Blowout Sketch Card Draft: Ted Dastick Jr. Viceroy Space! AP Sketch

A couple of months ago a novel thread popped up on the Blowout Cards forums. Several fairly prominent sketch card artists are forum members, and someone proposed that the forum hold a sketch card draft. Thirteen artists all agreed to do 2-4 sketches each, with some being Personal Sketch Cards and some being Artist Proofs / Artist Samples from trading card sets.

The draft participants each paid for a slot, and the artists were paid as their cards were completed, with a deadline of the end of April to complete the sketches. The list of participants was randomized to generate the pick order, and then all of the sketch cards were revealed at once:

Not every sketch was something that would fit in my collection, but they were all pretty well done. Chris Henderson and Brian DeGuire did some pretty cool multi-layered sketches, and Tim Proctor did a booklet sketch / autograph of himself as one of the Zombies from The Walking Dead (he actually appears as a zombie on the show). I got pick #28 out of 43, so I was a little nervous about what would be left by the time my turn came around. It took about 3 days to get to my pick and a few of my top choices were already taken, but there were still some stuff from my Top Ten list on the board. After a little deliberation I chose Ted Dastick Jr.'s Artist Proof from Viceroy's SPACE! set. It features a nice brightly-colored galactic scene, which appears to be based on a Hubble Space Telescope image of the Horsehead Nebula.

This is probably not something I would have sought out for my collection on my own, but it is a pretty cool piece to have. I guess that is the beauty of the sketch draft format; the artists were given very few rules as far as what to put on the cards, so depending on your draft slot you could really wind up with anything. 

Each artist shipped the cards out directly, and my package from Ted Dastick Jr. included a few extras.

One was this Garbage Pail Kids-inspired sticker proclaiming me as the recipient of an Awesome Collector Award.

Another inclusion was this Star Wars-themed card featuring the artist as Han Solo.

Finally, he included a business card so that parties interested in his art might be able to find him on the web. The sketch card draft was a cool idea and went relatively smoothly considering the drama that can sometimes happen on forums. A lot of people were pretty skeptical that it could be pulled off, but all of the artists made the deadline, all the participants paid for their slots, and as far as I know everyone received their cards without any trouble. Depending on timing it is probably something I would do again.

A Tie-Dyed Dickey

Here is a nice colorful card featuring R.A. Dickey. The colorful background helps to make up for the bland logo-less uniforms found on Panini's baseball products. This is a Tie Dye Prizm parallel from 2015 Panini Prizm Baseball and it is numbered # 08 / 50. I haven't had any real targeted goals for my player collections this year, so they have been growing in a kind of haphazard manner. I haven't been spending as much money on cards lately, and that keeps me from chasing most rainbows with any conviction. I also haven't been keeping very good track of what I have and what I don't, so I refrain from bidding on cards or adding them to my cart out of uncertainty. Additionally, I have been focused on a few things outside of baseball and basketball, like sketch cards, Japanese wrestling cards, Star Wars, and other non-sports stuff. I still manage to add a card here or there to my main collections.

MLB.tv finally is holding the annual Father's Day promotion, where the rest-of-season subscription for watching baseball games drops by half to $50. Additionally, if you are a student or military member you can get an additional 35% off, which drops the price to $32.50. It was sometimes a bit difficult to get by just watching the Free Game of the Day for the first half of the season, but I held out and saved myself about $100 off the original price of $129.99, This evening I took advantage of my new subscription and watched the Astros tee off on the Rockies. It was a pretty good time. If you aren't already a subscriber I'd suggest going and checking it out.

Jon Singleton 2014 Topps Pink and Josh Reddick 2014 Topps Mini Pink

I've had a couple of pink cards in my Drafts folder for a while, so I thought I'd knock them out in one quick post. Most of the stuff I have in my Draft folder has been there for so long that I don't really remember the circumstances under which I acquired it. I will rarely pass up a chance to acquire a Pink parallel of a player I collect if the price is right. This first one is from the 2014 Topps Update Series and features Jon Singleton. It is numbered # 14 / 50. A few weeks ago it looked like Singleton might be called up from AAA, but Chris Carter has begun to hit the ball a little bit and that doesn't leave much room for Singleton. Maybe he'll get a chance sometime during the year, but it's far from a sure thing at this point.

