A Hobby Box of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing

I really like Panini Chronicles Racing, probably because of the sheer variety of cards you can find in every box. I usually don't get lucky and pull huge hits of big-name drivers, but there's usually a smattering of stuff that fits into my various collecting interests. It's hard (for me) to have a bad break of Chronicles Racing, as there's typically something interesting in there. That all being said, I opened up a couple boxes of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing recently. Here are some of the cards from the first box.

Technically I guess there is a Chronicles base set design and everything else is considered an insert, but I tend to think of the whole product outside of parallels and hits as one big conglomerate set. I took pictures of some of the sets designs I like, and some cards of drivers I collect. Some standouts for me this year were the Luminance and Thunder designs.

Here are a few more designs featuring drivers I collect. I especially like the Overdrive cards. They remind me of 90's Topps Chrome.

There were plenty of parallels in both boxes I opened. Most were of the /199 Blue variety. Nothing here really fits my collection, but I do like the look of the Blue parallels. The John Hunter Nemechek Pedal to the Metal card is especially eye-catching.

Every box has 2 Immaculate cards in it, which I guess replaces Spectra as the thick cardstock special set in the product. All the ones I pulled had serial numbering, but I don't know if that's true of all of them or if I am just lucky. I also got a Martin Truex Jr. card /99 and a clear acetate Richard Petty /100.

The lowest-numbered card in the box was this Lawless Alan /25. I've never heard of Lawless Alan, but he's got a great trading card name.

The box promises 4 hits, but I got 5 in each of my boxes. It used to be 3 autographs and 1 relic per box, but they did away with the guarantees this year. I still got 3 autographs per box, but I also got 2 relics per box. It's nice to get bonus hits, but I don't know if that happens across the print run. I guess the Chase Elliott Recon relic here is my favorite hit card from the box.

As I mentioned, there were three autographs in the box. The Spencer Boyd is /49, but I think the Chris Buescher Contenders auto is my favorite of the group.

That does it for my first Hobby box of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing. Overall this is a fun break that pays off in variety and has a rather narrow checklist of stars and rookies, so you're likely to pull something you like if you're a fan of racing.

Half a Blaster Case of 2021 Panini Chronicles Racing

I mentioned a while ago that I ordered a couple of blaster box cases as part of a big card order from Blowout Cards. The first I already showed off, a case of 2018 Donruss Racing. The other case was 2021 Panini Chronicles Racing. A blaster case is 20 boxes, so this post will cover the first 10 blasters.

 

By my count, there are 17 different base designs in the Chronicles set. It makes for a lot of sorting. Technically I think the Chronicles are the base set and the rest are inserts, but either way there are 17 different designs. I got nearly complete sets of most of the 20-cards checklists, and partial sets of the bigger checklists. Scattered throughout are Green retail-exclusive parallels. This is a stars and rookies product, so the big chase is whoever your favorite driver is, as long as they are a star or rookie.

Blue parallels are /199 and cover most of the base designs. I pulled Ryan Blaney, Austin Cindric, and Kyle Weatherman. Not much else to say about these, as none of them really fit into my collection.

This Tyler Reddick Spectra parallel is numbered /99. Spectra is one of the bigger checklists in the product, so I didn't come close to completing it. There are parallels and nickname variations as well, which make it even harder to complete.

I was happy to pull a numbered Dale Earnhardt Jr. card, as he is one of the drivers I collect. Even better is that he is featured in his National Guard branding. I spent 20 years with the National Guard and retired last year, so I like this particular branding scheme.

The Jet Black Materials and Newly Minted relic sets feature multiple swatches per card. The Austin Dillon card has firesuit and tire, while the Paul Menard adds sheet metal to the mix.

Status Swatches are one of the basic relics you'll pull from this product. I wouldn't say I collect Ryan Newman, but I've gathered a handful of his cards over the years. With this being a 2021 product, many of the photos of current drivers feature masks prominently.

Chronicles Swatches are the basic hit you find in blasters. I pulled Ryan Preece, Erik Jones, and Aric Almirola. Two tires and one firesuit relic. Again, not much among the hits that fits into my collection specifically, although I cast a pretty wide net when it comes to collecting.

Each lot of 10 blasters gave up two autographs, with this half of the case yielding Michael Waltrip and Anthony Alfredo. Again, not anything that fits into my collection specifically, but nice to add a couple of names to my collection that I don't think I had autographs for yet.

That does it for the first 10 boxes of the case. As far as my collection goes, the best cards were probably the Dale Earnhardt Jr. parallel /99 and some of the Green retail parallels of various drivers I collect.

