Pack of the Day 183: A Box of 2017 Topps WWE Legends

I made it back home from Utah yesterday, completing the course I went down for. I finished class early in the morning, but I stayed until late afternoon, visiting with an old friend at his family's car dealership and purchasing a new (to us) minivan from the lot. After that I drove back home, and my wife caught a ride down to Utah this morning to drive the van back. I hope she likes it, as it will be her vehicle for the next few years.

I stayed home with the kids so that they could attend a birthday party for a friend at the police station. It was pretty fun to get the tour and mess around with all of the police gear. One benefit of having kids is tagging along when they do tours of places like police and fire stations. It's exciting to go and see all that stuff, but it would be weird for a grown man like me to just walk up and ask for a tour. When it's the Cub Scouts or a birthday party or something, no one bats an eye. The birthday boy's dad is a police officer, and he was in the Marines as a tanker, so we had stuff to talk about. We were actually both in Iraq at about the same time. His dad was there, too, and he spent ten years in the Idaho Army National Guard, which is who I work for, so we talked about that as well. I wore my Macho Man Randy Savage t-shirt to the party, and they commented that they'd gone to see a WWF show many years ago with all of the big names.

Speaking of wrestling legends, while I was gone I ordered a box of 2017 Topps WWE Legends from a guy who I did a couple of group breaks with. This product looks awesome, but at the price point it's a little hard to justify buying because there are only 4 hits per box. Three of the four are promised to be autographs, but still, it feels like a lot to me.

One of the first things I did once I got home was bust the box open. It is packaged as two mini-boxes, with two hits in each mini-box. You get six packs per mini-box, with five cards per pack.

Here are the odds from the side of one of the mini-boxes. There are a couple of insert sets as well as plenty of parallels, autographs, and relics.

The packs look like the rest of the packaging. I don't have much else to say about them.

I got 37 base cards in the box. Here are 8 of them. There's some pretty good stuff here. I was happy to pull the Iron Sheik and the Ultimate Warrior. It was also good to see Randy Savage among my pulls.

Bronze parallels are not numbered, and I got almost one per pack, with nine in the box. Some of my favorites here include Big Boss Man, Mick Foley, and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

Retired Championships is one of the insert sets in the product. I pulled four of them in the box. Trish Stratus was a pretty good pull. She appeared in the Women's Royal Rumble, one of several legendary wrestlers from WWF/WWE to make an appearance in the event.

The other non-hit insert is Legendary Bouts, which features some big matches from the promotion's history.

I got three numbered parallels in the box. The Michael "P.S." Hayes card is a Silver parallel. These are seeded 1:8 packs, and this one is numbered # 46 / 99. The X-Pac and Rocky Johnson cards are Blue parallels, seeded 1:15 packs. The X-Pac is numbered # 21 / 50 and the Rocky Johnson is # 22 / 50. Now, on to the hits!

The first one is a base autograph of Sergeant Slaughter. I was pretty happy to get his signature in the box, as I always liked him. This one is # 061 / 199.

The next hit is a Commemorative Championship Plate Autograph Card of Wendi Richter. It's got a sticker autograph and a manufactured relic of the WWE Women's Championship belt. I believe this is the basic version of the card, numbered # 81 / 99 and seeded 1:30 packs.

Next up is a nice Autograph Relic card of The Iron Sheik. This is the Blue parallel, numbered # 16 / 25 and seeded 1:172 packs. It's got a nice multi-colored swatch of fabric and a full signature. He can be a little inconsistent about autographs, sometimes signing as 'Iron Sheik' and other times just as 'Sheik.'

Only three autographed cards are promised per box, but all four of my hit cards were signed. This one is the hit of the box, and it's a pretty big one. This is a Triple Autograph featuring the signatures of Kevin Nash, Sting, and Lex Luger. It's numbered # 10 / 10 and these are a 1:1,723 pack pull. I don't think I'll sell it, but if I did this card alone could probably replace the cost of the box twice over.

This was a pretty good box. Even without the big hit, it was on track to be fairly nice, but obviously the triple-autographed card is huge.

