Work Trip to Dayton, Ohio: The Hobby Stuff

Now that my work trip to Ohio is about over, I figured I'd show off the hobby-related stuff I picked up while I was there. When I first flew in, I stopped to get something to eat and then I went to Wal-Mart to pick up some stuff I needed, like a razor, some soda, and some baseball cards.

I don't think I've posted the previous Gypsy Queen blasters I bought yet, but they weren't all that great. I'd heard rumors that 2017 Topps Gypsy Queen retail was hot stuff, but in my experience that hasn't been the case. But I thought maybe it was just a problem with the blasters in Idaho. I picked up an Ohio blaster as a test, and also because there wasn't a whole lot of other stuff on the shelves.

I got a decent array of base cards. Derek Jeter was my short-printed base card. I got a Charlie Blackmon Green Back parallel. There are supposedly only 50 copies of each Green Back, as opposed to the Green Front parallels that come in value packs. There are a couple of inserts, too.

After three blasters, I finally pulled a hit out of Gypsy Queen. I should have just bought 2/3 of a Hobby box with that money, but I didn't, and now I have this Aaron Judge autograph card. He's been playing pretty well lately, so this card has actually kind of taken off in the two weeks since I pulled it. I should put it up on eBay or something.

I made a stop at TCI Sports Fan, a card shop that I stopped at on my last trip to Ohio. There were a few things I looked at while I was there, but they had this box of 2016 Topps Star Wars Rogue One: Mission Briefing cards on the discount shelf and I bought it. I probably should have purchased something else.

The base cards are about the same as every other faux-vintage Star Wars set that has come out recently. They have red borders and feature scenes from the films.

The Death Star insert set shows different important locations on the space station.

I got a few of these Comic Strips inserts in the box. Although the backs of The Death Star inserts actually have text, most of the other inserts have some variation of the 'COLLECT ALL [NUMBER] CARDS!' text on the back. 

These Villains of the Galactic Empire and Heroes of the Rebel Alliance cards are pretty cool.

The two cards in the upper left are Character Stickers. They are printed on thin stock and I believe they are actually stickers, although I haven't tried peeling one. The two cards in the upper right are part of a Darth Vader continuity set, so I guess there will be more of them in other releases. Maybe those other releases are already out. I don't know. There are so many sets being released that I don't even keep up anymore. The three cards on the left of the bottom row are Character Foil cards, and the card on the bottom right is probably part of the Montages set, which probably interconnects with other cards to create a panoramic scene.

I pulled quite a few Death Star Black, Green, and Blue parallels. Those are the more common ones. I didn't pull any of the scarce Gray, Gold, or Orange parallels, which are serially-numbered # / 100, # / 50, and # 1 / 1.

My two promised hits were a manu-patch of Captain Cassian Andor and a base autograph of Corey Dee Williams as Klaatu. Klaatu is one of the folks who hangs out in Jabba's palace, and he gets killed during the sail barge escape scene.

Here are the backs of the hit cards. That box was kind of underwhelming, but buying the low-cost stuff bring high odds that your hits are going to be low-end hits. The regular cards are more of the same stuff we've been seeing, reprints of earlier designs with many of the same film stills that have been in circulation for the last forty or so years.

Later, I made a second trip to TCI Sports Fan. They were having a die-cast sale, and I wanted to pick up something for my NASCAR collection. I eventually settled on this 2011 Danica Patrick Honoring Our Heroes car. She drove this car in the Nationwide race on September 11th, 2011.

There were 1,209 of these die-cast cars produced. This one was on sale for $25, which is a better price than I can get online, especially when you take shipping into account. There were a couple of other cars I was interested in, but I decided on just purchasing the one.

Here's what it looks like out of the box. It's a pretty cool paint scheme. Each of the stars represents one victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I think the mixture of sports and patriotism is kind of weird, but I know baseball really played a big healing role after the 9/11 attacks and after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

They had also moved these boxes of 2011 WWE Champions onto the sale shelf. For $12 apiece, I thought it might be fun to bust some WWE wax. This set is pretty basic, and I think it is the predecessor to the current WWE Road to WrestleMania product line.

The base set is all about the photographs, and recounts the WWE storyline between WrestleManias. The set isn't that big, so you'll complete it in one box with a fair number of doubles and maybe some triples.

There are no parallels, and only one insert set. There are also autographs, but they only fall 1:150 packs, so you'll only see one every 6 boxes or so. I wasn't lucky enough to pull an autograph. The Foil inserts are a 1:3 packs pull, so you get eight per box. It's a 10-card set, and I completed the set out of two boxes, with 6 doubles. I don't know what the selection criteria were for the checklist, but there are some cool names in the set.

