A Second Box of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing

I mentioned in my last post that I'd opened a couple boxes of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing. It's probably my favorite racing product to open because of the variety of designs and the checklist's focus on stars and rookies. I always know I'm going to pull something for my collection.

Here are four of the base designs that I liked from the box. Danica Patrick has long been the most numerous racer in my collection, and Brittney Zamora has been my non-retired collection focus for the last couple of years. Luckily they both make appearances in most products, so I always have new cards to chase.

These are four more of the base designs. I haven't counted the base designs yet, but there are quite a few Panini brands represented in the checklist. Thunder and Luminance are a couple of my favorites. Luminance has a very Stadium Club feel to it.

 

In addition to a lot of base designs and plenty of hits per box, this product also drops a lot of parallels on you. The basic parallel in Hobby boxes is the Blue /199. It's a good-looking color. Pulling a couple of Hailie Deegan Blues in this box was pretty good. She's one of the better sellers in the current crop of young racers.

My Immaculate pulls were both pretty low-numbered, with an /25 and an /51. I assume that all of the Immaculate cards are serially-numbered, based on my small sample size. The big names came in the Red parallels for me, with a Jimmie Johnson /99 and a clear Kevin Harvick /100.

Each box promises four hits, but I pulled five in each of my two boxes. Not sure if that's typical of the print run, or if I just got lucky. I pulled three autos and two relics per box, although Panini stopped guaranteeing a certain number of autographs this year. I pulled a basic tire relic of Tanner Gray and a triple relic of Austin Cindric.

The Chase Briscoe autograph here is actually an /10 Gold parallel, so it's the lowest-numbered card in my Chronicles break. I would argue that the Kevin Harvick Immaculate auto-relic is actually the hit of the break, though. It's a nice-looking card of a guy I kind of collect.

That does it for this break of 2023 Panini Chronicles Racing. It's a fun product with a lot of variety. Again, it's probably my favorite racing product to open because the checklist is full of good drivers and there is so much different stuff you can pull.

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.

A Grail Card, and a Really Nice Bonus Card

I've mentioned this card on my blog a few times over the years as one that I really wanted to add to my collection, but I never thought I had a realistic shot at obtaining it. This copy of it has been on eBay for a few months, and the price has slowly gone down to the point where I finally jumped on it and bought it.

The card in question is this 2010 Press Pass Showcase Classic Collections Ink Fan Favorites autograph card featuring the signatures of Dale Earnhardt Jr., Danica Patrick, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart. There are a couple parallel versions of this card. My copy is the Gold parallel, numbered # 02 / 10. The card is acetate, so the signatures are all on clear plastic windows. I wasn't really chasing a graded version of the card, but this one happened to be graded. I think the autographs got a 9 because Jeff Gordon's 'J' slips off the card a bit. I am just happy to land this card, which I've been drooling over for a long time.

From the back you can see the signature windows and the printed areas. It's kind of crazy to think that these drivers are all retired now. What a lineup of names, though!

This card was the bonus card that came in the lot. I would have bought the autograph anyway, but I'm not going to complain about a patch card featuring the same four drivers. I have a couple other similar cards featuring sheet metal swatches, but this is my first Classic Collections Firesuit card from 2010 Press Pass Showcase. This is the Melting parallel, numbered # 3 / 5, and featuring rainbow holofoil to distinguish it from the base version. Those patches are sweet.

Here's the back of the card, with the same pictures as you see on the front, as well as a ton of logos and legalese.

It's not often that you add a true white whale to your collection, and I was very happy when this package arrived safely in the mail. I paid less for the quadrograph than I thought I would have to, and it jumps right to the top as far as NASCAR cards in my collection. The patch memorabilia card ranks up there, too, and it was really just a throw-in on the deal.

The Japanese Sumo Wrestling Cards and Menko Blog Sent a Little Bit of Everything My Way

A while back, R Laughton of the Japanese Sumo Wrestling Cards and Menko blog reached out to me, saying he had a few things he'd like to send my way. He really did send me a little bit of everything, including the things you might expect to see on a blog about sumo wrestling cards and Menko. I didn't scan it all, but I scanned enough to show the breadth of the things that came out of the stuffed mailer that arrived in my mailbox.

