Pack of the Day 185: Two Blasters of 2018 Topps Heritage

Since my 2018 BBM True Heart Japanese Women's Wrestling post isn't getting written as fast as I anticipated, here's something else I got recently. Like many card collectors, I've been visiting the local retail establishments, hoping for a taste of 2018 Topps Heritage. Unfortunately, there hasn't been much stock at all in my local stores. There were a few rack packs and hanger boxes in my local Target for a day or two, but I haven't seen a blaster box in the wild yet. I finally resorted to searching online for them. I happened to check eBay on a day when there was a coupon for 20% off any purchase of $25 or more, so I ordered a couple of blasters from a reseller. After the coupon, the total cost was under the retail price, including shipping. I have also been watching this Wal-Mart link, as you can order them from the big box store and they will ship for free as long as you order two or more blasters. I ordered three that way, but they haven't arrived yet. They go in and out of stock all the time, though, so you just have to keep looking. I figure retail is gonna be the only way to build this set for most of us, as hobby boxes have been selling in the $120-125 range lately. That's close to double what I'd want to spend on one. So that's my philosophy on Heritage at the moment. Here are some of the highlights from my two eBay blasters of the product.

I'll start things off with a nice sunset card of Carlos Beltran, who retired on top as a World Series Champion.

I photographed a selection of base cards that I liked. You'll obviously see a lot of Astros here, as well as some notable names or (subjectively) cool pictures. I included Carlos Asuaje because I saw him play in person several times while I was in San Diego for work last year.

Here are some more nice base cards from the blasters. Some years I don't like Heritage as much as others, but 2018 is a year that I enjoy. I'll be trying to build the full base set this year, although I am going to go the easy route and buy the short-prints outright.

Speaking of short-prints, I pulled five of them between the two blasters. The Chris Davis card is a Chrome parallel, numbered # 588 / 999. Blasters contain 8 packs, and the Chrome cards are a 1:35 pack pull, or about one in every 4-5 blasters. Short-prints are 1:3 packs, so 5 is about what you'd expect from 16 packs.

These decals are the Wal-Mart exclusive for this year, and I got a couple of decent names for mine. It looks like you get one of these per blaster.

Here are all the vertical inserts I pulled. They've got varying pull ratios. I think I like the New Age Performers best. I'd probably like the Deckle-Edge inserts better, but they've been done many times over the last few years.

I also got a horizontal insert, with this Then & Now card featuring a couple of all-time great pitchers.

I even lucked out and pulled a hit from this break, an autograph of Cardinals outfielder Harrison Bader, who is one of the guys contending for the team's last bench spot this season. Heritage has nice-looking autographs, and at 1:375 packs they are hard to find in retail. They're hard to find in Hobby boxes, too, so I still think retail is the better bet for set collectors unless Hobby prices drop a whole bunch.

Gint-a-Cuffs VII: Pack 4

+2 Great Scott!

+2 First Ladies

Pack 4 Points: 4.00
Box Running Total: 24.00
Per Pack Average: 6.00

Box Pace: 150.00

A Box of Munnatawket Mini Awesomeness

Around the time I got that Christmas card from the creator of the fabled Munnatawket mini card set, I won a couple of his auctions for cards in the set, Freddie Freeman and Torii Hunter. There was an e-mail exchange in which I apologized for being a cheapass and winning his cards with lowball bids while some of the other cards sold for a bit more and also telling him that I planned to buy more cards from him soon, so he could save on shipping and just hold Hunter and Freeman until that happened, and he asked me if I was serious about putting together the whole thing. I said something along the lines of, "Heck yeah!" and he told me that the package with the two cards in it might be a little bigger than expected. There was more to it, but those were the highlights.

It was definitely a little bit bigger than a two-card envelope. It was a whole box of these things, featuring various quantities of most of the cards in the set. I sorted them out by number and put them all into pages row by row, gaining an immense feeling of satisfaction as the little pockets filled up. The photo above shows the current state of the box, so you can see that there were plenty left over after I took the ones I needed.

He encouraged me to share them with other people, so I have been including a few in each trade package I send out, trying to match subjects in the set to the interests of other collectors. There are some good baseball photos in the set, but some of my favorites include the oddballs like Dirk Nowitzki dressed in a Rangers uniform and holding a basketball.

