Pack of the Day 192: Two Boxes of 2018 Topps Archives Snapshots

I ordered two boxes of 2018 Topps Archives Snapshots. I was going to order more of it, but I watched some breaks online and they were mostly pretty brutal. That prompted me to stick with a 2-box break.

Each box has 12 cards total, with one of them being an autograph. There are a number of parallels available, as well as parallels of the autographed cards.

The cards are packed in a clear plastic bag. The box promises a look at photos from the Topps Vault. That means a lot of posed shots. If there are cards with action photography, I haven't seen them yet.

You do get a mix of rookies, veterans, and retired players in the checklist. I like the design of the cards, although I like cards better when the player's position is somewhere on the front.

The cards have a glossy front, which goes well with the photographs. I was happy to see an Astro in this first box, with an appearance from Carlos Correa.

I think the Black & White parallels, like that Amed Rosario card, are one per box. Tyler Mahle doubles up in this box, which gives a look at the difference between the base cards and the autographs. Having on-card autographs is nice. I think stickers would look pretty tacky on this set.

Starting off the second box is a bunch of retired players. John Olerud shows what the backs of the cards look like.

Pretty cool to get the Shohei Ohtani card in this box. Rick Ankiel is an interesting addition to this set. He is attempting to make a comeback as a left-handed relief pitcher. He was the first player since Babe Ruth to win 10 games as a pitcher and hit 50 home runs as a batter. Ohtani has 4 wins and 22 home runs. I wonder if he will make it to 10 and 50?

There are some pretty nice cards here, with Gleyber Torres and a Black & White parallel of Rafael Devers. The autograph in this box is Paul DeJong.

So that's the break. I like the base cards enough that it would be fun to collect the whole set. I don't think I would like to build the set through opening boxes, though. You get ten base cards per box, so you need at least 5 boxes with perfect collation to build a set. It is likely that you would need many more, because collation is unlikely to be perfect.

Pack of the Day 189: I Missed the Gint-a-Cuffs Entry Deadline, but Here's What I Pulled

I announced my intent to join in on Gint-a-Cuffs again this year, but I must have missed the official sign-up deadline. I had already ordered a box, though, so let's bust it open and see what Allen & Ginter looks like for 2018.

2018 Topps Allen & Ginter offers 3 hits per Hobby box, with a variety of cards acting as hits. Most often you get one 'A-design' full-size relic card, one 'B-design' full-size relic card, and then one of the other hit types.

The bottom of the box lists the Box Loader odds, as well as the No Purchase Necessary rules.

The pack looks like an Allen & Ginter pack. A box contains 24 packs, with 8 cards in each pack, unless you pull a thick hit. If you do, your box will be short a few base cards.

Here are the odds for all the stuff you might pull in a pack of Allen & Ginter. Each pack contains a mini card of some kind.

My box loader features Cal Ripken Jr, posing on a baseball field near a house in the woods.

Here are some of the base cards I liked. The set looks like a pretty typical Allen & Ginter set. I am not a details guy, so I can't tell you specifics about how it differs from previous sets. It just looks like Allen & Ginter to me.

You should get 12 short-prints in a box. Here are the first 6 that I pulled. I'm not sure how Topps goes about choosing who makes the short-print checklist.

Here are the other 6 short-prints from my box. Eckersley is probably my favorite of the bunch. Julia Morales, part of Houston's TV broadcast team, recently ran as Eckersley in Oakland's mascot race at a game. That was pretty entertaining.

I think these are the 9 regular minis I pulled from the box. Pretty standard stuff, although it was nice to pull an Astro.

It looks like I got three black-bordered minis, a couple of SP minis, and 5 A&G-back minis. The Bo Jackson is probably the best one here.

Here are the Fantasy Goldmine inserts I pulled. I kind of like seeing a set based around the WAR stat. I acknowledge that WAR probably still isn't a perfect measure of a player, but I like to use it because it's relatively easy. I am not enough of a math-head to understand it all, but I do know a lot of folks take issue with how defensive WAR is calculated.

World Talent is another neat set, with MLB players hailing from so many different countries around the globe. I got a nice mix of countries represented in this group.

Baseball Equipment of the Ages isn't my favorite insert ever, but it's a nice enough set that matches the theme of this product.

World's Greatest Beaches is another insert that fits the product well, but doesn't interest me a whole lot. Fun fact: I hate the ocean and other large bodies of water. They are fascinating, but I don't want to be in or on them. I love tide pools and frog ponds, though.

I do like the Magnificent Moons insert set. It's a little funny to me that all these other moons have cool names, and our moon is just 'Moon.'

Here is my Home Run Challenge card of the box. Pretty decent player to get. I guessed September 10th, and Goldschmidt did not hit a home run on that day. Oh well.

Here are some mini inserts. I guess Postage Required is my favorite in this group. I really enjoyed stamp collecting when I was young, but fell out of it at some point. I think I would like Folio of Fears better as a set if they used different pictures. This ghost just looks like a poorly-filtered photo. I would prefer a drawing or a picture over a picture doctored to look kind of drawn.

These are the other two mini inserts I pulled. Much has been said about the Flags of Lost Nations set, which appears to be a favorite among bloggers. I think I prefer The World's Hottest Peppers, though. I don't have a high tolerance for stuff like that, but I will test my limits every so often. The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion has a cool name, too.

On to the hits! This would have been a great box for a Cubs collector, just to foreshadow things a bit.