First up was a stack of sumo cards from the 1999 BBM set. I don't know much about sumo, but I did a quick read-up on the sport. Two things that really interested me about sumo were the dedication required to be a professional and the complex ranking system.

He also enclosed a large group of menko cards from the 1950's. Again, I am not an expert in this world, so I can't say much more about them than what he told me. Luckily, his blog is a great resource for someone wanting to learn more about menko. Out of this group, I particularly like the Western-themed cards, as cowboy movies are something I enjoy watching from time to time.

The back of each card features a Rock-Paper-Scissors symbol and a fight number, which are two different ways of playing games with menko. Originally menko were used in a game that Americans of my generation would recognize by the name Pogs, where a card is thrown in an attempt to flip the opponent's card over. Then kids started collecting the menko instead of playing with them, and these alternate game aids were printed on the backs to give them a way to play games without damaging their cards.

Here are a couple more menko, which feature big robots and monsters, but I don't know if they are generic or tied to a specific property.

The backs of the cards suggest that they might belong to different sets, although I can't be certain of that. The one on the left has a very clear line where the bottom layer of cardboard doesn't reach quite as for as the top layer of cardboard. These things are thick.

Moving into things that are more familiar to me, R Laughton included a big stack of cards from BBM's 1995 Pro Wrestling Cards set. A couple of my favorites were these logo cards from AJW and JWP. One of my favorite wrestlers, Command Bolshoi, is the current President of JWP, while AJW folded in 2005.

Here are a few of the wrestler cards included in the stack. Some of these wrestlers are still active now, 21 years after the release of this set.

R Laughton also touched on many of my mini-collections and player collections. There was a wide array of good mustache cards, with Franco, Viola, and Garcia among the standouts. There was some nice cardboard of Jim Abbott, Carlos Correa, Goose Gossage, and some shiny cards featuring Andrew McCutchen.

 There was a little bit of football cardboard in the package, as well as a number of neat NASCAR cards. For the NASCAR scans, I mostly chose the craziest of the die-cut cards, as there were many designs I was not familiar with. The other day I took one of those Facebook quizzes that asked if you could name the driver of the pictured car. I did pretty well on the quiz, but whoever made the quiz must not have realized that the driver's names are usually printed above the door and/or on the windshield of the car.

Closing out the cardboard portion of the scans is a six-pack of Nolan Ryan cards. They include a Goose Gossage cameo (or is it a Nolan Ryan cameo?) and a Coca-Cola oddball. You've gotta love those old Astros uniforms. I've wanted to get a Nolan Ryan rainbow jersey for years (probably decades) now, but I've never been able to pull the trigger on it.

Finally, he included an unopened pack of Star Wars: Episode I widevision cards with a price tag from 7-11 in Japan. I am still mad that 7-11 pulled out of Idaho, as I have to travel at least one state away to get a Slurpee. This is a cool collectible, though, and I might just leave it unopened for now.

That is just a sampling of the cool stuff included in this package. I am extremely grateful for all of it, and I am excited to be inducted into the world of menko. Thanks, R Laughton!

Junior Junkie's Best Page Challenge

 

The Junior Junkie recently posted a challenge to create the best binder page possible from your collection and share it with the world (or at least the sports card blog-reading world). Coming up with my page was pretty easy to come up with, but it was a little bit harder than I thought it would be to fill out all nine slots. I started thinking that I could probably do a complete page for many of my mini-collections, like sketch cards, Star Wars, wrestling, baseball, basketball, maybe football, and some of my player collections. There are some notable (to me) cards that didn't make the cut. Some of the cards that did make the cut aren't 100% secure in their spots. But if I tried to make a definitive best page it would get posted 15 years from now and no one would know what I was talking about when I linked back to The Junior Junkie's post from 2015. This is the best page from my collection that I could come up with after a couple days of thinking about it and about 35 minutes sorting through boxes to find cards. I also didn't scan them into a binder page because the relic cards wouldn't fit and I was nervous in general about putting these cards in and out of pages, sleeves, and top loaders. These are the best 9 cards in my collection, after all.

