April 2018 Loot Locker

I ordered another Loot Locker in April, again going for the Triple Play Baseball locker, which costs a little more than the All-Star Baseball locker and less than the Grand Slam Walk Off Baseball locker. The All-Star and Triple Play lockers have different amounts of the same products, while the Grand Slam has higher-end stuff. There are also basketball, football, and hockey versions.

As usual, the cards ship in a 400-count card box with Loot Locker branding stickers attached.

Here is what I got in my box of stuff. There were also a few pieces of candy, but I ate them before I took this picture. Every Loot Locker contains a package of Ultra Pro supplies, usually around 10 top loaders and some penny sleeves. One in five lockers contains a bonus hit of some kind, and mine was one of the lucky ones this month. It's a pretty decent hit, too, a 2015 Bowman Chrome Purple Refractor autograph of Wilmer Difo. He's been a fairly regular player for the Nationals this year, backing up second, third, shortstop, and center field. He even had a Topps Now card a couple of days ago, with a walk-off single to claim a victory over the Phillies. The card is numbered out of # / 250, and looks to be a $10-15 card on eBay. Pretty good stuff!

The packs for the month are two packs of 2018 Panini Diamond Kings, two packs of 2011 Bowman Platinum, and one pack of 2018 Topps Gypsy Queen. As usual, I like to break down the cost of the packs to see what kind of value I'm getting for my money. I couldn't find a lot of 2011 Bowman Platinum for sale, but I did find enough information to suit my needs. To come up with my numbers, I price hobby boxes on online card shops, divide by the number of packs in a box, and multiply by the number of packs in the locker. It may not reflect exactly Loot Locker's costs, but it kind of reflects what I'd be spending if I made the unlikely journey to my local card shop. I round the numbers, so some of the final math is off by a bit. Here are the numbers I came up with:

2011 Bowman Platinum: $113.33/box / 20 packs = $5.67/pack x 2 packs = $11.33

2018 Panini Diamond Kings: $75.95/box / 12 packs = $6.33/pack x 2 packs = $12.66

2018 Topps Gypsy Queen: $174.95/box / 24 packs = $7.29/pack x 1 pack = $7.29

$11.33 + $12.66 + $7.29 = $31.28

That's a pretty good value for $30 + $5 shipping, especially with the card supplies and the bonus hit. The last two lockers I priced out came in at $26.32 and $28.64, so this one was significantly higher.

Here are a couple of the key base cards from the 2011 Bowman Platinum packs. Giancarlo (Mike) Stanton is heating up in New York (bad news for my Astros), and Miguel Cabrera is breaking down but probably has the numbers and accolades to get into the Hall of Fame.

I did pull some doubles from my Platinum packs, in the form of Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins. First world problems, right?

One of the Bowman Platinum packs also contained a hit, this bat relic autograph card of Juan Miranda. It is numbered # 0704 / 1166, and features a guy who played in parts of four seasons with the Yankees and Diamondbacks. His last season in MLB was 2011.

I pulled another hit out of Diamond Kings, an Original Materials dual relic of Miguel Andujar. Justin Verlander represented the Astros in my packs, and I also got a Sepia variation of Aaron Judge, last year's Shohei Ohtani. Today was Tony Gwynn's birthday. He would have been 58, but he passed away in 2014. He blamed a chewing tobacco habit for the cancer that eventually took his life, and it looks like he may have a cheek full of chew in that photo.

The Gypsy Queen pack contained another Astro, Dallas Keuchel, and a Missing Nameplate parallel of Mike Trout. The Missing Nameplate cards are some of the more common parallels out there, but Mike Trout is still a big name to pull any parallel of.

This was a pretty solid Loot Locker for me. The pack mix was a good value, and I did pretty well as far as pulling some good stuff from my packs. The packs for May's Loot Lockers are all 2018 releases, with Diamond Kings, Donruss, and Bowman making appearances. I've just ordered mine for the month, as that's a pretty good mix of products. I'd like to see more Topps stuff because I like logos, but I doubt we'll see too much more until stuff like Series 2 and Allen & Ginter drop.

Power Girl and Wonder Woman by Jeremy R. Scott

Today I've got a couple of sketch cards to show off from artist Jeremy R. Scott. Usually I try to link to an artist's social media pages and website. He has a website, but it hasn't been updated since the end of 2016. The same goes for his various social media accounts.

The first sketch card I have is this Power Girl from the Cryptozoic DC Comics: Justice League set. His art style is pretty distinctive, and I don't know if everyone will like it, but I think it looks cool. I was very happy to grab this one for my extensive collection of Power Girl artwork.

