Contested Shots 31: A Twitter Prize from Topps

At the beginning of January I won a contest that Topps was running on Twitter. The prize was a box of 2017 Topps Inception Baseball cards. I sent Topps my mailing info, and nothing happened. Last week I sent them a message, asking about the status of the prize. They told me that it was sent out a while ago, but that they would check on it. Then they told me that they don't know what happened, but they will send another one out. Translating that from customer service-speak: "Oh shit, we forgot all about that contest!" A little bit later I got a shipping notification from FedEx and today I got the package.

Here's the front of the box. It promises 7 cards inside. The side of the box tells me that there is one autograph included among the 7 cards, and that some autographs may be redemption cards.

Here are the odds from the back of the box. There are plenty of parallels and autograph subsets available.

A single thick foil pack was nestled inside the box.

Here are the base cards and parallels. The Kyle Seager and A.J. Reed cards are Green parallels, which seem to be the most basic parallel. They are not numbered. The base cards look nice enough, and they are plenty thick.

The autograph is an Orange parallel of Matt Strahm, a former Royal who was traded to the Padres. It is numbered # 08 / 50. He's had a couple of major injuries in his career, and doesn't seem to be on the radar as a big up-and-comer.

I hate to be too critical of a free box of cards, but I am so glad I didn't spend the current $95 - $100 asking price on this box. It was fun to win a prize, but in this case the anticipation was much more exciting than the actual break. Thanks to Topps for holding the contest and providing the prize!

Pack of the Day 159: 2017 Bowman Blaster

I can't help getting excited about new releases, even releases packed with players whose names are unfamiliar to me. With 2017 Bowman releasing, I toyed with the idea of buying a group break slot or something, but couldn't quite bring myself to pull the trigger on it before the breaks I was looking at closed. Then I considered what a Hobby box would cost, and decided that wasn't really something I wanted to pursue, either. It seems like I've been on a bit of a cold streak recently with Hobby wax, and I hate that down feeling I get after busting a disappointing box of cards. But circumstances last night led to me driving past Target, and I found myself inside looking to see if Bowman had made it to the shelves yet. It had, and I debated between the rack pack, value pack, and blaster variations before selecting a blaster off the shelf.

The box promises 7 packs + 1 bonus pack, for a total of 80 cards inside. This is Bowman's 70th Anniversary, so there are a couple of retro inserts and buybacks stamped with a big foil '70' logo.

Here are the odds and the NPN information. I learned from Zippy Zappy's click-bait post that the paper autographs are retail-exclusive, so I guess that's pretty neat.

Here's the pack design, which mirrors the branding on the box. I didn't scan the back, because the insert odds are in larger print on the side of the box, and also because I am lazy.

One of the appealing / confusing things about Bowman is that there are three different sets within the one product. There is the base set, with mostly stars and rookies. Then there is the Prospects set, with minor league guys and maybe some recent call-ups. The Prospects set has a Chrome parallel, aptly called Chrome Prospects. So you get a mix of cards from those three sets in your packs, along with any parallels, inserts, or autographs you might encounter.

I got 33 cards from the base set in this blaster. I scanned some of the bigger names along with any Astros I found, as I don't know that Joe Musgrove is considered a big name.

I got 23 of the regular Prospects cards. I tried to scan names I've at least heard, but I am not good at following all of the minor league players. I can barely keep up with a handful of major league rosters. There are some cards in the Prospects set for participants in the World Baseball Classic, although I don't see any mention of ties to specific MLB teams. Maybe they are just guys who got buzz from the tournament. I don't know.

Here's the back of some of the Prospects cards. It looks like Bowman, with all of the lines and the bullet-point list of attributes or anecdotes for a scouting report on the player.

The Chrome Prospects cards are like the Prospects cards, only shinier. I got 16 of them in this blaster. One thing I find kind of weird is that there is usually also a Bowman Chrome product that comes out later in the year, so each year you get a couple of prospect-based Chrome sets, with one as a standalone product and one as a subset of the Bowman product. The Bowman brand is not for people who like simple card products.

And to round out the 'regular' cards, here are a few card backs from the Chrome Prospects I pulled.

I only pulled one parallel from this blaster, and it's so subtle that you can hardly even tell without seeing the serial number on the back. I was watching a Bowman break yesterday, and the guy had to flip through every stack of base cards from the back to find the Silver parallels. Without much of a border, the light silvering effect on the corners of the card is barely discernible. The odds say that a Silver Prospects parallel is a 1:47 pull, and this one is numbered # 364 / 499.