In true Ginter fashion, the checklist includes figures from outside the world of sports, like Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. I guess you could call her the founder of a sport, as there is an official U.S. Quidditch league with their own logo, World Cup tournament, and even a concussion policy. It looks like the Lone Star Quidditch Club currently is ranked #1, but their perfect record is held down by a weak Strength of Schedule. It could be argued that #5 Maryland Quidditch and #6 Ohio State Quidditch have the more impressive resumes. My preferred school's team, The Moscow Manticores at the University of Idaho, aren't ranked dead last, but they have a 1-2 record and they are rated last in Strength of Schedule. Interesting stuff.

I don't have a lot to say about this row of cards, but it was on one of the pages I scanned and I had to include it. Also, it's not very often that Justin Verlander gets outdone in a baseball card set, but in this case...

...his girlfriend Kate Upton outdoes him by about 6500%, with the highly sought-after #0 card in the set. I did not receive any duplicates of that one, so you'll have to track it down using your own wiles. I sent a copy of the Spider-Man card to the UK recently as a throw-in with a comic book sketch card I sold to someone there.

This row is full of big names, and also Wil Myers. The rest of these guys should be pretty familiar to baseball fans. It's a little jarring to see Morneau in a Pirates uniform, as he only spent 25 games with that organization. 

I'll close this up with Michael Morse, the current last card in the base set, one of the autographs, and a couple of the photo variations from the set. Actually, I am not sure which versions of Giancarlo Stanton and Manny Machado are the regular cards and which are the variations, but there are (at least) two different cards for them. Cespedes has an Athletics card and a Red Sox card, so the order those go in is more obvious. I have since discovered that there are even more interesting things in this set, but they were part of different transactions and they will get their own posts.

This was among the coolest packages I got last year, and I will be trying to pay this one forward for a long time. So if you get a package from me this year and you're like, "What? I don't remember setting up a trade with this guy," you can thank folks like roddster, Too Many Verlanders/Manninghams, Zippy Zappy, The Prowling Cat, Cards on Cards and Nachos Grande for being so generous and inspiring me to try to do the same. Sometimes I fail, but I have found myself picking things up with other collectors in mind a bit more often lately and looking for one more thing to add to an outbound package.

Thanks for the cards!

2014 Topps Finest 11-20

I am sure I can find something to say about many of these cards, as this group even features a few of my 'kinda' Player Collections. I don't know that I go out of my way to buy cards of these guys, but I certainly welcome them in trades and take notice when I pull them from packs. Max Scherzer fits on that list, although with all his success last year he went too early in this year's fantasy drafts and I didn't get him on any rosters. If a guy isn't on one of my rosters I tend to lose track of him, which has happened with me and Max this year. Let's go check on how he's doing.

[Time Passes]

Well, he's having a pretty good year. He's got a 15-5 record with a 3.26 ERA, a 1.15 WHIP, and a 10.55 K/9 ratio (220 K's) over 187.2 innings so far on the year. His last outing wasn't so good, as he gave up Adam Dunn's last home run with the White Sox before his trade to Oakland.

I don't even know what to say about Buster Posey. The coworker in the cubicle across from me is a fan of the San Francisco teams (Giants and 49ers), so I try to track their recent games and place in the standings a little. It gives me some small talk material at least, which is something I am not often very good at. I try not to overpay in fantasy baseball at the catcher position, so Posey has probably never been on my fantasy rosters.

The Rangers want us to know that they are still around in this set. I think I mentioned in the previous post that there are a boatload of Rangers on this checklist. Beltre has been pretty good this season, but not good enough to live up to his draft position. Josh Donaldson was drafted an average of 72 picks later than Beltre and ranks higher among 3B so far this season. I have both of them on one of my fantasy rosters, which is pretty nice. Beltre's average balances out Donaldson, and Donaldson has higher production in the counting stats.

Carlos Gomez has been pretty good, but when I think of him I think of the little incidents he's had as a result of showboating, to include the big kerfluffle with the Braves and the unwritten rules of baseball last year. And then again this year between him and Gerrit Cole that led to the benches clearing and at least one black eye. Although Gomez apparently really rubs other teams the wrong way, I still reserve most of my spite for McCann specifically and the Braves in general. It's not like I have a special place in my heart for the Brewers or anything. I can't explain it. It's the unwritten rules of my card collection.