Josh Reddick has had a pretty good 2015 so far, although the same cannot be said for his team, the Oakland A's. They sit in last place in the AL West, 9.5 games behind the Houston Astros (this may or may not be true by the time this post goes live, but it'll probably be close). You'll have to look elsewhere on the club for answers as to the Athletics' woes, as Reddick has been solid so far. While this card looks very similar to the one above, the serial numbering is different, reflecting a print run of only 25. That's because this one comes from 2014 Topps Mini, and the smaller Pink cards come with a smaller print run. This one is numbered # 21 / 25.

I've really been battling the pack-busting itch lately, just wanting to open anything. So far it's been limited to the blaster of Archives I opened the other day. 2015 Topps Series 2 releases in a couple of days, and I'm wondering if that might be the thing to scratch the itch. It's a relatively cheap break, and the flagship set is one I will always put together anyway. I'll have to look into it. I've been saving* a lot of money over the last little while by buying sets outright instead of trying to build them through pack-busting, but I still miss the whole ritual of peeling the plastic off the box, opening the packs stack by stack, and sorting through all the cards.

* It's not saving money if you didn't need the stuff you bought! Saving money would be putting it into an investment or under the mattress!

Pack of the Day 99: The Decline and Fall of Topps Archives

Topps Archives has been one of my favorite sets of the last few years. I opened up a bunch of the 2012 and 2013 sets and I got through quite a bit of the 2014 product, too. Even though the base cards and inserts were largely rehashes of previous designs, there were enough different things going on to keep any given blaster or hobby box interesting. Although 2014 was the weakest of the three years, it was still pretty good. I felt like the base set took a step back with the SPs no longer featuring a number of different historic Topps designs and the inserts lost some variety, but there was still some fun stuff like the wooden Firebrand inserts and a couple different shiny parallels. Just as I had in 2013, I put together the full 2014 Gold parallel set.

Although I didn't do much research beforehand, I was looking forward to the release of 2015 Topps Archives. Today I went out and picked up a blaster box from Target. Here is the pack design and a scan of the retail odds:

2015 Topps Archives Retail Blaster Box Pack Odds

 As you can see, there isn't a lot going on as far as inserts. It's kind of like Topps is expecting the gimmicky allure of Will Ferrell's cards to carry the whole thing. You'll also see the the SPs from the base set fall at ridiculous odds. In past years the SPs in Archives have been at around 1:6 odds, I believe, so the SP part of a base set was difficult to put together, but not prohibitively impossible. At 1:47 packs this year, the SP set is going to be something not even worth bothering with. Outside of that you have some parallels and some autographs, as well as the Will Ferrell cards.

The non-SP base set is made up of 300 cards, with each group of 100 featuring a design from a different year in Topps history. The first hundred cards feature the 1957 design. It's nice enough and the photographs are all right, but the main thing I noticed about these cards while sorting through the four packs I opened in the car was that these things are almost transparent. The cardstock is so thin that while looking at them in the sunlight I found the backs of the cards bled through when looking at the fronts, and the images on the fronts bled through when trying to read the backs. Also, the cards feel extremely fragile in-hand, like if you hold them too firmly the stack will fold in half. A couple of the packs had cards that were damaged across the top edge because of the packing process and the fact that these things are paper-thin.

The 1976 design is nice and colorful, and I think Topps did a generally good job of mixing in different photographs. I don't know for sure, but I feel like that Hunter Pence photo is a repeat from another set, as well as the Jon Singleton card in the first scan. In artificial light the bleed-through isn't as pronounced, but the cards still feel cheap and fragile in-hand, like they are just asking to be creased. 

The 1983 design also looks decent. I guess I can give Topps credit for that. The base cards are okay design-wise and I would probably be a whole lot happier with this set if the cards weren't so thin. I guess that may be a bit superficial, but a big part of collecting baseball cards is in the tactile experience of sorting through stacks and holding the cards in-hand. You expect certain sets to feel a certain way. Modern sets tend to have thinner glossy stock, while older sets are thicker and rougher. It feels like Topps went with thin and rough in an attempt to split the difference between old and new, and the combination just doesn't work. 

I got three cards in the box that weren't standard base cards. I pulled one of the Will Ferrell cards, this one featuring him in a Cubs uniform. These are seeded at a rate of one per blaster, so this was expected. There are ten different Will Ferrell cards, and each one also has an autographed variant limited to 10 copies.

I also pulled a Gold parallel of Brock Holt. The pack says these fall 1:47 packs, so they only show up about 1 in every 6 blaster boxes. The Silver and Gold parallels are no longer printed on shiny foil, which for me was a big draw in the 2012-2014 sets. I considered putting together one of the parallel sets this year to keep with my annual tradition, but not like this. The 'gold' border is more of a diarrhea brown color, and it just isn't that appealing.