Asuka Topps WWE Now

Tonight is a big night in the WWE, with the 30-Man Royal Rumble match along with the first ever 30-Woman Royal Rumble. There have been a few other blog posts discussing the event, and I'll join the crowd of people watching it. So far my military lodging internet connection has been skipping and stopping a lot during the pre-show, but we'll see how it goes.

Among the favorites to win the Women's Rumble is Asuka, the sensation out of Japan. I picked up this Topps WWE Now card of her victory way back in May 2017 at NXT TakeOver: Chicago. There were 74 of these cards printed, which is one of the higher print runs among WWE Now cards.

It will be interesting to see if any Now cards come out of the Royal Rumble. I bet there will be at least two, one for each event's winner. For the men's match, I am not sure who to pull for. Of course, the full list of entrants isn't available yet, so we don't even know who is going to be in it. I'd probably go for some of the old favorites like Cena or Lesnar, or some of the big dudes like Braun Strowman or Big E.

For the women's match, I think my order of preference is something like 1) Nia Jax, 2) Bayley, 3) Ember Moon, and 4) Naomi. We may not even see all of them in the match, but that's who I'll root for if they show up.

Seeking Redemption 22: A Long-Awaited Panini Mailday

Way back in December of 2014, I pulled a redemption card for a Rookie Signatures autograph of Kawhi Leonard from a box of 2012-13 Panini Basketball. I waited, and waited, and waited. Sometimes I tried to contact someone at Panini about it, but never heard anything back. Some time ago, the card popped up on Panini's list of cards that had been produced, and I saw some of them on eBay, but I never got mine.

Finally, I saw that some people were having success in reaching out to a Twitter account, @PaniniCSM, so I gave that a shot. Nothing. I sent another Tweet. Nothing. Finally, I sent a third Tweet, asking why I saw other people getting responses but no movement on my request. That time they got back to me, and within an hour I'd let them know that I would love to have the Leonard autograph, but if it needed replacement I would like to have something from the Houston Rockets. Pretty soon after that, I got a shipping notification. The package arrived after I left for Utah, so I asked my wife to take a picture of what they sent me.

That there is my first autograph from Houston superstar James Harden. It's a Game Changers autograph from 2013-14 Panini National Treasures Basketball. That's a pretty fancy card, and I am happy with the replacement.

My wife also took a picture of the serial number on the back. This is the base version of the card, numbered # 59 / 60. It took a little bit of doing, but eventually I got in touch with someone from Panini and wound up with a card I am satisfied with.

Road Cards

On my way from Idaho to Utah, I stopped at a Walmart to grab a few things I needed. While I was there, I had to stop by the card aisle to see what kind of stuff they had on the shelves. There wasn't a whole lot of stuff that was different from my 'home' Walmart stores, but I grabbed a couple of basketball hanger boxes.

First up was this 2016-17 Donruss Optic hanger box. With only 12 cards in a box, this would be better served as a fat pack or something, but I guess they can charge more for the hanger box, and have it take up more eyeball space on the shelf.

Sorry for the potato-cam pictures here. The lighting in my room might even be worse than the lighting above my desk at home. Kyle Lowry used to be a Rocket, so I guess he's the highlight of this batch.

I got a Rookie Kings card of Caris LeVert, a Prizm of Skal Labissiere, and a nice Pink Prizm parallel of Jonas Valanciunas, who is on my Fantasy Basketball team in the league run by Cards on Cards. The Pink Prizm is numbered # 16 / 25.

I also grabbed this hanger box of 2015-16 Panini Prestige out of the clearance box. This one's got even fewer cards in it, but I got sucked in by the promise of Acetate Rookies.

Here is a blurry photo of the base cards. I guess John Wall is the big name here. Those Wizards uniforms are pretty sweet.

As promised on the front of the box, I got two rookies and one acetate rookie card. Jahlil Okafor is the best of the two regular rookies, and the acetate card features Wille Cauley-Stein. Okafor isn't having a great season right now, but Cauley-Stein is pretty hot at the moment, although playing for the Kings is a bad spot for pretty much anyone. 

This was a pleasant surprise out of this box. A relic card of a legitimate all-time great of the game, Larry Bird. With most products these days pumping out rookie cards like nobody's business, it's nice to occasionally get a card featuring a good veteran or retired player, and it's hard to top Bird.