Finally, I made a trip to the Dayton Visual Arts Center to put some money in the Art-o-mat machine. The gallery was between exhibits, so there wasn't much art on the walls and I had to dodge ladders and stuff to get to the machine, but the staff didn't kick me out and even gave me change because the machine wouldn't take my bill. They didn't have Raz Card Blog favorite artist John Soukup stocked in the machine, so I had to try some new artists. The first was Andy Brzeczek, an artist out of Colorado. He doesn't seem to have much of a web presence, but I found a Facebook page and a profile on an art organization's page. Based on his Facebook feed, it looks like he does batches of Art-o-mat paintings with a similar theme, often centered around UFOs. The art block I got features a cow about to have a Close Encounter of some kind; maybe of the Fourth or Sixth Kind, depending on how things go.

Next, I pulled the lever for a piece of art from Jack Hernon. He has a web page and some profiles on various art pages, but none of them seem to have a lot of activity. I wasn't sure which way to orient the picture, so I went with the way that felt right to me. I've read that part of the fun of abstract art is seeing which way people choose to hang it.

It was a pretty successful trip from a hobby standpoint. I'd probably like to take back the Star Wars purchase and get something else or save that money, but I am pretty happy overall. There were a couple of comic book stores I meant to get to, but I never got around to it.

I Found the Place (TCI Sports Fan Card Shop) and Got the Thing (Panini Prizm NASCAR)!

For the past few days I have been going to Target after class to see if their stocker has put out NASCAR Prizm cards yet. Today we had an exam and after exams people are burnt out, so we just get the rest of the day off because the instructors don't want to waste their time talking to 30 glazed-over students. So I took my exam (I got 100! That gave me enough points to pass the course, but I still have to stay for Week 4 anyway!) and when I got back to the hotel after checking again at Target I didn't want to hang out in my room because the housekeeping folks had all the bedding off my bed and they needed to be in the room doing their stuff. To stay out of their hair I went across the street to the Air Force Museum and ate lunch in the Memorial Park there.

While I was there I was also trying to decide if it was worth driving somewhere like Cincinnati just to look for these cards. My internet searches brought up another card shop here in the Dayton area, TCI Sports Fan. It was just a couple of miles away, and I thought it would be worth checking it out. The shopping center they are located in has seen better days, but upon entering the shop I saw that they had all the things I like. I wish this place was my local card shop. They have NASCAR die-cast, NASCAR cards, UFC cards, WWE cards, sports cards of all types and eras, and everything is clearly marked with a price. Some of the more expensive boxes are opened so you can buy them by the pack. The people running the store were friendly without being pushy. The aisles were big enough to move around in. I just wish I'd found this place earlier in my trip, although my travel budget might not agree with that sentiment.

I milled around for a while and browsed a whole lot of things I wanted to buy, but the thing I really wanted at that moment was some Panini Prizm NASCAR. They had one box on the shelf and I purchased it. If you're ever in the Dayton area, I recommend checking them out. They are the best card store I've found so far. I'd say Bookery Fantasy is the best comic shop I've found, and Maverick's is the best variety comic/card place I've located.

I guess at some point I will do a box break post for this Prizm stuff I purchased.

Workin' at the Card Shop 8: A Switcheroo at the Local Card Shop

note: This got kind of long, so here's the short version. I had a disappointing experience with my local shop's Father's Day event due to a faulty assumption. I bought a box of cards, too, and if you scroll down to the pictures you can read about that.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that the local card shop was holding a Father's Day promotion this weekend, and I assumed that the promotion involved the 2016 Panini Father's Day packs that are available this weekend at card shops everywhere. I marked the date on the calendar and blocked out some time to go down there at lunchtime today (I'm working the weekend).

My assumption was based on the fact that it was labelled as a Father's Day event and the Panini Father's Day packs were released this weekend. I was wrong. When I was in the store looking around, he pulled out a bin of silver packs, but they were not the 2016 Panini Father's Day packs. They were assorted packs of other promotional cards from the last few years, mostly of the variety you might find in a bin marked 'Free - Limit 5 Per Person' on a dealer table somewhere. But I was in the store and I was committed at that point, so I spent 23% over the best online price on a box of 2016 Topps UFC Top of the Class cards, which I will show when I get done with my rant. I'm not going to even show the promotional packs I got, because they honestly aren't worth the effort. I wound up with a couple duplicates of some 5-card NBA promo and some 5-card NFL promo, both a few years old. When I got back to the office I looked at the details of the event and noticed that the shop owner never actually said it was a 2016 Panini Father's Day event. Instead the event listing said:

Everyone gets a FREE Silver Promo Pack just for stopping in on Satuday, June 18, for Father's Day! No purchase necessary. One FREE pack per person. Want more Silver Promo Packs? Get 1 additional pack for every $14 spent...