I was a little surprised that I was able to get this Wonder Woman card from the Cryptozoic DC Comics: Bombshells set. Wonder Woman is a very popular character, and it can be hard to beat out all the other collectors for artwork featuring her. I was able to land this one, though, and that was pretty cool. For those who are wondering, Bombshells is a spinoff that features various DC characters redesigned for a 1940's setting. They started out a designs by artist Ant Lucia, but the figures became so popular that DC cashed in with a whole line of merchandise and comics. I think it's pretty cool, and I have a full run of the print comics, although I haven't read the digital comics that came before.

I would like to track down more artwork by Jeremy R. Scott, but it looks like he might be difficult to track down. I guess I'll keep watching eBay. I was happy to be able to get a Power Girl sketch for my main art collection, and a Wonder Woman sketch as well.

2018 Bowman

I managed to track down some of the latest hot product, 2018 Bowman Baseball. I was obviously chasing some of the latest hotness in Shohei Ohtani and Ronald Acuna, but I decided to take pictures of a bunch of cards. I got some blasters and some value packs, with the value packs containing exclusive Camo parallels.

One of the fun and maybe confusing things about Bowman is that the base product is really three products. There is a checklist for established players, another checklist for prospects, and a Chrome parallel of the prospect checklist. You get some mixture of these three card types in each pack, along with any inserts or parallels you might come across. I chose eight of the base cards to show off here, including my only Ohtani pull, some Astros, a couple of other famous guys, Ozzie Albies, and Zack Granite.

Here are some of the prospect base cards I pulled, including a couple guys I've actually heard of, like Ronald Acuna, Scott Kingery, and Vladimir Guerroro Jr.

Here are a few of the Chrome prospects I got. I've heard of about half these guys, as I am not much of a prospector. Most of the Bowman guys I know about are players who have already been promoted to an MLB roster, are going to be promoted very soon, or have been touted on Zippy Zappy's blog.

Matt Sauer is one of the guys who I recall seeing on Zippy Zappy's recent Bowman rundown post. These are some of the Camo parallels I got from the value packs.

There were three numbered parallels among my breaks. The Gold Shimmer Refractor of Jose Trevino is numbered # 08 / 50, the Purple Refractor of Ibandel Isabel is numbered # 198 / 250, and the Sky Blue parallel of Miguel Cabrera is numbered # 237 / 499. The seeding on these cards really kind of drives home for me how much Bowman must be printed. I realize that seeding on Hobby packs is probably much easier, but still, let's take that Miguel Cabrera card as an example. Sky Blue parallels are numbered # / 499. There are 100 cards in the base set, so there should be a total of 49,900 of them printed. They are seeded 1:95 packs, and 95 x 49,900 = 4,740,500 packs out there in the world. Again, the Hobby odds should be easier, but that's still an awful lot of baseball cards.

Even though I didn't hit anything super exciting from these packs, I did enjoy the break. Having three different types of base card gives some variety to each pack, and it seemed like there were also plenty of inserts among my packs. One of my favorite inserts is the recurring Bowman Scouts' Top 100, which is a list of a hundred top prospects in baseball, arranged in order. You can see that the meter in the bottom left corner is red for top prospects, yellow for medium prospects, and green for the lower portion of the list. Every year I think about building this insert set, but so far I haven't gotten around to it in any season.

The #BowmanTrending insert is the obligatory nod to social media, since young prospects are probably all about the Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Players who have a social media presence get their handles added to the nameplates on their cards, while players without public profiles get the generic @bowmancards. 

I am not sure what to think about these Bowman Birthdays inserts. Maybe there is a sell sheet out there that explains them, but it appears to be an insert set dedicated to players born in 1993. This is a decent collection of talent, but I just don't know the meaning behind it.

The Talent Pipeline insert shows players from each team's A, AA, and AAA affiliates. It's a decent insert idea for a prospect-based product.

Finally, there is a 2018 ROY Favorites insert, showcasing players who have a shot at the 2018 Rookie of the Year award. I can almost guarantee that none of the guys I pulled will win a Rookie of the Year award in 2018. Word on the street is that MLB will allow the Angels to play half a season in the weakest NL division so that Shohei Ohtani can win the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards.

And that's the rundown of my 2018 Bowman breaks. It was pretty fun to bust open a bunch of packs of this stuff, and I may pick more of it up if I can find it.

