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.

May 2018 Loot Locker

I don't have my usual picture of the outside of a Loot Locker to put up at the top of this post, but I got my May Loot Locker in the mail a day or two ago. As usual, I went with the Triple Play option that includes a little more than the slightly cheaper All-Star box. There are also football and basketball lockers.

Here is what I got in my Loot Locker for the month. A couple pieces of candy, some Ultra Pro top loaders and sleeves, 1 pack of 2018 Panini Diamond Kings, 2 packs of 2018 Donruss, and 2 packs of 2018 Bowman. These are all Hobby packs. I always like to break down the value of the Locker based on the going price for Hobby boxes to see if I'm getting a decent price on the packs. I just take the box prices from a major online card retailer, divide those by the number of packs in a box, and multiply by the number of packs in my Locker.

2018 Diamond Kings: $75.95 / 12 = $6.33 x 1 = $6.33

2018 Donruss: $104.95 / 24 = $4.37 x 2 = $8.75

2018 Bowman: $179.95 / 24 = $7.50 x 2 = $15.00

Total: $6.33 + $8.75 + $15.00 = $30.08

Well, with the cost of the packs, hobby supplies, candy, shipping, and labor, I hope the Loot Locker folks got a good deal on their product, because this Loot Locker yielded more in packs than the $30 base price. Let's see if I pulled anything good.

I didn't find much exciting in the Diamond Kings pack. That Gabby Hartnett card has a cool picture. Other than that, I am struggling to find a lot to say about this one. Robinson Cano's injury and suspension kind of put a damper on my fantasy baseball team.

One of the Donruss packs was a Noah Syndergaard hot pack, with a Stat Line parallel and a Nickname variation appearing back to back. There were a couple of other interesting cards in the mix, including a Diamond Collection relic card of Deven Marrero, who has gone from playing not-that-great for the Red Sox Boston to playing not-that-great for the Diamondbacks Arizona.

I got a couple of neat inserts in the Bowman packs. The Ronald Acuna is a #Trending insert and the Bowman Sterling of Carlos Correa is a one-per-box insert. I like the way the Correa card looks.

Overall, this Loot Locker didn't rock my socks off. Of course, with card prices being what they are right now, it's all a big gamble. I am still not sure if I'll be grabbing another Loot Locker in June. They put a decent amount of product in there for the price, but maybe the price of cards is too high right now.

Target Does Right by the Little Guy - 2018 Bowman Mega Box

I stopped at the local Target last night to see if they had any Bowman Mega Boxes. I checked the card aisle and the toy section, and they didn't have them. I almost skipped going today while I was out on errands, but I decided to at least give it a shot. There wasn't anything in the card aisle, but as I approached the toy aisles I saw a small crowd gathered. Target had actually posted an employee near the Mega Box display, and he was rationing them out with a limit of four per customer. I saw one guy who looked like he might be looking to fight the Target worker, but he eventually took his four boxes and moved on. I asked for three boxes, and the employee handed them over. I also told him that I appreciated what they were doing, and he said that they try to do that if they feel a product is hot and likely to be cleared out and scalped by resellers. He said that if I have friends who are looking for Mega Boxes, they have some more in the back, and they can go and ask for them. If you're in Nampa, Idaho or thereabouts, they had Mega Boxes as of noon today.

Here is what the box looks like. The box is bigger than a blaster, with fewer packs, and it's a bit cheaper than a blaster. The real draw here is the 2 Mega Box exclusive Chrome packs.

Here are the odds and whatnot from the back of the box. You've got your usual assortment of inserts, parallels, and autographs.

These were the highlights of the regular Bowman packs from my first box. Nothing too crazy here.

Here are the highlights from the initial two packs of Mega Box Chrome. The Green parallel of Heliot Ramos is # 09 / 99. 

Here are some highlights from the regular Bowman packs in the second box I opened. I should probably be showing off more prospect cards, but I don't know any of those guys. Kyle Tucker is one of the hotter prospects the Astros have coming up. I just learned that the Astros released one of my PC guys, Jon Singleton, after he tested positive on another drug test and earned himself a 100-game suspension. He wasn't likely to make the big-league roster again anyway, but getting suspended again for drugs isn't the way to make yourself attractive to any other teams out there. I'm guessing that this might really be the end of the line for him when it comes to baseball.

