Wal-Mart Re-Pack - The True Finale

Earlier this year I picked up a lot of 100 random packs from Wal-mart's website for the reasonable price of $40.  I had a lot of fun ripping through all the packs and posting the highlights here on the blog.  Way back at the beginning of August I posted the final batch of those packs.  Or did I?

I turns out the seller was pretty gracious and actually included well over 100 total packs in the box, which is pretty cool.  So, a few months later let's look at that overflow and finally call this round of posts done, shall we?

As with before I'll handle these in batches and show only the highlights.  First up, a couple packs of 2014 Topps, and a 2008 Upper Deck First Edition Update.

The Upper Deck pack was a total dud, which doesn't sting so bad at a price point of 40 cents.  One of the two Topps packs yielded this Jonny Gomes however, a card which was surprisingly missing from my team collection.  I'll take it!

Next up, a combination of 2012, 2013 and 2014 flagship packs...

Only the 2012 pack yielded anything of interest to me, in this second year Mike Trout card.  This looks to be about a $4-$5 card looking at COMC, so I'm not going to retire by cashing this in, but might make a nice throw-in for a future trade package anyway.

The Topps train continues, with 2010 Update, 2012 Series 2 and 2006 Series 2...

Unfortunately there was not a keeper to be found for me within these three packs.  Can't win 'em all!

Here's where things take an interesting turn, a pack of 2007 Topps sandwiched between a pair of fat/hanger packs, one from Fleer Ultra and one from Upper Deck!

The Ultra pack was good to me, as it yielded a new Jason Varitek for my Red Sox collection.  I really like the full-bleed minimalist design from Ultra around this time, though I admit the designs all seem to blur together with the passage of time.

Also decided to keep this late-career card of Greg Maddux with the Padres.  I was an impressionable young baseball fan when he rose to prominence with Atlanta, so I've always had a soft spot for Greg.  At some point in the future though I could see myself sending this one out to another collector, not sure it's destined for the long haul here at Shoebox Legends World Headquarters.

The Upper Deck pack was even more interesting.  Each half of the pack included one of these All-Time Legends inserts.  While not terribly creative in name or design/theme, I at least appreciate pulling some big names I'm familiar with.  The top half of the pack spit out this Killebrew...

...and this Julio Franco, someone I half-heartedly collect simply due to the age he stuck around in the Majors until (I half collect Jamie Moyer and Bartolo Colon for the same reason).

The bottom half of the pack contained this Johnny Bench from the All-Time Legends insert set...

...and a really neat card for my Red Sox collection, featuring current manager Alex Cora in front of a distant and blurred Green Monster!  Really happy to have pulled this one, easily my favorite card in tonight's post anyway.

Perhaps the most interesting packs in the entire lot were these one-card exclusive patch card packs, which typically come as the guaranteed "hit" in a blaster.  I'm not big on manu-patch cards at all, but was hoping I could either pull a Red Sox card or two, or if not at least end up with some decent trade fodder.

First up, Ernie Banks.  I suppose I'll be able to find a home for this one, there are enough Cubs and HOF collectors out there anyway.

The other one I'll certainly be able to ship out, as I have two Mets collectors in particular that I've been trading with for quite literally years now.

So, in retrospect how was my experience overall with this gigantic re-pack lot of packs?  To be honest, I think this would have been a better fit for me years ago when I was into keeping any and every new baseball card that I didn't already have a copy of.  These days I just don't have the mental energy, and don't want to dedicate the required space in my house, to hang onto that sheer volume of cardboard.

The approach I took with these definitely helped though, as I retained only 87 total cards from this entire lot for my own collection.  Nearly all of the others have already been packaged and shipped out to my trading buddies over the past few months.  On the one hand, I'd have been smarter to use the $40 on something like a graded T206, but sometimes you just get the itch to rip.  For $40 these provided hours of pack-ripping enjoyment, and at least half a dozen blog posts.

In summary, not a deal I'd probably jump at again, but not one that I regret either.

That's all for tonight, but I've got plenty of awesome content coming up, including arguably the single greatest card I've ever been sent out of the blue in the entire time I've been running this blog!  Until then, thanks as always for stopping by...

A Football Card Experiment - Game 7 - It's the Jets Again

In an attempt to increase the size of my very small football card collection, I'm picking up and featuring one new card for each of the Patriots' 16 regular season games this year.

For week 7 action, the 6-0 Patriots find themselves on the road to face the 1-4 New York Jets.  The Patriots handled New York in the first match-up of the season in Week 3, and as I did then I'm featuring a 1965 Topps card this time around...

Not sure what more I can say about this set at this point other than I love these "tallboy" cards.  Pretty much identical to their hockey card cousins from the same year.  I'm not sure why Dee Mackey, a tight end, appears to be practicing receiving a snap here, but we'll look past that.  A great image and a colorful card.

The cartoon on the back might be even better, I really like the concept of Mackey excitedly signing right on the scout's back!

Hard to believe we'll have 7 weeks in the books already on the NFL season after tonight's action.  My meager football card collection is now 7 cards the richer for it.  Will the Patriots stay undefeated and improve to 7-0, or will the Jets rally at home to stun the football world?  Should be a fun game either way.

Enjoy the NFL action tonight football fans, and thanks as always for stopping by!

Card Show Blaster - Dollar Boxin'

This past Monday, thanks to a holiday from work, I had the good fortune of attending a card show for the first time in years.  It was a decent-sized show, just shy of 100 tables with some autograph guests.  Having just returned from a vacation I was a little short on time, and funds, and nearly skipped it altogether.  In the end though I'm pleased that I stopped by, and I kept my day's spending under $75 including the small admission fee.  I thought that was pretty reasonable given how long I go between making it to shows.