Chihiro Hashimoto Autographs from Yahoo! Auctions

I don't have it in me to blog about everything I got in the big box of cards I recently got from Japan, so I'm breaking the contents into somewhat manageable chunks. Today I've got three different autographs I picked up for one wrestler, Chihiro Hashimoto - 橋本 千紘.

First up is her card from the 2016 BBM True Heart set. She made her debut at the end of 2015, so this might be her first signature in a True Heart product. She was an amateur wrestler in high school and college, so she brought that persona to the world of professional wrestling, joining Sendai Girls' Pro-Wrestling and training under Meiko Satomura, who I talked about in my last post about this shipment. Her ring gear is a wrestling singlet.

I found it interesting that her 2017 autograph was a sticker. I hadn't seen any sticker autographs in True Heart until I pulled one from my 2018 boxes and bought this one. The cards with on-card autographs have a matte finish on them, but the sticker autograph cards are UV-coated and glossy like the base cards.

With her wrestling experience and her stout build, she is a force to be reckoned with in the squared circle. She's held the Sendai Girls' belt several times, and was the 2016 Tokyo Sports Rookie of the Year. Her star seems to be ascending, and I was happy to land these three autographed cards for my collection.

Jon Singleton and George Springer Panini Cards

I want to blog about cards, but I also kind of don't want to do anything at all. I am currently in Spokane, Washington, for some job training. That doesn't really have much to do with my lack of motivation, though. I've been feeling the same way at home lately, too. I guess it's just a symptom of my depression. I am normally pretty down anyway. My baseline mood is other people's low. I am used to it, though, and manage to be pretty functional and relatively happy a lot of the time. It seems like every 5-6 years, though, I go through an extended period where I just can't seem to get going on anything for a few months, and I barely function. I guess it's more of a physical depression than a mental one. I'm right in the middle of one of those periods now. I've been meaning to get to my doctor to see about a medication adjustment or something, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's all just part of the fun of managing a chronic illness, I suppose.

Speaking of a chronic illness, it seems like the Astros' offense can't generate any run support this year. I just got done watching Justin Verlander do everything he could (8 IP, 14 K, 0 BB, 3 H) to keep the team in a game against the Yankees, and the bats couldn't even generate a single run to back him up. Of course, the bullpen immediately gave up 4 runs after Verlander left the game, but I have to imagine things could have been different if there were a couple runs on the Astros' side of the scoreboard.

I think I already have at least one copy of all the cards in this post, but how can I turn down dirt-cheap relic cards of player collection guy Jon Singleton, especially when some of them feature George Springer, too? These all come from 2015 Panini Elite baseball.

This last one is pretty cool because it's a Christmas Card, bearing the coveted # 12 / 25 serial number. I think I have # 14 / 25 on the way to my house as we speak, because I have a hard time saying no to these things. This one has a pretty cool patch embedded in it, though, so I have that going for me.

Leaf Live Shohei Ohtani

I finally tracked down some Bowman at Walmart, but I'm not going to talk about that today. I haven't taken pictures of the cards I pulled yet. There weren't any Ohtani Superfractors in my packs, that's for sure.

Every so often, Leaf puts out a card in their Leaf Live line. I think they are sold exclusively through the official Leaf eBay account. I think the only other Leaf Live card I've purchased was when Tim Tebow signed a baseball contract with the Mets. This time the card highlighted Shohei Ohtani's AL Player of the Week award win for his pitching and hitting performances. I bought the first couple of Topps Now Ohtani cards, but I've stopped that for now. I figured I might as well get this one from Leaf, too.

Doug Riggsby Red Sonja Artist Proof

I like a little silliness from time to time, so I will occasionally buy a sketch that strikes me as funny. Doug Riggsby is an artist known for his cartoony art style and his jokes, some more off-color than others.

I got this Red Sonja Artist Proof from Riggsby's eBay shop. It's from the Women of Dynamite set that was released by Breygent a few years back. I swear I've seen that guard/soldier somewhere before, but I have no idea where. Anytime I see a, "That's what she said," joke, it reminds me of The Office. I like Doug Riggsby's work a lot. I think I've also got a couple of sketch comic covers done by him that I haven't shown off here yet. I'll have to dig them out one of these days.

Dynamite Comics are the folks who own the license for Red Sonja comics, and they just recently completed a Kickstarter for a premium card product celebrating the 45th Anniversary of Red Sonja. Each pack of the cards has two sketches in it, and I supported the Kickstarter for two packs, so I've got four sketches coming to me at some point. The artist list has some pretty big names on it, so I am hoping to get some good stuff.