There was some color in this Mega Box. The Jorge Mateo Gold parallel is # 16 / 50, while the Purple #Trending insert of Sixto Sanchez is # 150 / 250. Ronald Acuna and Royce Lewis are some pretty good base pulls.

The last box I opened gave up some Astros, Vlad Jr., one of the Braves' hot players, and some other stuff from the regular packs.

The inserts from the Mega Box packs weren't that interesting (to me), but I did get Kyle Tucker, Shed Long, and Adbert Alzolay from the base cards.

This wasn't an earth-shattering break, but I was glad to have a chance at opening a few Mega Boxes. I thought it was pretty cool of the local Target to ration them so that more people could have a chance, although not everyone at the store today felt the same.

Pack of the Day 186: A Blaster of 2017 Topps Allen & Ginter

I picked this blaster up last year in July or August, while I was in San Diego on a work trip. I am hoping this will be a quick blog post, as I promised myself that I would go to be early, and it is currently much later than early.

Here is what the front of the box looks like. Pretty standard stuff for Allen & Ginter.

Here are the pack odds from the side of the box. Nothing too crazy there, either.

Here are some of the base cards that stood out to me at the time. This would have been right in the middle of Judge-mania, so that card was a pretty good pull. It would be funny if that Giant Panda card was a photo variation of a Pablo Sandoval card, but it's just a regular card.

I'm assuming that these four cards are short prints. The only one here that I would be likely to scan otherwise is the Harmon Killebrew card. Then there are four What a Day inserts, with the highlight of those being a Ken Griffey Jr. card.

I got some minis, including a regular Willie Stargell, an A & G back Elvis Andrus, a Black Border Alex Reyes, and a surprisingly rare (1:50 packs) Required Reading insert. I also got Steven Matz and a horse.

These World's Fair and Revolutionary Battles inserts aren't all that rare. Neither card really interests me, but I appreciate the wide range of topics covered by Allen & Ginter.

The Sport Fish & Fishing Lures insert is more my style, and I pulled two of those. It's kind of cool how Topps made the fish look like a mini insert embedded in a full-size card with the cattails and the lure. The final card I scanned is a relic card of Mookie Betts. Retail hits are pretty difficult pulls in this product so I feel like I beat the odds in getting this one.

2018 Bowman

I managed to track down some of the latest hot product, 2018 Bowman Baseball. I was obviously chasing some of the latest hotness in Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuna, but I decided to take pictures of a bunch of cards. I got some blasters and some value packs, with the value packs containing exclusive Camo parallels.

One of the fun and maybe confusing things about Bowman is that the base product is really three products. There is a checklist for established players, another checklist for prospects, and a Chrome parallel of the prospect checklist. You get some mixture of these three card types in each pack, along with any inserts or parallels you might come across. I chose eight of the base cards to show off here, including my only Ohtani pull, some Astros, a couple of other famous guys, Ozzie Albies, and Zack Granite.

Here are some of the prospect base cards I pulled, including a couple guys I've actually heard of, like Ronald Acuna, Scott Kingery, and Vladimir Guerroro Jr.

Here are a few of the Chrome prospects I got. I've heard of about half these guys, as I am not much of a prospector. Most of the Bowman guys I know about are players who have already been promoted to an MLB roster, are going to be promoted very soon, or have been touted on Zippy Zappy's blog.

Matt Sauer is one of the guys who I recall seeing on Zippy Zappy's recent Bowman rundown post. These are some of the Camo parallels I got from the value packs.

There were three numbered parallels among my breaks. The Gold Shimmer Refractor of Jose Trevino is numbered # 08 / 50, the Purple Refractor of Ibandel Isabel is numbered # 198 / 250, and the Sky Blue parallel of Miguel Cabrera is numbered # 237 / 499. The seeding on these cards really kind of drives home for me how much Bowman must be printed. I realize that seeding on Hobby packs is probably much easier, but still, let's take that Miguel Cabrera card as an example. Sky Blue parallels are numbered # / 499. There are 100 cards in the base set, so there should be a total of 49,900 of them printed. They are seeded 1:95 packs, and 95 x 49,900 = 4,740,500 packs out there in the world. Again, the Hobby odds should be easier, but that's still an awful lot of baseball cards.

Even though I didn't hit anything super exciting from these packs, I did enjoy the break. Having three different types of base card gives some variety to each pack, and it seemed like there were also plenty of inserts among my packs. One of my favorite inserts is the recurring Bowman Scouts' Top 100, which is a list of a hundred top prospects in baseball, arranged in order. You can see that the meter in the bottom left corner is red for top prospects, yellow for medium prospects, and green for the lower portion of the list. Every year I think about building this insert set, but so far I haven't gotten around to it in any season.