Half a Blaster Case of 2018 Donruss Racing

I recently made a decent-sized purchase from Blowout Cards. Part of the buy was a couple cases of Panini racing card blaster boxes. The first case was 2018 Donruss Racing. Not a super exciting product, but at $5 per blaster I thought it would be pretty fun. I'll show the hits from half the case at a time, just to keep from having the post be too long for me to deal with.

Those are the base cards from the entire case. I got 3 full base sets out of it, and 6 or 7 copies of many base cards. I actually sat down and sorted all of it this weekend, which was quite a project.

You're going to get plenty of parallels in Donruss, mostly identified by a slight color variation in the foil. This Austin Dillon holofoil Press Proof was the lowest-numbered card of the break, at /49. It's a lot shinier in the picture than in real life, but I'll take it.

This Jamie McMurray car card was the only /199 card in this half of the case. I averaged just over one numbered card per blaster, which is decent at the price point I paid. I bought this on sale at $100/case, and it's currently listed on Blowout at $400/case. I wouldn't recommend buying it at $400/case.

Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano make up the /299 parallels from these 10 blaster boxes. The Hamlin card shows the Race Kings design from the base set, which I think is pretty good. The Joey Logano card is a variation. The photo/nickname variations in the set aren't short-printed, appearing just about as often as their base counterparts. I sorted them as part of the base set rather than putting them in the back of the box with the parallels and inserts.

I pulled five /499 Gold parallels, with the Chase Elliott car card probably being the best of the bunch. Corey LaJoie and Carl Edwards are part of the Retro 1985 portion of the checklist, which all told is 175 cards deep.

Most of your insert parallels are going to be the Cracked Ice /999 variety. I don't really care about the numbering that much, but I think the Cracked Ice foil treatment is pretty sharp-looking. It's not really evident in this photo, but the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Studio card is particularly striking with its dark blue border and the foil.

Big hits out of this product are rare in retail. This is one to break for fun rather than for money. I suppose that should be true of all products, but some lottery tickets have bigger prizes than others. This is the low end of the trading card lottery pool, where the $1 scratchers are. The Brendan Gaughan card is a parallel of the 1985 relic design, numbered /99. I believe it's the only numbered relic or auto from the whole break.

This AJ Allmendinger Racing Relics sheet metal card was the lone representative from Racing Relics to come from the entire case.

The majority of hits from Donruss Racing come in the form of tire swatches in the Rubber Relics set. I got some good names in this batch, like Kurt Busch and Martin Truex Jr.

The lone signature from this half-case was Spencer Davis.

That does it for half a case (10 blaster boxes) of 2018 Donruss Racing. I got a handful of relics and inserts that fit into my various collections, and a whole ton of base cards that I can use as fortifications when the world ends. At $100/case you could do worse than this. At $400/case you should probably look at something else.

Some Box Breaks and Other Things

A while back I wanted to bust some packs, so I ordered some boxes of my favorite products of the last year or so from Blowout Cards. It feels a little weird that I don't have any baseball product in this order, but I've sort of moved into only buying singles and sets for that sport. I collect a relatively small number of baseball players, so the likelihood of pulling something that fits into my collection is slim. I tend to enjoy all kinds of stuff from racing, wrestling, and UFC, so the randomness of box busting is a little more collection-friendly for me.

There's the lineup of boxes. For wrestling I got a blaster of 2017 Topps WWE Women's Division, a hobby box of 2018 Topps WWE Women's Division, and a hobby box of 2019 Topps WWE Road to WrestleMania. For racing I got a box of 2018 Panini Victory Lane and a box of 2018 Panini Certified. I also got a box of 2018 Topps UFC Chrome. The pictures below are not really in order, so anyone who can't handle chaos should probably take off, eh.

Here are a couple of card from the Victory Lane box, an insert parallel of Alex Bowman and a Engineered to Perfection triple relic of Denny Hamlin. I guess this is as good a place as any to repeat that I have a mild interest in Hamlin cards because I worked for his sponsor, FedEx, for a couple of years.

The blaster of 2017 Topps WWE Women's Division turned out to be a pretty good one, with a Blue parallel of Lana and an autograph of Nikki Bella.

These breaks were pretty heavy on the Alex Bowman cards. These cards all came from 2018 Panini Certified. I got that Red Certified Signatures Alex Bowman autograph with two relic swatches, a Gold All-Certified Team insert of Kyle Larson, and two different versions of Bowman's Skills insert.

Here are some Red and Gold parallels and hits from the Certified box. I bought the Certified stuff hoping to get a Hailie Deegan autograph, but that didn't happen for me.