I guess it's bad on me for assuming that because Panini's Father's Day packs are released today and silver in color, the shop's Father's Day promotion featured those packs. He also had posted a Father's Day greeting on his shop's main page earlier in the day with pictures of Panini Father's Day cards, although they may have been cards from a different year. I had actually gone back and forth about whether I should attend the event at the LCS or just buy some Father's Day packs online. I know the LCS prices are inflated, so why spend $14 there to get a $5-6 (the going rate on eBay at the moment) pack of Father's Day cards? I bid on a couple lots of Father's Day cards with the reasoning that if I won them I would stay away from the card shop. I didn't win them, so I fell back on my original plan to get some Father's Day packs at the LCS. That plan backfired and now I'm irritated. I'll have to pick up some Father's Day packs online at some point to make my experience whole. I should have done that in the first place. I posted on the shop's Facebook event page that I had been expecting the Panini packs. The shop owner apologized and noted that the event description did not specifically mention this weekend's Panini promotion. Apparently there were some gems in that bin of packs as well, because the shop owner is posting pictures of hits that people have pulled from their free packs. Maybe my frustration at the mix-up is compounded by some bad luck in selecting my packs.

I read an article a while back about disappointment in relationships. The basic assertion was that disappointment in relationships is caused by unmet expectations, and that the best way to avoid disappointment in a relationship is to communicate your expectations to each other and also to consider the other person's point of view when you first feel disappointment. My expectation was that I would be opening up a few packs of Panini Father's Day packs, looking for the first Panini NASCAR cards. The shop owner may not have even thought about the Panini promotion and expected his customers to be happy about getting free promotional packs with their Father's Day gifts. I guess I am not mad at him specifically, but I am disappointed by the situation.

I feel like I want to support the local guy, but there are a lot of obstacles in the way and I don't get a lot of perceived value out of the relationship. What is the point of driving 20-40 minutes round-trip, paying more once I'm there for a limited selection of items, trying to make small talk with a guy who I find difficult to talk to, and often feeling a bit let down by the whole expedition? I've had some good moments at the shop, too, but for the most part I usually come away feeling like I am not getting enough back for it to be worth my while. I'll probably give it another try in a few months or sometime next year, but for now I'm going to stay away from the local shop. He's been around over 20 year, so there is a customer base there and he isn't likely to miss the couple hundred bucks I usually spend with him annually. I can get more for my money online and I usually get a better experience to boot, probably because online shopping makes it easier for me to manage expectations and outcomes.

I did pick up a box of cards while I was there, so at least I can close this thing out with some kind of cardboard, even if it's not necessarily the cardboard I wanted to show off today. Here's the box top:

This is a hit-driven product. You get 5 cards in the box, with 1 insert, 1 insert parallel, 2 autographs and 1 relic.

There aren't any base cards in the product, but this Top of the Class insert set might as well be a base set. In my mind it is the base set. My base insert card is Jon Jones, who is apparently a pretty good fighter, but can't stay out of trouble when it comes to drugs, the law, and the court of public opinion. I'm not a fan.

This is my promised parallel of the box. It's a Silver parallel of Dominick Cruz, numbered # 22 / 25. This is a 1:9 box pull, so not too bad. I am also not a Dominick Cruz fan, but he owned the recent fight to defend his title against Urijah Faber. I guess I have to give him props for that.

Every product has subjects who seem to pop up in every box, and Johny Hendricks is one of those guys in this one. He got beaten by Stephen Thompson in his last fight, and hasn't fared all that well since losing his belt to Robbie Lawler in December 2014. Stephen Thompson happens to be fighting tonight in the Fight Night headliner, while Hendricks has a fight coming up soon against Kelvin Gastelum. In short, this relic is a dull grey bit of shirt and I'm not too excited about it.

My first autograph is kind of another dud, a base autograph of Michael Chiesa. This is another $1 hit. Chiesa is riding a three-fight win streak, with another fight coming up in about 4 weeks against Tony Ferguson. I don't have any reason not to like him, except that I picked PC guy Jim Miller over him in their fight this past December, and Chiesa submitted Miller.