The #BowmanTrending insert is the obligatory nod to social media, since young prospects are probably all about the Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Players who have a social media presence get their handles added to the nameplates on their cards, while players without public profiles get the generic @bowmancards. 

I am not sure what to think about these Bowman Birthdays inserts. Maybe there is a sell sheet out there that explains them, but it appears to be an insert set dedicated to players born in 1993. This is a decent collection of talent, but I just don't know the meaning behind it.

The Talent Pipeline insert shows players from each team's A, AA, and AAA affiliates. It's a decent insert idea for a prospect-based product.

Finally, there is a 2018 ROY Favorites insert, showcasing players who have a shot at the 2018 Rookie of the Year award. I can almost guarantee that none of the guys I pulled will win a Rookie of the Year award in 2018. Word on the street is that MLB will allow the Angels to play half a season in the weakest NL division so that Shohei Ohtani can win the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards.

And that's the rundown of my 2018 Bowman breaks. It was pretty fun to bust open a bunch of packs of this stuff, and I may pick more of it up if I can find it.

February Loot Locker

I ordered another Loot Locker for February. I went with the baseball locker, and instead of the basic $20 + $5 S&H locker, I upgraded to the $30 + $5 S&H option. The main difference between the two is that you get a little bit more stuff in the $30 locker. There is also a $50 locker with a different product mix. It usually includes higher-end stuff than the basic boxes. The product mix for the month is usually posted as a pinned Tweet on the Twitter page for Loot Locker.

All of the stuff is packed into a card box for shipping. It's got a locker-themed sticker on one side along with all of the branding.

Here are the card packs that were included in mine. There are 3 packs of 2017 Panini Donruss Optic, 2 packs of 2017 Topps Chrome, and 2 packs of 2018 Topps Series 1. Randomly selected Loot Lockers also include bonuses, and I got a bonus Jumbo pack of 2018 Topps Series 1. This month I again broke the cost of the packs out by dividing the hobby box prices on a major card retailer's site by the number of packs in a box and multiplying that number by the number of packs in the locker to see how much 'value' I got for my $30.

2017 Panini Donruss Optic: $87.95 / 20 = $4.40 x 3 = $13.20

2017 Topps Chrome: $149.95 / 24 = $6.25 x 2 = $12.50

2018 Topps Series 1: $52.95 / 36 = $1.47 x 2 = $2.94

$13.20 + $12.50 + $2.94 = $28.64

I valued the bonus pack at $10.50, so the final total was $39.14 for the cards in the box. Based on current market prices, the basic locker seems to offer an appropriate amount of product for the price. I hate to pay that much per pack for Chrome, but 2017 products are crazy and it looks like 2018 is shaping up in a similar manner, with Heritage boxes going for $125 now.

As usual, the box also includes a package of top loaders and penny sleeves, as well as a few pieces of candy. Now that I've done the math, lets see what I actually pulled this month.

Here are the highlights from the Optic packs. The Sierra, Braun, Snider, and Reyes cards are all Prizm parallels. I also pulled a Diamond Kings of Mike Trout and a The Rookies card of Carson Fulmer.

Here are the notable cards from the Chrome packs. The Mike Trout is a base card. The Starlin Castro and Gerrit Cole cards are basic Refractors.

The 2018 Topps Series 1 packs offered up a handful of base cards featuring Astros, along with a few inserts. I was happy to get that Nolan Ryan card and the Carlos Correa insert.

I pulled a relic card from the bonus Jumbo pack of Topps Series 1. It's a standard relic card of Chris Archer.

That wasn't the best break in the world, but that's how it goes. Loot Locker is a good option for people who don't have a hobby shop, or whose hobby shop is inconvenient or unfriendly (or both). I'd much rather buy a Loot Locker than spend the gas and time to visit my somewhat local shop, where I always feel like the owner is inconvenienced by my presence.

March's baseball Loot Lockers have 2018 Panini Donruss, 2018 Topps Gypsy Queen, and 2017 Panini Donruss Optic for the low-end options, and 2017 Bowman's Best, 2017 Bowman Chrome, and 2015 Bowman's Best for the high-end boxes. There are also options for football, basketball, and hockey. The ordering deadline is March 24th.