Mid-Week Draft Folder Fodder

I actually find myself with a little bit of free time for posting tonight, which feels like a minor miracle of late.  I don't have the kind of time it would take to pull some new stuff, scan or photograph it, and post, so instead let's pump out some backlogged images from my drafts folder...

First up, a French Bulldog "Collectible Canines" insert from last year's Allen & Ginter set.  I purchased this card for a very obvious reason...

...and that is the fact that Shoebox Legends' official assistant is indeed a French Bulldog.  This is Leo, who I'm fairly certain made an appearance on the blog when we first brought him home around three years ago now.  He's my favorite pet of all time, so well behaved that he hasn't even chewed a single card yet.  

Seriously, he has free reign of my office/card room, door is always left open and he even goes in there and naps alone sometimes.  There are small stacks of cards everywhere, many of which are within his very limited reach.  Sometimes he's even home alone with access to them, and not a tooth mark or toppled pile yet.  What a good boy!  The trick is that I let him nibble on an unlicensed Panini Prizm baseball card when he was still a puppy, which obviously put a rotten taste in his mouth (totally kidding).

Here's the write-up on the back.  I popped this one into one of those UltraPro OneTouch magnetic holders specifically for minis (which are amazing, by the way), and it's displayed on my home office desk, which has been my work area for coming up on 8 months now.  Nice work with this insert set, Topps!

Here's a really stunning Pedro card that I only got to scanning and adding to my collection formal very recently, even though I purchased it probably close to two years ago, maybe longer.  Everyone fawns over the 1993 Finest Refractors, and it's easy to see why.  To me, though not nearly as coveted, these '94s are equally beautiful.  This card practically glows, easily my new favorite pre-Red Sox Martinez card.

I got an absolute steal on this too, as a Buy-It-Now for $10 flat.  Nowadays, I have a feeling I'd have to drop more than that to acquire one of these.

I've been selling a lot of my soccer cards on eBay these past few months because the market for them went absolutely insane (it's calmed slightly in the past couple of weeks, but overall is still solid).  One that I decided to keep though is this Pitch Kings insert of Leo Messi from 2015 Donruss.  It's not worth enough to bother listing on its own, and besides I like the artwork, even if it is a little spooky.

Last but not least, here's a card that arrived in the mailbox just today.  I've sold a few of my Mookie Betts cards via eBay auction this week, with him being in the World Series again and all he's getting some hobby attention for sure.  Since I was pumping quite a few of them out of the collection, I decided to bring in this new one to offset things just a bit.  Cost me less than $2, with free shipping.  Technically it's a Purple parallel, though it looks very pink both in this scan and in hand.

I know what you may be thinking.  Earlier in this post I made a crack about unlicensed Panini sets being terrible, why would I buy this?  Well, the reason I don't enjoy most Panini baseball products is simply the fact that they don't have a license.  I think they should have an MLB license, because exclusivity seems to breed laziness at Topps sometimes.

In particular, I really love the 2017 Donruss Optic set.  If these had proper team names and logos this might be my favorite baseball release of the 2010s, not even kidding.  Just look at the Optic basketball or football sets that use this design, both of which are licensed, and you'll see what I mean.  In hand, the parallels from this Optic set are some of the shiniest baseball cards in my entire collection.

I'm not even doing it justice here, trust me, but just look at how this card catches and refracts the light.  Tilting it around side to side I almost get lost in the rainbow reflection.  Just beautiful.  In fact, I have a project in mind involving some of the parallels from this set, but that's for another post on another day.

That's all for tonight, here's Leo one more time, doing his best impression of the year 2020.

Thanks for stopping by!  Until next time, stay safe out there.