirates. Tensions run high in the playoffs. While I hope they make a deep run and win it all, I figure the Astros will fall sooner rather than later. I'll probably stick to rooting for the AL for a while whenever that happens. I'll probably be pulling for the Blue Jays if / when the Astros are eliminated. If the Astros and Blue Jays get knocked out and the Cubs are still in it I will probably switch sides and pull for the Cubs, since in that scenario the other playoff teams would probably be the Rangers, Royals, and Dodgers. Yuck! I like individual players on each of those teams, but various rules of playoff fandom rule them all out. I don't really have anything against the Cubs, so they win by default. If it becomes a Rangers, Royals, Dodgers, Cardinals playoff then I will just turn the whole thing off and wait for next year.