First up is a basic B-version relic (1:20 packs) of the Cubs' star second baseman, Javier Baez. He's having a pretty good year.

Next up is a framed mini relic (1:56 packs) of Yu Darvish, who struggled for the Dodgers in the World Series last year, pitched a little for the Cubs this year, and then went down with an injury. He had an elbow surgery a couple of days ago.

The last hit is a Rip Card (1:161 packs) of another Cub, Anthony Rizzo. It is numbered # 03 / 75. I debated on whether or not to rip it for a couple of hours, but I couldn't resist the urge to see what was inside.

The prize inside was an extended-checklist mini of Boston's Rafael Devers. He has struggled this year, but he's also just 21 years old. There is plenty of time for his talent to catch hold.

Here is the back of the mini. The Devers card is number 360 in the extended set.

That does it for this box of Allen & Ginter. It wasn't the most exciting box for me, an Astros fan, but it probably would have earned a decent Gint-a-Cuffs score and it's always fun to get a Rip Card. Maybe next year I'll get my entry in by the deadline. I have gathered most of the non-baseball autographs and relics I wanted from the 2018 set, so I probably won't be buying much more Allen & Ginter this season.

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.

Black November, Act III - 2016 Topps Archives Signature Series

The second and final lottery ticket item in my order from the Blowout Cards Black November sale was a box of 2016 Topps Archives Signature Series. I bought a few singles from the 2015 iteration of this product, but I hadn't sampled the 2016 product at all, and I have never tried an unopened box of it.

Each box has one encased buyback card enclosed, with an on-card signature. I think the 2016 version added some relic cards and stuff, but I haven't researched that at all. The breaks of this stuff I've seen online have been all over the place, so I wasn't sure what to expect with it. The most likely scenario, especially given how these breaks have gone so far, was that I would pull a $5-$15 card and feel terrible about buying this box.

Well, that's not an awful pull. It's an on-card autograph of Cal Ripken Jr., numbered # 1 / 1. It's a nice-looking card, too, being a buyback of Ripken's Baseball Highlight Sketches insert from 2012 Topps Allen & Ginter. The problem with this card is that it reinforces bad behavior. I can probably recoup most of the cost of this order from the sale of this card, which might encourage me to make similar orders in the future. I still haven't decided on what to do with it, though. I remember when he broke the consecutive games record. I think I even clipped a page from the newspaper when it happened, but Cal Ripken Jr. was really my cousin's favorite player, not mine. I could probably get something I like even more in exchange for this card.

Either way, this one card saved the whole break for me. It's a really neat card, but the possibilities it opens up for my collection might be more exciting than the card itself. For now I think I will just bask in the glory of pulling a rare and valuable card, made even better because it saved a break that was going down fast.

At the Trade Deadline 44: The Prowling Cat Cleans Out His Clutter, and I'm Reaping All the Benefits, Part 4

A while back the Prowling Cat posted a bunch of stuff he was planning on donating if he couldn't find someone in the blogosphere to give it to, and I put my name in the hat for several of the items. He sent out one shipment of stuff to me near the end of 2015 and just recently I got hit with a second wave of cards. I think out of this batch I originally just requested two things, but he sent more than that. The really cool thing is that the bulk of these items were food issue sets from the 80's.

I don't know if there is anything better than food-sponsored baseball cards. I was going to buy food anyway, but packaging cards with that food makes things so much better. Unfortunately this kind of thing has mostly gone by the wayside these days, but food issues had a long hobby run. My kids got Pokemon cards in their Happy Meals recently and some Canadian coffee place gave away hockey cards with their drinks last year, but as far as I know those are some of the relatively few food promotions out there. When I was a kid it seemed like you couldn't turn around without finding baseball card in your cereals and snacks. This first set in my package from the Prowling Cat is a 1986 Topps Quaker Chewy Granola Bars issue that touts itself as the 1st Annual Collectors' Edition. The card fronts feature some pretty nice portrait photos while the backs have a good amount of biographical data, 1985 stats, career stats, and a bulleted list of career highlights.

There are plenty of stars in this checklist, some teams like the Mets and Cardinals receiving extra attention. That jacket that Dave Parker is wearing looks incredibly uncomfortable, like someone coated a trash bag in rubber and added a zipper and sleeves to it.

Normally I'd have more to say about these cards, but I've got like twenty minutes until midnight and if I don't hit publish on this thing soon I will break my streak of posting every day this year so far. I am thinking that the streak might break in April anyhow, but there's no use in breaking it before I have to. Nice to see Fernando Valenzuela wearing a helmet on a card. Nolan Ryan looks like he might be trying to suppress some kind of gastrointestinal issue long enough for the picture to be taken. Maybe he's looking into the sunlight or something.

Don Mattingly is one of the few people on this earth who should always have a mustache. There are all types of mustaches on this scan, from Saberhagen's barely-there look to Wade Boggs and his uber-stache. I'm guessing that bulge in George Brett's cheek is just him eating some tasty Quaker Chewy Granola Bars.

That whole top row of photographs is pretty good. Reggie Jackson looks surprised to be having his photo taken, Eddie Murray is rocking all kinds of hair, Phil Niekro looks like somebody's grandpa, and I think they must have borrowed Dan Quisenberry's mugshot from the local precinct.

Thanks for the cards, Prowling Cat! There is plenty more to post from this package over the next little while.