• I considered putting Hakeem Olajuwon's rookie card on the page, but I think his second-year 1987-88 Fleer card is probably more important to me. When I was a teenager and heavily into basketball card collecting, his 1986-87 Fleer Rookie card booked for between $100 and $200. It was unattainable. The local shop had his 1987-88 card in the display case for $30 + tax, and I eventually saved up enough money to buy it. After bringing it home I realized that it had soft corners and a light crease and probably wasn't worth a quarter of what I paid for it, but it was still a second-year Hakeem Olajuwon card and the centerpiece of my collection. Now you can get them for a buck or two all day long, and you can even get a PSA 9 copy for less than $20 shipped. But this card will always be special just because I saved up for so long and felt so much excitement leading up to the purchase of the card. I may or may not track down a 'better' copy some day.
• This Hakeem Olajuwon relic / auto comes from a set so high-end it gets delivered in a briefcase instead of a cardboard box, 2012-13 Panini Flawless. It is easily the most valuable Olajuwon card in my collection and also my only Olajuwon autograph. He actually signed these cards twice, once on the card and once on the relic swatch. I doubt this will be surpassed in the near future as the centerpiece of my Olajuwon collection.
• Card # 3 in my binder page is the only Superfractor in my collection. More importantly, it is the jewel in my Josh Reddick 2013 Topps Super Rainbow. The same photo was used for his cards across several different products in 2013, so I decided to build a multi-product rainbow of parallels. You can see the current rainbow in it's entirety here. I am still missing some cards, but I've got 38 different variations so far. Most of what I'm missing is 1 / 1 's, printing plates, and a few # / 5 and maybe some # / 10 cards. I overpaid for this card, but I 'needed' it.

• This was my first Carrie Fisher autograph, and it is still the best one I've got. It's a sticker autograph from the 2013 Topps Star Wars: Jedi Legacy set. I would love to get one of the on-card ones like the ones she signed for Masterwork or Chrome, but I don't have $250-350 just sitting around right now for that. If I were to add one of those to my collection they would bump this one from the page.
• The infamous C-3PO # 207 error card from 1977 Topps Star Wars was one of the borderline cards for this page, but I needed something with a bit of a laugh factor on my page. These aren't particularly rare, but they sell pretty consistently at a premium. If you haven't noticed it yet, the error is that C-3PO happens to be sporting an extra-long golden probe at his waistline. There are various stories that attempt to explain the origins of the error. Some say that a piece fell off the costume just as the photographer took the picture. Some assert that it was a trick of the light. Some even think a mischievous or vindictive Topps employee painted the wang onto the photo prior to sending the set to print. C-3PO's golden member caused an uproar and the error was corrected in later print runs. No matter how the error was caused, this card makes me laugh every time I see it and that propels it to a spot on the page. Other candidates for this spot were a 2013 Topps Star Wars: Jedi Legacy relic piece from Jabba the Hutt's Sail Barge and a Shield Bunker relic from 2015 Star Wars Masterwork.
• The final card on this row is a card that I sought out for a very long time before Zippy Zappy found a copy and directed me to the seller who had it. It's a Foil Rare card of R.A. Dickey from 2013 SEGA Card-Gen, a card set dispensed in Japan by an arcade game that used the cards as playing pieces. I had obtained quite a few SEGA Card-Gen cards, but this one was a bear to track down. For that reason it is probably my most-loved R.A. Dickey card and my most favorite SEGA Card-Gen card. That's good enough to put it on this page as a representative of both collections.