I don't know if it's a good thing to keep score this way, but so far I'm losing on this box. The two hits are $1-2 cards, and I could probably get about $5 total out of the Jones and Cruz cards. So I'm at $7-9 at the 80% mark of the box, or about 15% of the cost of the box.

The second autograph of the box is a pretty decent card. This is a base autograph of Joanna Jędrzejczyk, the current Women's Strawweight Champion. This is a pretty good pull, probably one of the better base autographs to get in this product. It doesn't quite save the box, as it's a $20-25 card, but it's nice to pull something from the top 10% or so of the checklist. Although I probably only got about 60% back on the sticker price (it would have been over 70% on the current internet low), this card made the box feel like a winner. It would have been nice to pull a couple of PC cards, but this box was okay.

In terms of cardboard collecting it was a bit of a roller-coaster day. My experience at the card shop left me feeling pretty negative, but I think I've worked my way through most of that. I probably won't go back there for a bit, but I'll get some Father's Day packs on eBay and everything will be okay. My box of cards was good enough, and it's been a pretty decent sports day for me. Evan Gattis hit a home run, the Astros beat the Reds, Randa Markos won her UFC fight, and my UFC Pick'Em luck so far has been better than usual. I've got plenty of reasons to be happy, and really in the big scheme of things none of these things are worth getting too worked up about.

Workin' at the Card Shop 7: Two Autographs from One Pack

I had some time to kill between work and an appointment I had, so I made a visit to the local card shop to have a look around. I planned on picking up a little bit of 2015 Topps Series 2 and hopefully a couple packs of 2015 Topps Archives. He had Archives in stock, but none of the boxes were open yet. I felt bad about asking him to open a box so I could buy two packs from it, so I wound up with a Jumbo Pack of Series 2 and a couple packs of 2014-15 Panini Donruss Basketball instead. The Jumbo pack of Topps contained 50 cards. I won't show all of them, but I'll show some of the ones that caught my eye:

The first thing I noticed was the weird coloring on Billy Butler's uniform. "Self," I said, "That is probably an airbrush job on his Royals uniform. I took it a step further and went and found the image that was altered to create this baseball card:

View image | gettyimages.com

The other guys I chose for the scan were either Astros or showing off some Ugly Pitching Face (UPF). And that's it, really. I have a hard time with some of the little colored circles containing the player's position abbreviation. The light blue ones and the bright yellow ones are a bit distracting.

These were the best horizontal cards in the pack. I was glad to get an Astros team card. I included Wei-Yin Chen because he got hosed by the Orioles recently and I read an article about it, so his name was stuck in my head when I sifted through these cards.

To give the non-pitchers a fair shake, I have included Kolten Wong and his Ugly Fielding Face (UFF) in this scan. Max Scherzer gets in for some UPF and because he's kind of a PC guy. Marwin Gonzalez gets in because he's an Astro and Adeiny Hechavarria makes the cut because I picked him up on a fantasy baseball team recently to play shortstop, because that position is a minefield in fantasy this year and whoever I drafted for that position was putting up terrible numbers.

I chose Moustakas because of the great fielding shot, another Astro card in Jed Lowrie, Carlos Gonzalez because he's on one of my fantasy baseball rosters, and I don't know why I included Jose Fernandez but then this popped up on my Facebook feed and gave me a reason:

I love it when a (failure to) plan comes together!

I pulled an autograph in the pack of a guy who was drafted in 2004, has played since then in the minor leagues, and pitched 6.0 total innings across 7 games in 2014 for the Giants as his only Major League service to date. The only real notable thing I saw on his Baseball Reference page was that he managed to hit three batters during those 6 innings. That Career High number in the corner of his card is celebrating his 11.6 minor league strikeouts per nine innings ratio in 2014. I got a Gold parallel of Danny Santana, another guy who is on at least one of my fantasy baseball rosters. My First Pitch insert features Jon Hamm, an actor whose work I don't really follow at all. I had to look him up. Madison Bumgarner rounds out the scan, with an appearance in a decent-looking insert set called Stepping Up

That Edgar Martinez card looks like it fell right out of 2012 Topps Baseball, and I don't think of that as a compliment. Wei-Yen Chen makes another appearance in this post, this time on a Black parallel numbered # 46 / 64 (a palindrome!). Mike Piazza shows up in some sort of bat-themed set about which Night Owl has remarked, "I think Topps did an excellent job of making bats look like loaves of bread in a deli." And finally, Willie Mays appears in a set that presumably discusses famous comebacks in baseball history.