I don't know what to say here. Kolten Wong appears to be giving props to Carlos Gomez, which is probably something that will never actually happen. But on this blog anything is possible. Wong has been pretty good this year, staying within the top 25 or so second basemen in the league and getting within the top 15 over the last month.

This was a pretty good picture to choose for a loud, colorful card set. That green uniform is wild. I actually went and searched the image to make sure it wasn't some Photoshop trickeration. I guess they wore these green uniforms on September 14, 2013 in honor of Halfway St. Patrick's Day.

I keep thinking that this is Matt Dominguez, the goofy-looking Astros guy. It's not. It's some other guy. They do play the same positions, so there's that. He had 76 at-bats in 2013, but none so far this year. The back of his card suggests he can hit for some power.

You shouldn't buy into a career year, but I bought into Chris Davis' crazy 2013 on a lot of fantasy baseball rosters this year. And I am in the bottom half of the standings with a lot of those teams. He hasn't even been a top-25 guy at his position this year. The power has kind of been there in little bursts, but it doesn't look like he is going to pull his batting average above .200 anytime soon. The face he's making in that picture kind of reminds me of this:

It's basically the same face, except Davis' mouth is tilted the other way. Maybe he just saw his stats posted on the ballpark Jumbotron.

I've seen this picture somewhere before. Oh yeah, it was in my last post. On Bumgarner's 2014 Topps Chrome card. The only difference is that his Chrome card is cropped a lot tighter, so it really highlights the wonderful face he's making. I really wish the major sports leagues would open up their trading card licensing so that more than one company could make licensed cards for a given league. Maybe the added competition would spur some creativity and get Topps to stop reusing the same image across many brands and even across a couple years of product.

Closing out this post is Paul Goldschmidt. My son randomly chose the Diamondbacks as his favorite baseball team a while back, but I don't think he remembers that he did that. It's all about football and the Bengals for him. Last season he would cheer against the Broncos every game, I guess as a way to show some independence from me and my wife. I let him look through a bunch of football cards and choose a team of his own so his favorite team wouldn't always be whoever had played against Denver last. He liked the Bengals because of the orange in their uniforms, so I've been slowly feeding Bengals cards into his little collection. They play the Broncos in December, so I imagine he won't be talking to me very much for a couple days when Peyton Manning and whichever Broncos aren't suspended at the time hang a whole pile of points on them. Yes, I am talking trash on my blog to my five year-old son, who just started Kindergarten this week.

One of the twins (3 years old) sleeps with some Star Wars cards I gave him underneath his pillow. Sometimes I see him sorting through them and naming the characters. Both twins were getting jealous that their big brother was getting football cards, so I now have to split the stacks of doubles into three parts, so each one gets a few cards. They usually wind up in the couch cushions or behind some other piece of furniture, but at least they express some interest in them.

A Couple of Generous Stacks of Custom Allen & Ginter Minis

Shortly after buying the custom Allen & Ginter minis in my previous post, I won another auction from the same seller for a C.C. Sabathia mini. He included a few other minis in the package. I am pretty sure my favorite one of the bunch is that Kevin James card, but Jose Fernandez and Hunter Pence aren't bad cards either. It turns out that this eBay seller is actually the guy who designed and made the minis, although there are other people out there with auctions featuring a handful of his custom cards.

To add to the fun, after my post about the first group of custom Allen & Ginter cards I purchased, a mystery envelope arrived in the mail. It included a pile of minis from the set, including players from the PC list on my blog. It also included a nice note thanking me for featuring the minis on my blog. Pretty cool stuff. I've got an extra Spider-Man card now, so I will probably be running my first contest on the blog pretty soon centered around that theme.

The note also mentioned that there would be some new designs coming out soon, including Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson in a Texas Rangers uniform. I've been watching his eBay listings for the new designs, as well as a couple of cards that I missed out on the first time through. Sorry for the poor quality of the scans. The cards are much better in person, but these scans were part of the batch that I did before fixing my scanner settings. 

In addition to players taken from my favorite players list, I also got a rare on-card autograph of the custom designer himself. No sticker autos or redemptions in this product! I do not think he has a blog, but I could be wrong about that.

Thank you for the cards, Ryan! They are definitely appreciated. I'll be watching the auction listings for those new releases you mentioned, and if you happen to post another Upton card I'll be bidding on that, too. I planned on taking you up on your 2nd-chance offer, but I got busy and by the time I got back to it the offer had expired.