Contested Shots 24: Bowl Game Pick'Em Winnings from Cards on Cards

I love participating in fantasy sports leagues and pick'em contests. I've nearly always in some kind of league. Right now I've got 4 fantasy baseball teams and I'm involved in 2 NASCAR leagues. It's just part of the fun of watching sports for me. The Cards on Cards blog runs quite a few contests each year for a variety of sports, including a college football bowl game pick 'em contest that draws quite a few entries each year. I enter most of the contests. Sometimes I do well, and sometimes I 'win' the last-place prize. This year I wound up winning a prize in the Cards on Cards Bowl Pick'em contest. I missed first place on points, but I got the most correct picks and that was enough for me to be announced as a winner. The Cards on Cards contests also tend to be pretty generous with the number of winners. You should probably give the blog a follow and enter some of them.

The first card out was this giant Nolan Ryan card from the 1980 Topps Superstar 5x7. This is a set I wasn't familiar with (it came out the year before I was born), so I had to do some research to figure out where it came from. It's a pretty cool piece of cardboard.

There were plenty of basketball cards among the stacks of team bags in the mailer, with a mix of new and old cards. Mostly I scanned newer cards, though. I like Dwight Howard, but it sure seems like he has a hard time being a team player. James Harden has flourished this year, with a new-look lineup based around his skills. Patrick Beverley has been a big part of the Rockets' success this year, and Sam Dekker has looked pretty good in the limited time he gets on the court. Dekker is a high-energy guy, but sometimes it seems like he is pushing too hard. I guess being a fringe bench guy would push anyone to try really hard, because you only get so many minutes to play your way into another contract.

The bulk of the package was tons and tons and tons of Houston Astros cards, taken from many different eras. I tried to scan at least one card from every set represented in the package, but I might have failed. At the very least, I tried to make sure most of the notable players got into a scan. 

That Carlos Correa in the upper right corner is a Heritage Chrome parallel, numbered # 001 / 999 (the first one in the print run!). I always forget that Miguel Tejada spent time as an Astro. I always think of him as an Oriole, even though he spent more time with the A's than the Orioles. I think it's because many of his better seasons were in Baltimore, and that would have been right when I was drafting him heavily in fantasy baseball leagues.

Some of the current team's core can be found along that top row up there, with some big names from various other eras scattered throughout the scan. A.J. Reed down at the bottom is part of the convoluted mess that the Astros have at first base. He is currently getting some seasoning down at AAA.

A lot of these cards are from the time when I was out of collecting (roughly 2000-2013), so many sets that might be familiar to other collectors are new and wonderful to me. I am always jealous of people who can look at a card design and remember what year it's from. I usually have to do a little work, unless it is a product I've seen a whole lot of cards from.

These cards were in top loaders, and represent the premium cards in the package (along with that serially-numbered Heritage Correa from a few scans ago). The George Springer card is another Heritage Chrome parallel, numbered # 360 / 999. The Hunter Pence comes from the 2007 Fleer Ultra set. It's hard to believe that all the major sports just have one licensed card producer these days. I'd rather have 30 products divided among several manufacturers than 30 products put out by one card maker. But the leagues don't seem to care how I feel. That Tracy McGrady card comes from a Panini Adrenalyn XL game, and it appears to be a fancy foil card of some kind. The Luis Scola card from 2008-09 Bowman Draft Picks & Stars is pretty rare, numbered # 30 / 50. For a while he was one of the Rockets' better players, but he also got a pretty late start in the NBA and was never going to be the guy to bring them to glory. He was a pretty solid contributor, though, based on my unreliable recollection.

This was quite a prize package. I am envious of bloggers who have their lives together enough to run leagues, host contests, make frequent trades, and post excellent content. I am barely able to keep up with my posting, and my trading/sorting/contest efforts could be saddled with labels like 'unfortunate' or 'sadly lacking.' Thanks for the prize package, Kerry, and especially thank you for running so many entertaining contests! I like participating in your leagues even when I don't win.

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.