Pack of the Day 97: 2014 Panini Father's Day

I think this pack might have been another booster to get past a threshold for free shipping on a card order. It comes from Panini's 2014 Father's Day promotion and contains a couple of cards.

First up is a team collection hit featuring George Springer of the Houston Astros. It comes from the Rookies portion of the base checklist and is numbered # 389 / 599. There are Cracked Ice # / 25 and Lava Flow 1 / 1 variations out there as well. Springer is one of the promising young Astros that did make the Opening Day roster, unlike my PC target and the subject of early trade rumors, Jon Singleton.

The Cordarrelle Patterson card is from a Rookie insert set of some kind. It is not serially-numbered. I don't really understand all of the different subsets and inserts that come out of the Father's Day packs. It's kind of like Panini took a bunch of 'hot' players, threw their names into a hat, and then drew a handful out at a time and made a subset based on them. I guess some of them have a theme, but the set as a whole seems a bit hodge-podge and thrown together based on the Cardboard Connection checklist. I had Cordarrelle Patterson on some of my fantasy football rosters early last season based on his hype and play-making ability, but so far that hasn't really materialized.

The backs of the cards feature a couple of highlights from each player's career along with the usual copyright and legal whatnots and a bunch of diagonal lines.

2012 Greatest Heroes Iron Fist Sketch Card

Here is a sketch card I picked up a while back. It comes from the 2012 Greatest Heroes card set produced by Rittenhouse Archives. I think I was looking to fill out my sketch card collection with some of my favorite characters, and managed to get one half of the Power Man & Iron Fist duo. I still haven't picked up a Luke Cage/Power Man sketch, but I will get one eventually.

When it comes to sketch cards I can be a bit of a cheapskate, trolling the lower-priced listings for standout sketches. There is such a glut of sketch cards on the market that you can often find bargains if you are persistent and dig through the listings. I have picked up a few nice sketches from well-known artists in this way, but usually what you get in the $15 or less category are higher-quality sketches from lesser-known artists. In this case the artist is Rodrigo Martins, who has done sketch cards for a few Marvel-based sets. His work can be hit or miss, but this illustration is pretty good, with nice color work, great detail on the inking, and a nice use of perspective on the fist in the foreground.

I don't often really like the mystical characters in comics, largely because the authors who write them tend to be a bit too wordy for my tastes, but Iron Fist is pretty cool. He doesn't seem to get much respect compared to the big names in the Marvel Universe, though:

R.A. Dickey 2014 Panini Immaculate Autographs Blue # 02 / 10

Here's a pretty nice card I picked up recently. It's an autograph of the Blue Jays' Toronto Baseball Club's knuckleballer R.A. Dickey. This card comes from 2014 Panini Immaculate. The autograph is on-card and the card is numbered # 02 / 10. There is a little divot taken out of the card along the top edge in the front, but that doesn't bother me a whole lot. It would really be nice if Panini could get a license to use MLB logos, but I don't foresee that happening anytime soon.

Dickey says he is coming into the season much better prepared to play well all year. We'll see how it goes. If he does put up some good stats he might start showing up in more checklists again, as his cardboard footprint has shrunk a little bit every year since the explosion of cards he got after his Cy Young Award-winning 2012.

Josh Wise 2013 Press Pass Signings and Ignite Hot Threads

Here are a couple of Josh Wise items I've picked up. I got the 2013 Press Pass Ignite Hot Threads firesuit relic from eBay sometime during the last couple of months. I think multi-colored swatches are more common in NASCAR products than they are in the various stick-and-ball sports, but I couldn't pass on this three-color piece. I am not really sure where I got the autographed card, but I found it while sorting a bunch of stuff and figured I might as well scan it and put it up here on the blog. It's from some 2013 Press Pass product, and it is numbered # 15 / 25. You can tell by the relatively blank front of his suit that sponsors are hard to come by when you're a one-car operation without a superstar driver.

There isn't a race this weekend, so I can't fill space by talking about where my favorite drivers qualified and finished this week. I suppose I will just leave it at that.

MLB.tv offered a couple days' worth of free games to get people to sign up prior to the start of the baseball season. That was pretty nice of them. I still haven't decided if I will take them up on it or if I will just hold out for the price to drop a bit. It was fun to watch a couple of Astros - Royals preseason games, even if the Astros did lose both of the games I watched. I am trying to get excited about fantasy baseball this year, but I haven't been able to muster much excitement at all. I am in a few leagues still, but I usually prepare a lot more for my drafts and then go through my rosters all the time looking for updates and guys who are coming out of Spring Training with good numbers, but I have not done any of that. I even have a spreadsheet that projects what my league's numbers will look like that the end of the season so I can see what pace I'm on compared to everyone else, but I haven't even loaded the teams into it yet.

Star Wars Masterwork Imperial Shield Bunker Relic

Here's another type of insert that can be found in the recent high-end Star Wars Masterwork release from Topps. These are relic cards containing pieces of the shield generator bunker on Endor in Return of the Jedi. I believe there are Frame relics and Panel relics. The cards feature various characters from the film alongside the relic piece. I picked up the Princess Leia Organa variation, serially-numbered # 022 / 155.