Topps has rolled back the number of parallels available in many of their Bowman and Chrome offerings, and I kind of miss all the crazy colors from earlier years. That's how I remember it, at least. Maybe I'm just looking at the past with Refractor-colored glasses. 

I got five inserts in the box, with four of them being of the vertically-oriented variety. The Clayton Kershaw in the upper left is a 1951 Bowman Reproduction insert, a 1:16 pull. The Riley Pint card comes from my favorite recurring Bowman insert set, the Bowman Scouts Top 100, which is basically a ranked list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. I like ranked lists, and a list-based insert set is pretty awesome. With these being seeded at 1:8 packs, you can expect to find one per blaster. The Yoenis Cespedes card is a 1992 Bowman insert, seeded at 1:11 packs. The final insert in this scan is a Carson Fulmer ROY Favorites insert, which is seeded at 1:8 packs, or about one per blaster.

The final insert is this Talent Pipeline card, which falls 1:11 packs and features a player at each level of A-ball for a given team. It's a pretty decent idea for a prospect-based insert, if you ask me. I don't have much investment in the Diamondbacks, but this is a neat insert idea.

I did get one of the buyback cards, with the Bowman 70 foil stamp. These are seeded 1:12 packs, so you can expect one every 1.5 blasters. My buyback is a 2000 Bowman card of Junior Brignac, who never made it past AA ball.

I pulled a hit in this blaster, one of those paper autographs mentioned above. This is a Green parallel of Tanner Scott, who is working his way through the Orioles' minor league system. The odds say these Green autographs are pretty rare, falling 1:614 packs. This one is numbered # 89 / 99. It would be a pretty exciting hit, but it came out of the pack damaged. On the top edge it looks like it got pinched in something mechanical, leaving it with a substantial crease. Oh well, at least I didn't have to look too hard for the cloud around my silver lining.

Pack of the Day 155: A Hanger Box of 2017 Topps Series 1

Last night after work I stopped at Wal-Mart to get some hearing protection for my kids (Monster Jam is today! Woo!). The Wal-Mart I stopped at was not the same one I usually visit, so I went way out of my comfort zone and asked an associate where the cards were. Not wanting to sound like a loser, I told her I was trying to find Pokemon cards for my kids. That was a lie.

This is what I was looking for. 2017 Topps Baseball Series 1. I debated between the blasters and the hanger boxes. The rack packs and regular packs showed obvious signs of having been molested already by pack searchers, so I ignored them. Not because of the hits, but because pack searchers in my area tend to damage the cards while trying to detect the hits. Ultimately I opted for the hanger box.

Here are the odds for hanger boxes, as well as the No Purchase Necessary information.

This Dallas Keuchel base card was my first 2017 Topps baseball card. Not bad, pulling a card for my favorite team as the first one of the year. I wonder which finger that is poking out of his glove? I hope he's not flipping me a stealthy bird there. I don't mind having the players' social media info on the back of the cards, but I do miss the full career stats. I know I can go and look them up online, but often while flipping through my cards, I will stop on an unfamiliar face or a guy who I wouldn't normally think to look up and see what their stats have to say about them. Cutting the career stats down to 5 years leaves an incomplete picture, and I hope they come back for 2018.

There are some decent photos in this set. I was glad to see Evan Gattis come out of my stack of cards. As far as the design goes, I like it better than I thought I would. I think I prefer a full border for the flagship set, but this design isn't going to make me boycott the product for the year. It takes up a lot of space at the bottom of the card, though, and from what I pulled it looks like you're not going to see much of what's going on below knee level in the action shots. I personally like to see the dirt and the grass and the bases and such. The nameplate and logos look pretty good. The team names in-hand are more readable in-hand than they are in this scan.

I didn't pull the Kris Bryant #1 card that was voted on by fans, but I did get a League Leaders card with his picture on it. Topps brought back #7 in this years set, after retiring it for many years in honor of Mickey Mantle. There a Facebook Live video on the Topps Facebook page yesterday where Sooz busted a couple boxes of cards and mentioned that Topps wanted to bring that card number back and celebrate all of the exciting young players in the game.

Gary Sanchez was an obvious choice to fill the #7 spot, as he is the most popular young Yankee in card collecting circles at the moment. I hear that Corey Seager is pretty popular out on the West Coast, and Gregory Polanco's card had probably the best action photo in the box.