• Putting two NASCAR cards on this page seems a little like overkill, especially since I don't have any football cards on here and the other sports are a bit short, too. In the end I couldn't decide on a football or baseball card that would definitively bump either of these cards off the list, so I kept them both here. The first one is an auto / relic of Danica patrick from 2014 Press Pass Five Star. It's got a nice clean autograph and a big piece of firesuit with part of the GoDaddy logo on it. I'm thinking the relic could be part of the collar of the firesuit, but it may come from the sleeve or the chest or really just about anywhere, as there seem to be 7 or 8 different GoDaddy patches on her firesuits. That will change soon as GoDaddy dropped from her list of primary sponsors and got replaced by Nature's Bakery. I'll miss the bright green color scheme but it will at least be something different to collect as soon as someone picks up the NASCAR trading card license.
• The second card is nearly a Holy Grail of NASCAR for me. It's got sheet metal relic pieces from the cars arguably my four favorite drivers embedded in it. The reason I call it nearly a Holy Grail card is that there is an autograph version featuring signatures from all these drivers. That card would be an awesome addition to my collection, but I think the cheapest I've ever seen it on the market was over $800. The card has Dale Earnhardt Jr., Danica Patrick, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart on it. That's some pretty good star power. This memorabilia version is a very good place holder against the day when I get that other card. This card comes from the 2010 Press Pass Showcase set. I actually have another version of this card, but this one made the cut because it's a parallel with a lower print run.
• The last card on the page is a nod to an iconic wrestling figure on an iconic card design, Hulk Hogan on a Precious Metal Gems card. This card was only issued to Upper Deck employees as a special incentive card and was limited to a print run of 125 copies. There were some other sports figures in the set, like Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, and Michael Phelps, but the Hulkster was the one I wanted. I actually wound up buying a lot of four of these because it was much cheaper per unit than singles were at the time. I have since sold two of them, but haven't got around to selling the third one. I think I made my money back on the two sales, so there isn't a lot of pressure to get that one out the door. Recently one of the ones I'd sold popped up on eBay with a BGS 9.0 slab on it. I don't think the guy made any money off of it after accounting for grading fees, eBay fees, and shipping. The Hulkster's star has lost some shine over the last year or two, but he is the one guy who really represents the totality of professional wrestling during my youth. This Precious Metal Gems card is one of my favorite cards and is easily the centerpiece of my WWF/WWE collection. I thought about putting a Japanese wrestling card in this spot, but I don't have one single card that represents my collection as an extension of myself as well as this one does.

And that's it for my own best 9-card page of cards in my collection. There were a couple of notable snubs, a couple of gut calls, and plenty of nostalgia and fun as I sorted through my cards trying to pick the 'best' ones from my collection. In the end I think I am pretty comfortable with my choice. One big category of card that I left out was sketches. I have quite a few sketches and I have favorites among them, but I would have difficulty putting one of them above the others. I thought it would be better just to leave them out. I felt bad that some of my favorite players got excluded, like Gheorghe Muresan, Munenori Kawasaki, Jon Singleton, and Manute Bol, but I didn't have cards from them that could bump these other cards from the list. That was in large part due to some of the cards on my page filling roles in several categories, like R.A. Dickey's card being a key card in that player collection as well as representing SEGA Card-Gen on the page.

Quadzilla NASCAR Relic: Earnhardt Jr., Patrick, Gordon, Stewart

I picked up this card in March. I already had a more limited version of the card that I got in early 2014, but at the price this one surfaced for I couldn't let it go. It features sheet metal relics from four of my favorite NASCAR drivers' cars, with a nice variety of colors and some good paint scrapes on the Danica Patrick and Tony Stewart swatches. The other two featured drivers are Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This copy of the card is numbered # 79 / 99.

The set this card comes from is 2010 Press Pass Showcase, and the insert is named Classic Collections Fan Favorites. I still think it's a shame that Press Pass closed up shop and left the NASCAR license without a card producer. There is plenty of the older stuff out there on eBay so it's not like I am hurting for cards to chase, but as a card collector I do like to have new things to see and chase. A lot of the eBay stuff now is the overpriced Buy It Now auctions that have been cycling for the last three years with no change in the price tag.

I haven't sat down to watch a NASCAR race in a couple of months, but I do follow the races as they progress on the NASCAR.com leaderboard tracker. Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon seem to be struggling a lot this year. It's a shame especially for Gordon as this is his farewell tour before retirement. He's still just inside the Chase for the Cup playoff field, so he might be able to salvage a good end to the season with some strong runs in the last third of the season. Danica Patrick has shown fairly stead improvement year over year, but hasn't made the big jump where she is a week-to-week threat to win a race. She is more like a week-to-week threat to break into the Top 15, with finishes between 20th and 27th place being the expectation. Earnhardt Jr. is squarely in the top half of the Chase field with a couple of wins and plenty of Top 5 / Top 10 finishes on the year.