Relic cards featuring pieces of props from the movies aren't a new thing, as previous releases have included cards with fur from Wookiee and Ewok costumes as well as bits of Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. Bunker pieces are a new thing, though, and I think it's a pretty cool idea. I'm glad I was able to pick up one of these for my Masterwork collection.

2014 Panini National Treasures Jon Singleton Auto-Relic

I got this 2014 Panini National Treasures Jon Singleton auto-relic a little while back because the price was right and it's a pretty cool card, even without any logos. The signature is on a thick piece of plastic and embedded in the card. These autographs on clear plastic seem to be pretty popular right now because they are like sticker autos, but classy on account of their thickness and the way they can be embedded in the card instead of stuck to the surface of it. I am curious to see if they will fade or yellow over time. The relic swatch is pretty plain, but I can live with that. The card is numbered # 58 / 99.

I guess the other cool thing about the autographs on plastic are that you can see them in reverse on the back of the card. Some athlete needs to get creative and write 'REDRUM' as an inscription on their little piece of plastic. I am not sure what this insert is supposed to be called. My best guess is Treasure Materials - Signature, but I guess you could also make a case for Signature - Treasure Materials or Treasure Signature Materials.

Singleton didn't make the Astros' Opening Day roster, getting optioned down to AAA to work some things out after hitting just .200 in Spring Training games. He's still got promise, but he's not quite where he needs to be. Hopefully he is able to get things sorted out and join the team later this year.

Pack of the Day 96: A Box of 2012-13 Panini Basketball

I opened this stuff last year, but the post is in the queue and I might as well write it now. Dave and Adam's Card World had some decent deals during their Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale and I took advantage of some of them. One of the things I ordered is a Hobby box of 2012-13 Panini Basketball. Each box promises 7 Knight parallels and 2 autographs, along with cards from a handful of insert sets.

The base card design kind of resembles the NBA Hoops cards of the early 90's, mostly because of the key-shaped border around the photos. James Harden is having an MVP-contending season for the Rockets, and hopefully this year the team will advance past the first round of the playoffs. I'd probably start an Anthony Davis PC since I also have a unibrow, but I don't even keep up with the basketball PCs I already have. A new one would just be silly. JaVale McGee and Nate Robinson are a couple of fan favorite type players.

Chandler Parsons was on his way to becoming my favorite 'new' Rocket, but I didn't like the way he handled himself during and after his move to the Dallas Mavericks. Jeremy Lin has struggled as a Laker, and I wonder if Linsanity will be on the move again soon? David Robinson and Grant Hill are two of the players I collected a bit during my initial card collecting phase in the 90's, although Robinson was a rival to my favorite player, Hakeem Olajuwon.

This Matching Numbers insert takes a couple of players who wear the same jersey number and puts them on a card together. I guess it's a cool concept, but not a must-collect set for me. I'm not a huge fan of anyone in this group, either, so that's probably a factor in my lukewarm response to it.

These Spirit of the Game inserts fill the 'insert with photos taken from the vicinity of the backboard' niche. It's an all right insert, but I don't like how far the logo intrudes into the action photo. It takes up like a third of the card.

There's not much to say about these Knight parallels. They have the different logo down at the bottom and that's pretty much it. I've heard of Shved, but the other guys I am not that familiar with.

This batch is a little better, with Kyrie Irving as a pretty big star and Morris and Evans at least being guys whose names I know.

Here is the insert that fills the 'famous old guys' slot in the set, Heroes of the Hall. There are some big names here, but no one I have much attachment to. Moses Malone is pretty cool. Patrick Ewing is a villain.

And here is the star player insert, All-Panini. Zach Randolph and Dion Waiters aren't the biggest names out there. I guess I don't follow the NBA close enough anymore to know where they fall in the star/semi-star/scrub hierarchy, but they aren't in the core group of star veterans and they aren't the hot new rookies on the scene, so they must be in the middle somewhere.

It is really hard to tell from the front, but that Zach Randolph card is a parallel. It's a Christmas Card, too, carrying the # 12 / 25 serial number.

My two promised autographs are both redemptions for Rookie Signatures. One features Quincy Miller and the other is Kahwi Leonard. Miller has spent this season signing 10-day contracts and bouncing between the D-League and the end of the Kings' and Pistons' benches, not getting a lot of playing time. I imagine he'll probably be out of the NBA altogether pretty soon. Kawhi Leonard is the young star of the Spurs, the most boring great team in the Association. He was the NBA Finals MVP last season as the Spurs won the Championship, and he plays pretty good defense while scoring some points and getting some assists on offense. If he did similar things on a flashier team this would probably be a better pull, but even as it is this card will probably cover the cost of the box once it's redeemed.

And that's it for this box. I kind of like the base set, and maybe if I get around to sorting through the cards I will consider putting it together. The boxes are cheap, which makes sense considering what you get out of one. I am not too big on any of the insert sets. Mostly it's a good cheap break if you want to bust some basketball cards and take a flier on getting a decent autograph. But honestly, I opened a box of 2014-15 Donruss Basketball recently that I think was a lot more fun than this stuff. It's still a pretty low-end break, but there was so much more going on that it felt like I got more for my dollar. I'll post that whenever I get my scans all sorted out, so probably around the time 2015-16 Donruss releases.