There were some decent horizontal cards in the mix, as well. I think that Jonathan Lucroy card was the 2nd-best photo in the box, with Votto coming in from the left side and almost matching the lean angle on the border graphic. The Addison Russell card is an example of an already-good card that would be made great by having less bottom border, as you'd be able to see the rest of the base runner. 

I've got a few more nice photos to show here. That Denard Span is especially nice. Most of the logos wound up looking pretty good on this design, but the Cleveland logo needs a little more contrast to keep it from getting lost in the nameplate.

I didn't pull any parallels from the box. I will probably have to track down at least one so that I can see what they are all about.

That Joc Pederson card is the first insert in this post, although it was the last card in the box. It's from the 1987 Topps Baseball insert. It's printed on slightly rougher stock. I don't have an actual 1987 card on my desk right now, but in the video above Sooz does a feel test between a 1987 insert and the real deal, and she says they nailed it.

Here are a few more inserts that I pulled from the box. Al Kaline is a Legend insert. That Mike Lowell MLB Network insert is the rarest pull of the box, as they are seeded 1:5 hanger boxes while the other inserts are all listed at 1:2 hanger boxes.

I think the 5-Tool insert is my favorite insert design in this product. The checklist is surprisingly large, at 50 cards. I might have to look into getting the full set. My favorite ongoing insert is First Pitch, and I already have the 20-card set on order. When it comes to First Pitch, you are just about as likely to pull a card with a Cubs logo as you are to pull anything else. The Cubs have a whopping 8 cards in the set, or 40% of the checklist.

I think the Award Winners cards are retail-only inserts, with Silver Slugger Award Winners being exclusive to hanger boxes? That's what I gathered from the packaging. I got a pretty good group here, with Yoenis Cespedes and Miguel Cabrera being Silver Sluggers, and Terry Francona and Mike Trout filling out my pulls.

I am pretty happy with this year's flagship baseball set. My main complaint is the stats on the back, but I think the cards look pretty good in-hand. The photos are pretty good, and the backs are colorful. There are some good inserts, and I am happy to see First Pitch back again. I thought I might dislike the design, but I think it looks pretty good in-hand. My only complaint is that the bottom border sometimes interferes with the photos. I'll probably go the factory set route as far as building the base set, but I'll probably pick up a little more Series 1 at retail and a little Series 2 when it releases, as well as a set of Update when that comes out.

Pack of the Day 150: Three Topps Holiday Wal-Mart Mega Boxes

I've seen quite a few posts about the 2016 Topps Wal-Mart Holiday Mega Boxes on the blogosphere, and I thought I would add the results of my break to the mix. I liked the idea of these cards, with 2016 Topps Baseball's 'fog' effect replaced by snowflakes, but I wasn't sure if it was something I wanted to buy into. I saw some posts about the product on the Blowout Cards forum, including one that said the poster completed the 200-card base set easily from three boxes. That and the promised hit in each box prompted me to pick up three boxes from my local Wal-Mart.

The box front lets you know that this thing contains 10 packs of cards, including one relic, autograph, or autograph relic card.

The back of the box shows all of the cool stuff that might be found in the box, as well as pack odds and NPN information. This product has a pretty basic structure. You get one parallel to the base set (about 5 per box) and a mix of hits and parallels to the hits, with the vast majority of them being your basic relic cards.

The pack design mimics the branding on the box.

The cards mostly feature the same photos as the flagship Topps set. Some players got different photos. I anticipated getting a full set of base from my three boxes, but instead I got mostly triples and doubles across the boxes and wound up falling very, very short of completing a base set.

Here are some of the horizontal cards, as well as a card back. I didn't go through and check or anything, so I am assuming the card backs are mostly identical to their flagship counterparts outside of the card number. I believe the prefix on the card number is an abbreviation for Holiday Mega Box Wal-Mart.

I got the expected 15 Metallic Snowflake parallels. As others have mentioned, this parallel was created by affixing glitter to the card in the snowflake areas. It doesn't scan very spectacularly, and it isn't really all that impressive in-hand. I got some decent names among my parallels, with the best two probably being Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa.

Here are some more of the Snowflake parallels. I think the Granderson probably has the best photo out of this bunch.

I don't know what to think of Puig anymore. I was lucky enough to pull and sell a couple of nice photo variations featuring him back when he was a hot ticket, but his star faded pretty fast. I think he's still probably a serviceable player that you would want on your team, but I don't think he'll be a superstar. I'll erase this paragraph in a few years when he hits 40 home runs and leads the Yankees to a World Series alongside Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and a cybernetic replica of Brian McCann.