This is a super cool card to get. I like these multiple relic cards for NASCAR drivers, although they usually come with a price tag that matches their awesomeness. It's especially nice because if I had to pick four drivers to appear on a card, these would be the ones I'd choose. It's like Press Pass read my mind three years before I got back into card collecting. This one slipped through at a discount, maybe because the seller was trying to clear some stuff out or because it's got some rough corners. I think if the seller had put it out for auction rather than Buy It Now it might have fetched double what I paid for it. At least that's what I tell myself.

2014 Press Pass National Redline Intensity Set

I've been absent from the blog and the online card world for the last week or more. There are many reasons for that, but most of it has to do with a feeling of lethargy that hits me every time I sit down to write a blog post. I guess that is a sign that it's time for a break. I've still got 20 or 30 posts sitting in the queue, a bunch of scans in my photo folder waiting to become posts in the queue, and a bunch of cards sitting in stacks waiting to be scanned so I can process the photos and place them in queued posts. It feels a lot like work. The other thing that has been keeping me from posting is OOTP 16, the baseball simulation game. I always want to just play one more month, or just until the All-Star break, or just until the trade deadline, or just until Hall of Fame voting results are announced. It's a real problem. If you are a baseball fan and have a tendency to get absorbed in virtual worlds, stay far away from OOTP 16.

This is one of those shiny card sets that scans poorly, looking muddy and highlighting only the debris on your scanner bed. It's a 5-card Press Pass Redline Intensity set that was available at the 2014 National convention. I didn't attend the National in 2014 (or in any other year), but I needed to add a couple of dollars to my order at Dave & Adam's a few months back to qualify for free shipping, and this fit the bill. The cards feature a black and white portrait of the driver in the upper 2/3 of the card, and a color photo of them in their helmets in the lower 1/3 of the card. Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a pretty good run in the Auto Club 400 last week, starting 17th and finishing in 6th place. This week in the STP 500 he had a much rougher go of it, starting in 14th place but wrecking and breaking his shifter lever off and finally taking 36th place. The bad showing dropped him to 9th in the overall points standings for the season.

I like Jeff Gordon, but I don't really track his race finishes or his place in the standings. I don't pay much attention at all to Jimmie Johnson. Danica Patrick did okay at the Auto Club 400, starting in 22nd and climbing a couple of spots over the course of the race to finish in 19th. She did really well in the STP 500, starting in 16th and finishing inside the Top 10 with a 7th-place run. That finish moved her up several spots to 16th in the overall points. Tony Stewart has struggled this year. He started the Auto Club 400 in 20th and finished in 14th, and then in the STP 500 he started well in 6th but fell to 20th by the end of the race. He is currently 32nd in the overall standings. The other driver I follow is Josh Wise, who doesn't appear in this set. In the Auto Club 400 he started in 35th and finished in 36th, and in the STP 500 he started in 31st and finished in 30th place. He is 35th in overall points for the year.

Contested Shots 5: A Little Win and a Huge Loss

This past year I participated in the official Press Pass Yahoo! Fantasy NASCAR league, and I did pretty well. I wound up finishing 6th out of around 100 participants. Sixth place wasn't good enough to win, but the 4th and 5th place folks never responded to requests for their shipping information and after a while I got an e-mail telling me I was next in line if I responded with my address. I didn't know what the prize would be, but I was sure happy to provide my information. It turned out to be a Hobby box of 2014 Press Pass Total Memorabilia cards. Five packs, with a hit in each pack. That's a pretty good prize, and this post was all set to be a happy and victorious post about my big win.

But now I have to address the loss part of the post title. Various outlets are now reporting that Press Pass is going out of business. It looks like the news started with a tweet ESPN Sports Business Reporter Darren Rovell, and then spread quickly to other collecting media outlets like Beckett. I guess maybe I should have realized something was up, since the last post on the Press Pass Facebook page was back around Thanksgiving, but a lot of smaller companies come and go on social media without going out of business. Press Pass put out a lot of really neat and innovative racing cards and with many years working with NASCAR probably developed a pretty good relationship with the drivers and teams.