The Gold parallels are numbered out of # / 50, with this Brock Holt card being # 13 / 50. In past years the Gold cards have been numbered out of # / 199, which was a big factor in my decision to collect the sets. A print run of ~200 makes the cards a little pricey, but not overly so in most cases. The Silver set this year is numbered out of # / 199, but it's not foil and I don't really want to collect a full set of gray-bordered cards. The increase in the size of the base checklist from 200 to 300 is another reason I won't be chasing a full parallel set this year. That's 100 more cards to buy, and that is just too much.

 I also got a Presidential Chronicles insert, which features a selection of U.S. Presidents. This is an insert set that really belongs in Allen & Ginter or maybe Heritage. Each President supposedly has a 1 / 1 cut autograph in the product, so I guess availability of cut signatures is how Topps decided which Presidents to include. This insert falls 1:8 packs as well, so you can expect to get one in each blaster.

And that's it. No deckle edges; no cloth stickers; no acetate Gallery of Heroes or wooden Firebrands; no 4-in-1 stickers; no throwback All-Star cards; no shiny parallels; no attainable SPs; no fun. Topps has taken one of my favorite products and removed nearly everything I liked about it. I like the base design enough that I will probably order the 300-card set from a case breaker on eBay, but I won't be building the inserts and parallels and SPs like I have for the last three years. People are going to buy and break this stuff because there is that chance at a Will Ferrell autograph, but I really wish that collectors would let this product sit on the shelves and rot so that Topps would get the message that this is not what Archives should be.

Joe Mauer and Domonic Brown Members Only

Here are a couple more Members Only parallels I picked up from the 2014 Topps Stadium Club set over the last couple of months. I don't really have a lot to say about these except that I'm kind of surprised that the Joe Mauer card fell to me at a decent price and that I really have nothing to say about Domonic Brown. With most players I kind of have a feel for who they are, but for some reason I just can't place him anywhere in my mind. Apparently he was the top prospect in baseball for a while and an All-Star in 2013, but he is stuck down in AAA this year. That is kind of surprising given that the Phillies aren't exactly lighting the world on fire with their current lineup. Maybe I don't know him because he has never been overly useful in fantasy baseball for long enough that I had him on a roster. I do like that Topps made sure not to crop the ball out of the Mauer picture. It seems to add a lot to the photo, and I would like the card less without the ball included.

Felicia Day The Guild Seasons 1-3 Relic

One web series I enjoyed watching was The Guild, about a group of online gamers who also interact with each other in real life. Felicia Day plays the part of the main protagonist, as well as acting as the writer and producer of the show. I would recommend it for anyone who plays (or has played) online role-playing games or is in touch with geek culture generally.

Cryptozoic made a trading card set for Seasons 1-3 of the series and I've opened up a couple boxes of it over the last two or three years, but so far haven't pulled any of the bigger names (Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton) as far as autographs and relics go. I had to go the eBay route for this card, a Felicia Day wardrobe relic, which adds to my small PC which includes her relic and autograph cards from 2014 Allen & Ginter. She might also have cards out there from her appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural, but I have never seen those shows and haven't paid attention to their card releases.

Seeking Redemption 12: 2014-15 Donruss Basketball Wrapper Redemption Pack

I opened a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball a couple of months ago. It was a pretty fun break that I haven't found time to feature on my blog yet. Part of the product release was a wrapper redemption promotion, where if you sent in all 24 packs from a box of cards you would get a little set of 3 All-Star cards, with an outside shot at an autograph from one of the three featured players. I sent in the wrappers from the box and a few weeks later an envelope showed up in the mail with a pack of cards in it.

I wasn't lucky enough to get one of the autographs, but I did get the 3-card set made up of Zach LaVine, Stephen Curry, and Andrew Wiggins. I kind of like the color scheme on the front of the cards, and the photography is decent. I am not much of a Stephen Curry fan right now, as his team recently outplayed my Houston Rockets in the Western Conference Finals to advance to the NBA Finals.

Here are the backs of the cards. Each of them contains a little blurb about the player's performance during the 2015 All-Star Weekend. I like these cards well enough, and getting something for all of my wrappers is slightly better than just throwing the wrappers away. I liked the Donruss box break so much that I really wanted to put the set together, but I haven't gotten around to trying that and at this point it might be too late for me to regain my enthusiasm for that project.