This wasn't too bad of a break, especially for basketball cards. If this were a normal basketball break for me, I wouldn't have pulled the Valanciunas parallel, and the Bird relic would be replaced with a Kenneth Faried swatch.

2016 Topps Baseball Reddick Yellow Plate

I've discussed a few times in the last week that I was scheduled to attend a training course that was cancelled due to the government shutdown, which just so happened to be the final course I needed to get the certification I needed for a promotion and raise two years in the making.

Just after I decided to cancel my travel authorization and get back to work at my day job, I got an e-mail saying that the course was back on and I could attend if I got myself down to Utah by Wednesday morning. So I spent all of Tuesday trying to get authorization from HR to travel, re-booking my room, and making the five-hour drive.

Because of the late start, we are trying to pack 10 days of class into 8 days, but I don't think it will be too bad. I am happy for the opportunity to attend the course and get my promotion in spite of Congress' efforts to deny me.

It's always fun to get a 1 / 1 card of a favorite player, even if printing plates are like the bottom of the barrel when it comes to 1 / 1 cards. I feel like printing plates have a hierarchy to them as well, with the order of value generally going something like Black - Cyan - Magenta - Yellow from best to worst. There are some cases where the yellow plate isn't too bad, though, and this Josh Reddick plate from 2016 Topps Series 2 is one of them. If I remember correctly, the base card has a lot of green and yellow on it, and that makes for a pretty good bit of color on this plate. This card is also pretty similar in composition to Reddick's 2013 base card, which I built a super-rainbow for. I picked this one up on eBay for more that it's worth, but less than I was willing to pay.

Oh, and I saw this on Twitter today. It looks like the 2018 BBM True Heart wrestling set will have kiss cards in it. That's pretty cool. I also have seen a couple photos of wrestlers signing their checki polaroid-style photo cards for the set, so there might be a lot of good stuff in this year's product. I am getting excited for release day near the end of next month.

Pack of the Day 182: A Blaster of 2017 Panini Absolute Racing

I'm not feeling particularly inspired by anything in my draft folder today, so I'm going to post this blaster of 2017 Panini Absolute Racing I picked up at some point last year.

There's not much to the blaster, with five cards total in the box. One of them should be an autograph or relic.

Here are the base and parallel cards from the pack. The Derrick Cope card on the right is a Spectrum Silver parallel, numbered # 114 / 299.

I got one insert card as well, a die-cut RPM card of Jimmie Johnson. This is the Spectrum Red parallel, numbered # 077 / 149. Something about his beard in this photo makes me think it's pasted on, like a disguise or something. He may want to do something about that blue Lowe's firesuit, though, if he's trying to go incognito.

The promised hit in the box is this Absolute Memorabilia Signatures card featuring a bit of red fabric and the signature of Michael Annett. The Beckett product page for Absolute Racing says that this base version should be numbered out of # / 100, but I don't see the serial number on it. There are base copies of other drivers on eBay without serial numbers as well, although the Beckett page lists print runs for all of them. Annett currently races in the Xfinity Series, where he finished 9th last year.

The government shutdown ended, but not soon enough for my class to kick off. I had to go in to work without pay today for about half the day while management decided what to do. I hope that I will be able to find another class to attend soon, because this course is all that stands between me and a 10% pay increase. I am pretty irritated with the whole thing. Hopefully we don't have any more shutdowns this year.

Salvador Perez Members Only

The government is still closed, and I am still not on my way to the school I need for my big promotion at my day job. I am a little bit salty about that, but there isn't anything I can do except keep up on the news and try to keep busy with other things. Even though I am not being paid, I still have to drive in to work in the morning so that I can sign some paperwork and have my bosses tell me that the government is still closed. Just a one-card post today.

I picked up another Members Only parallel from 2014 Topps Stadium Club. This one has Salvador Perez on it. I don't have much else to say about this. Every time I think the supply of these things has dried up, I find another one. I imagine it has to end at some point, with less than 10 copies of each card in the set being printed.

I've slowed down quite a bit on my card organization project, but I try to at least get a few cards cataloged and put in the box every day. I'm approaching 4,000 cards in the organized part of my collection, and I think I'll have to expand to a second box here in another 300 cards or so.