If the news is true, the collector in me can't help wondering where I will get my NASCAR fix from now on. There are plenty of past releases out there for me to acquire for my favorite drivers, but I like new stuff just as much as the next guy. I hope that some company is able to pick up the license in time to put out 2015 sets, and I really hope that whatever company winds up with the NASCAR rights doesn't completely blow it. I like shiny new things, but I hate change.

Press Pass put out a lot of good products. Their flagship set each year was really nice for the couple years that I've been collecting them, and their memorabilia and autograph products usually were innovative and well-designed. Whoever picks up the license has a lot to learn. Maybe they will be able to pull in some of the Press Pass staff and glean their institutional knowledge to facilitate a smooth transition.

Enough about that mess. Let's see what I pulled from my prize box:

As far as base cards go, I just got one card that fits into my Driver Collections. Josh Wise is a driver for a lower-tier team, and got a bit of publicity in 2014 when the users of Reddit raised funds to buy a sponsorship for his car and then voted him into the All-Star Race over Danica Patrick. They also sold some t-shirts to fund the Dogecoin sponsorship for another race. I was able to add the Dogecoin die-cast model to my NASCAR die-cast collection when it was released near the end of the year. It's one of my favorite additions of the last few months. I am not sure if Wise will be back in 2015, but I guess we'll see how it goes. The last few spots in the NASCAR running order are kind of like your Quad-A guys in baseball, with a mix of older guys barely hanging on and your young prospects getting a chance to try their hand in the big leagues.

I got a couple of these shiny Black & White Holofoil parallels in the box, both numbered out of # / 99. Neither driver is anyone I have a lot of interest in, which was a theme throughout most of this break. The Elliott Sadler card is # 10 / 99 and the Ty Dillon card is # 46 / 99.

The Gold parallels worked out all right for me, with the big highlight being the Danica Patrick card there in the center. She is the main driver I collect, and this Gold parallel is numbered # 165 / 175. Kyle Busch isn't a bad pull either, as he drives the popular M&Ms (and sometimes Skittles or Snickers) car. The Busch is numbered # 087 / 175. David Ragan I don't really have an opinion on at all. His card is # 066 / 175.

Acceleration is one of the inserts in the product, showing off a couple pictures of the cars to go along with a driver photo. I got another Kyle Busch card here, along with another guy I like to collect in Jeff Gordon. There are a few other drivers here, but no one I really pay attention to. I guess I pay a little attention to Clint Bowyer because of his absolutely wooden acting in the 5-hour Energy commercials.

I guess if I am thinking about 5-hour Energy while I sit here and type this post, then Clint Bowyer did his job effectively as a shill for the company.

The other insert set in 2014 Total Memorabilia is this NASCAR Hall of Fame set. It's a shiny foil set with little medallion-looking illustrations for each driver. The Rusty Wallace appears to be some kind of holofoil variant, but I couldn't find much information about them online.

And now we get to the hits. All of these cards are pretty thick, and the excessive foiling around the edges means that most of them come out of the pack looking pretty rough, with soft corners and chipping appearing pretty much universally. This Joey Logano card is numbered # 048 / 150 and features bits of tire and sheet metal from his car.

These two cards feature three swatches each, and are numbered out of # / 99. Brian Vickers' card has a pretty nice bit of firesuit, a piece of shoe, and a glove swatch. It is numbered # 57 / 99. Clint Bowyer makes another appearance, with his card featuring a firesuit / shirt / sheet metal combination. It is numbered # 32 / 99. I wonder if he is actually wearing a blank cap, or if the logos on his cap had to be airbrushed out for some reason?

I guess this would be the hit of the break, if we were trying to determine that sort of thing. It's an Austin Dillion Champion's Collection relic card, featuring a large bit of firesuit and numbered # 01 / 25. It commemorates him winning the 2013 NASCAR Nationwide Series Championship. One thing that would add immensely to this card would be to have some sort of color in the firesuit swatch.