Here are the last couple cards from the Certified box, a couple of basic relic inserts featuring Jamie McMurray and Chase Elliott.

Here are the hits from the 2018 Topps WWE Women's Division box. I got a Silver parallel of Rusev kicking Elias in the face, which kind of makes up for the fact that there aren't any Women's Division wrestlers on the card. That Carmella autograph is a testament to the fact that female athletes don't always have great penmanship. I am always happy to get another Naomi card, even if this is just a manufactured relic.

I got a # / 25 parallel, a Kofi Kingston autograph, and a Titus O'Neil manufactured relic out of the 2019 Topps WWE Road to WrestleMania set. You may recognize Kofi Kingston as the current WWE World Heavyweight Champion.

The UFC Chrome box was a fun break, as usual for this particular product. These insert Refractors are of the # / 50 variety.

These are some of the more colorful Refractors in the box, an Orange # / 25 of Lyoto Machida and a Green # / 99 of Chuck Liddell. 

The box was a hot box, meaning that every pack contained one of those Refractors with the crazy patterned background shown on the Rose Namajunas and Holly Holm cards. X-Fractors and Blue Wave Refractors both come one per box, but X-Fractors are unnumbered while the Blue Waves are # / 75.

Each box of UFC Chrome has two autographs (unless you get a hot box with an OctoFractor), and I did pretty well here. The Claudia Gadelha signature is a base autograph, while the Amanda Nunes is an Orange # / 25.

Back to racing with some more Victory Lane stuff, including a Justin Haley autograph, a nice Chase Elliott auto-relic, and a dual relic of Justin Allgaier.

I pulled two # 1 / 1 cards in this break, and they both came from the Victory Lane box. One is a Yellow printing plate featuring none other than Dale Earnhardt Jr. The other is a Prime Patches card of Jamie McMurray, featuring the series sponsor patch from his firesuit.

Here's a bunch of other stuff I've picked up over the last couple of months. These two autographs were fun finds for me. The Josh Reddick comes from 2012 Topps Mini. It was hard to find autographs in these Mini products, so it was cool to see one in the wild. The R.A. Dickey card is a wrapper redemption autograph from 2013. I don't recall seeing many of these out there, either.

I was glad to add another Jake Butt card to my collection. I believe this one comes from 2017 Panini Unparalleled. The Charlotte Flair signature is a Silver parallel from 2019 Topps Road to WrestleMania. I like the design of that set's autographs, so I was happy to get one of the Queen.

Here are a couple of redemptions that came in from Topps. One is a UFC Museum Collection autograph of Maryna Moroz, which I believe is the first Moroz signature in my collection. The other is a Vanessa Borne card from the 2018 Topps WWE Women's Division set. Again, I think that might be my first autograph from her.

These cards were COMC purchases. Up first is an Octane Autographs card of Bubba Wallace from 2018 Panini Victory Lane. The other is a Green autograph of Naomi from 2018 Topps WWE Undisputed. The parallel coloring bleeds into the photographs on this set, leading to some weird situations, but in this case the green matches well with Naomi's gear.

This year's Topps Heritage set included box toppers featuring Topps staffers. I had to chase this one down on eBay because it pictures Sooz, one member of the A Cardboard Problem blog team and an active member of card Twitter.

I was one of the people who ordered one of the tablecloth relic cards from Manny Machado's press conference. The backlash against this card was so furious that I had to get one for my collection. I love things that other people hate, and the laugh I get from seeing this card in my collection is well worth the price.

The Alex Bregman card is a replacement for a damaged Bregman relic I got in the mail after buying a 2018 Topps Holiday box that was missing a hit. Attached to the card was a sort of passive-aggressive note reminding me that the damaged card was not folded in half when it was shipped. That was kind of the point. I was disappointed in the packaging. Poor packaging tends to lead to shipping damage. The other card is a replacement for a damaged Sandy Alcantara card I pulled from a rack pack of 2018 Topps Fire.

I was chasing a Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat card from 2018 Topps WWE Legends set, and I was pretty happy to get this Bronze autographed relic. I also picked up a Diamond Dallas Page autograph.

I also got this cool Alundra Blayze Hall of Fame Ring relic autograph card. This is the Gold version of the card, so it is limited to 10 copies. In the same group of auctions I picked up this Paige VanZant signature from Leaf.

That about does it for this bunch. Although my production of blog posts has slowed to a crawl, I am still actively collecting. I am trying to get back into the swing of my hobbies, but there are a lot of things competing for my attention right now and I spend most of my time feeling worn out.