Here are the relics I pulled from my boxes. All feature plain white swatches of fabric. There are some pretty decent names among my pulls, but no one I really collect. The snowflake theme makes them kind of fun looking, so I guess there is that.

Here are the backs of the relic cards, for completeness' sake. Pretty standard stuff, with the usual congratulatory message and the small print disclaiming any real association between the fabric swatch and the pictured player.

That does it for this break. I was pretty disappointed with the collation, but I think that tends to happen in retail fairly often. The cards go in big runs without a lot of variation from box to box, and if you catch a bad batch of boxes you wind up with a lot of duplication. I found a base set really cheap on eBay a few days ago, so I guess now I have plenty of cards to send out in trade packages.

Finally! The 2015 Topps Stadium Club Set

I've been trying not to bust packs too much lately, as it seems to be more cost-effective to buy collated sets and cherry-pick the hits I want from online sellers. I miss out on the thrill of pack-busting, but I guess that's what repacks, group breaks, and the occasional hobby box are for.

With that attitude I didn't purchase much 2015 Topps Stadium Club at all. I saw plenty of it on the blogs and picked up a few singles here and there, but I was waiting on the base cards until I could pick up the whole set in one go. It took a while, but I finally had a set fall to me at my (cheap-ass) price ceiling. I got it for about 19 cents per card, which I thought was a pretty decent deal. I flipped through the whole thing and picked out a few favorite cards to scan here. I tried to ignore some of the cards that have already had plenty of run in the blogosphere, so you won't find Bip Roberts, Ernie Banks, or George Brett here. I'm no Yankees fan, but this Mariano Rivera card shows how I reacted once I actually landed this set for my collection.

If you're going to use zoomed-in shots of players on your cards, that Josh Donaldson photo is a good example of how to do it. At this point it is hard for any Jose Bautista card to live up to the 2016 Topps Series 1 bat flip card. It would be awesome to be a fan who shows up on a baseball card, but it would be significantly less awesome to be a fan on a baseball card making a derp face.

That J.J. Hardy card is pretty chaotic. I guess the Orioles won't be mixing baseball with Twister again anytime soon. Not pictured on that Dale Murphy card is his mom telling him to clean up all that baseball stuff before someone trips on it and gets hurt.

It's nice to see an athlete showing proper form for the Anthem. So many times on TV broadcasts I see athletes dancing around or focusing on something else during the National Anthem. Football players seem to be the worst offenders in that regard. I guess not all the players are from America but for me it's not a negotiable thing. Bo Jackson was so cool back in the day. I don't even like thinking about the Astros right now. They've got a lot of expectations piled up now, and I have to wonder if their bats can be hot enough and their pitchers can throw well enough to stay in the mix this year. Evan Gattis will play a big role in the team's fortunes once he gets back from hernia surgery.

I don't have much to say about this batch of photos. Just nice photos all around. Stadium Club is a cool set. Maybe if every product looked like Stadium Club it would be too much, but I don't know. What cards out there look better than Stadium Club?

For a while there Yoenis Cespedes must have had his bags all packed, because he moved a few times before finally signing a deal with the Mets. Doug Fister was brought in to (probably) fill one of the back-end rotation spots on the Astros' roster. Hopefully he'll be able to put a poor 2015 behind him.

I picked these cards more for the photos than I did for the guys pictured on the cards. Felix Hernandez showed up to Spring Training this year having bleached his hair and goatee. The look has been universally panned by press and teammates, but Hernandez says he plans to keep the look all year in spite of the criticism.

In the lead paragraph I said I would try to avoid photos that had already seen a lot of run on the blogs, but I couldn't leave out that Eckersley card. It's probably my favorite card in the set. I watch a lot of A's broadcasts on MLB.tv, so I see the big-head A's quite a bit over the course of a season. I'm not sure why it works out that way, but if the Astros aren't on the A's are usually my go-to team. Next on the list would probably be the Blue Jays and then whichever matchup on the day features the most players on my fantasy baseball team.

In hindsight I think the Derek Jeter or Fred McGriff cards would have been better to close the post than that Scherzer card, but I wasn't really thinking about that when I did all the scanning for this post. Oh well.

I'm glad I was able to finally add the set to my collection. My patience paid off in the end, as the price was about 65% of what I anticipated a full set would cost me. There were a couple of cards missing from the set when it arrived, but I was able to purchase the missing cards on Sportlots quickly and without much expense.