And the final card to show from the box is this Rising Stars relic / autograph of Ryan Gifford. It's numbered # 60 / 99 and features a piece of glove. The autograph isn't really that fuzzy. It's just set back in a little shadowbox and my scanner has a hard time dealing with the change in depth. He races down in the lower circuits right now, but he ran a couple of Nationwide races last year and may eventually move up into the higher levels.

That's about it for this box. There wasn't much outside of the Danica Patrick Gold parallel as far as additions to my personal collection, and there weren't any mind-blowing hits. I'd say that the two boxes of 2013 Ignite I got from Blowout Cards' Black Friday sale offered much more in the way of excitement, but I can't complain too much because the box was free. If you kept the mix of cards the same and changed a few driver names around this could have been a really exciting box for me.

It's a shame that Press Pass looks to be done printing cards. I never really liked their sports cards during my first stint in the collecting hobby during the 90's, but their racing cards over the last few years have been really nice. I hope that someone else will pick up the NASCAR license soon and I really hope that whoever it is manages not to screw things up.

Black Friday Blowout Part 2: More 2014 Press Pass Ignite

This is the second box of 2014 Press Pass Ignite that I got in the Blowout Cards Black Friday Doorbusters sale. It would be hard to live up to the first box in the break, which produced 3 relic cards, two numbered parallels, a 1/2-case special card, and a low-numbered autograph from one of NASCAR's bigger names. This box didn't quite match the fireworks, but I still pulled some good cards, including a very nice PC hit.

This is what the normal base cards look like. They are quite colorful, and feature the drivers in their best 'standing there' poses. I included Josh Wise in the scan because I became a fan of his this season after the big push from internet users to sponsor his Dogecoin car, which I was able to acquire in die-cast form a little while ago. Danica Patrick and Tony Stewart are mainstays on my top driver list, and Travis Pastrana is a crossover star from the world of the X Games, motocross, and rally cars who ran some colorful cars in the Nationwide series before leaving at the end of the 2013 season. He's got a couple of die-cast out there that I'd like to pick up some day.

I again got two each of the Turning Point and Convoy inserts, For Turning Point I got Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick, who won this year's Sprint Cup Championship. For Convoy inserts I got another of my favorite racers in Dale Earnhardt Jr. and also Kasey Kahne, a driver I really have no opinion on whatsoever. I will be sad to see the National Guard sponsorship of Dale Jr.'s car lapse, but I can see how taxpayers might not want their money funding a racing team.

I got the usual two Profile inserts, with this box yielding Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin. I used to like the FedEx car, but I don't anymore. Neither of these cards does a whole lot for me, but once I find the Ignite cards from previous purchases I can pool them and see how close I am to completing these insert sets. I got one Hall of Fame insert, featuring a guy named Buck Baker. I don't know a single thing about him.

Another insert in this box was a part of the Davey Allison tribute set, honoring the 20th Anniversary of his death in a helicopter accident. It was issued across 5 different Press Pass products in 2013, with two cards from the set found in each release.

Since this was a special Hobby box, it contained a Power Pack, which contained a Kyle Busch Power Picks card numbered # 29 / 99, and a Jeff Gordon Hot Threads relic card similar to the one that I got in the Power Pack from the last box, although this one has a plain black swatch as opposed to the two-color red/black relic on the other card.

My autograph for this box was a Scott Speed Ignite Ink Black card numbered # 62 / 99. It's not quite as exciting as the Kyle Busch autograph I pulled from the first box of this break. Speed was a transfer from Formula One racing, and didn't find a whole lot of success in the world of NASCAR. His last race was in 2013, and I don't know if he'll be coming back for another try.

My numbered parallel was a Clint Bowyer Yellow Color Proof, which is Hobby-Only and numbered # 5 / 5. Bowyer has had a pretty good career, with a whole pile of Top 10 finishes, a few wins, and a 2nd-place finish in the 2012 Sprint Cup Championship standings.

For me the big his of the box was the relic card, a Hot Threads Red parallel of Dale Earnhardt Jr., numbered # 08 / 10. It's a nice low-numbered card of one of my favorite drivers and it features a three-color relic swatch. It's pretty good stuff. This box probably still rates below the other one in terms of quality, but I only paid $20 each for them, and I think I definitely got my money's worth out of them.