But wait! That's not all! I also got one of those Call Your Shot! code cards in my pack. I went to the site, entered my code, and this screen loaded:

The autograph selection is random, meaning that if you 'win' a 'prize,' you click through to your cart, pay Topps $4.95 for shipping and handling, and probably eventually get an autograph in the mail. From what I've heard, the players on the screen are just a partial list. The Full player list available here link goes to a broken page labeled as the B-level list. I have seen copies of the A-level and C-level lists and they are each several pages long, covering a huge number of players. So it's pretty random. Going through some Blowout forum threads on people who have already received their cards from the Series 1 codes, it looks like Topps is just sending out whatever happens to be nearby. I have seen some 2013 Topps Five Star of Jason Heyward, some Bowman Sterling of Didi Gregorius and Oscar Taveras, a Jim Rice Five Star card, a Marcus Stroman from last year's base Topps set, and some other stuff along those lines. I guess whatever I get probably can't be any worse than an Erik Cordier sticker autograph.

The two packs of Donruss basketball didn't contain anything too amazing. Mostly they just reminded me how out of touch I am with the current NBA. I manage to keep track of the Houston Rockets and most of the major stars and fan favorites, but 95% of the other guys are unrecognizable to me.

Here are three guys that I recognized from the packs. Beverley is said to be a pretty good player, but during the few opportunities I had to watch him it seemed like maybe he was showboating a little too much and needed to take better care of the ball. I've never liked Pau Gasol very much. He seems too much like a soccer player or something. Maybe he's just an emotional and expressive dude, but I find him irritating. Klay Thompson and all of the Golden State Warriors are jerks, and they will remain as such until the Houston Rockets can manage to beat them in a playoff series.

Here are some of the inserts that came out of the packs. It seems like I can't buy any basketball cards without pulling a Zach Randolph card of some kind.

Oh, and here are two more inserts featuring players I don't like all that much. I guess I should have asked the shop owner to open a box of Archives for me to pick a couple packs from.

Workin' at the Card Shop 6: Another Year of Spring Fever

A week or so ago I went in to the local card shop to redeem the Spring Fever coupons I received when I purchased my Hobby box of 2015 Topps Series 1. When all was said and done I got 5 Spring Fever packs, each containing 5 cards. I didn't pull any autographs or anything out of the packs, but I also didn't pull any doubles. I chose nine notable cards to scan for this post, either PC guys or guys who are popular among the bloggers. I was surprised to find myself including two San Francisco Giants among the chosen, as I find that fans of San Francisco teams are largely insufferable. But I consider Bumgarner and Pence to be faces of baseball, as in 'guys who make amazing faces on their baseball cards.' Bumgarner's Ugly Pitching Face (UPF) is legendary, and Pence is an All-Out Effort Guy who sticks his tongue out and pops his eyes so you know he's turning it up to 11.

I don't like this year's Spring Fever set as much as I liked the 2014 incarnation, as that set was LOUD. The colors on the 2015 set are darker and more muted, and the foil isn't as rainbow-laced either. Maybe the Atlanta Braves called Topps and demanded a more reserved set that respected the traditions of the game. Or maybe Cal Ripken Jr. tore up the Topps employees' new suits and beat them up a bit to teach them respect for veteran players. Either way, the cards are subdued this year and that makes me like them a little bit less. I still grabbed a full set of them anyway. I do still want them in my collection.

While I was in the shop I decided I ought to actually purchase something. I had intended to try out a pack of Panini's Country Music release to see if I could pull a Joe Diffie auto/relic, but in a surprise development the stuff had sold out. I panicked and asked to instead grab a couple Jumbo packs of Series 1 Baseball. The box he had open had three packs remaining, so I grabbed them all. This Manny Machado MLB Silhouette Logo Pin manu-relic (Manny-relic?) was inside one of the packs. I believe all the manu-relics combine to fall one per box, so this qualifies as a box hit. It's a fairly sharp-looking card.

Here's the back of the card, with the usual praise of Machado's superstar potential. We'll see if he can live up to it and put up a few healthy and productive seasons.

One of the other packs contained this heavy card, a Silver-Framed Parallel of David Murphy, numbered # 17 / 20. The Silver-Framed cards are base cards with their edges cut off that are then pasted into thick metal frames. They are pretty hefty cards and make for a nice novelty item.

I believe the Silver-Framed cards are seeded about one per case, so it was pretty lucky to buy three packs and pull a box hit as well as a case hit. I hope that next year Topps brings back the wilder colors on their Spring Fever cards. I need that splash of color to help me get through February.