To show off some of my haul today I thought I'd do a card show "blaster" post, featuring 20 singles plucked from dollar boxes...

There are going to be quite a few 1959 Topps cards in today's post.  One vendor had some really nice clean commons in his dollar bin.  I've been slowly plodding away at this set for years, and am past the halfway point with the cards in a binder even.  I figured it was worth my time to pull up my want list on my phone and see if I could do any damage.

In particular, I was happy to find a few needs from The Sporting News Rookie Stars subset, as I never seem to run across these for cheap coin on COMC like I do other commons.  From that subset I got Chuck Coles of the Red(leg)s...

...hurler Jerry Walker of the O's...

...Dan Dobbek of the Senators...

...and Deron Johnson, which I was particularly pleased to find given the "Yankee tax" that seems to exist on cards from this era.

This Pete Burnside is a little off-center, but aside from that is almost stunningly mint.  Couldn't leave it behind for a buck, that's for sure.

More red here with Charley Maxwell of the Tigers.

A confused-looking Taylor Phillips breaks up the color palette here with some black.  I can't tell if that's a batting cage in the background?  Too fuzzy.

Johnny Logan's a bit off-center as well, but again in remarkable shape otherwise.  The type of card that will likely never get a condition upgrade.

We'll close it out with some bright yellows and green here, starting with Bob Trowbridge.  I like how much of the frame Bob takes up here, makes him look monstrous in a way.

There seem to be one or two cards in every vintage Topps set that uses actual photographs that appear illustrated.  Such is the case with Ellis Burton here.  When you compare this image to the scan above or below it seems obvious.

Rounding out the '59 Topps is a smiling Walt Moryn.  I spent about 20 minutes digging through this particular vendor's dollar boxes, and wish I could have found more '59 Topps needs to be honest.  As it stands I'll happily accept this dozen, putting me at 326 cards now for my set.  54.9% complete and counting!

While I'm not actively pursuing the 1960 Fleer Baseball Greats set, I nonetheless could not resist grabbing the handful that I ran across in a dollar box at the show.  There were six of them, and I blindly grabbed all six knowing I had just a few cards from this release.

As with the '59 Topps cards, from the same vendor as it happens, these were in remarkable shape overall.  With a checklist less than 80 cards deep, it would be tempting to try chasing this one, but the reality is I just have too many other hobby projects at the moment.  Happy to scoop up cheap ones and hang onto them for now though.

My favorite of the bunch has to be this Burleigh Grimes.  The photo is just fantastic, and besides I don't have all that many cards of Grimes.

Bill Terry, again "Yankee tax" free!

My one mis-fire in this post was Ford Frick here.  He's pretty off-center top to bottom, and it turns out...

...that I already had a slightly less off-center copy in my small number of cards from this set.  My dupe's available if any of my regular trading partners are interested, just leave a comment!

Last but certainly not least on the Fleer Baseball Greats front, Tris Speaker!  $6 well spent on these if you ask me, even if I did inadvertently end up with a dupe.

We're at $18 and counting now, so let's close this "blaster" out with a pair of Piersalls!  Jim with the Indians courtesy of 1960 Topps...

...and Jim with the Angels in '65!  A nice way to bolster my small Piersall collection for less money than a Big Mac.

So, there you have it, $20 spent at a card show.  These 20 singles alone made the trip to the show worth it, particularly the damage to my 1959 Topps set.  I've got more great pick-ups to show off this coming week though.  Until then, thanks for stopping by!

Cards from Canada

This past weekend's Signature Sundays post was brought to you by my longtime hobby buddy Douglas, who blogs at Sportscards from the Dollar Store.  As I indicated in that post though, the pair of autographs I featured there were far from the only cards I received in my latest mailer from Canada.

Let's take a look at some of the other highlights, shall we?

There was a decent little stack of Boston Bruins cards to be found in the package.  While I've adopted the B's as my favorite team after the departure of my beloved Hartford Whalers, and watch every game faithfully, I've scaled back my collecting of Bruins cards some in my overall collection purge that's been ongoing over the past year or so.

With that being said though, I picked out my top five keepers here to show in this post, starting with this fantastic Bobby Orr from one of my favorite sets of the 2000s.  I'll certainly be hanging onto this one, as I do with any and all cards I don't already have from this attractive release.  I'm actually pretty astounded that I didn't have a copy of this Orr already, but indeed I did not!

Packaged alongside the Orr was the great Cam Neely from the same set, also a need.

I don't get a lot of modern hockey cards these days, but I'll never turn down a new David Krejci.  I certainly won't turn down a new David Krejci with a photo as compelling as this one!  He was my favorite player in the league for many years, and I even player-collected him somewhat seriously for a year or two.  Most of those cards are gone now, sold and converted into cards that better fit my collecting tastes these days, but this is a good one.

The most exciting young player on the team now is David Pastrnak, who is still just 23 and has already amassed 8 goals this season, just 7 games in.  I'll be hanging onto this SP Authentic single for sure.

Last card on the Bruins front, my first card depicting Rick Nash's 11-game, career-capping stint with the Bruins back in 2017-18.  I wasn't even sure anyone had produced a card of Rick in B's garb, so I was pretty happy to find this one included in the mailer.

Next up, the beast of a set known as 2013-14 Score.  The base set contained 650 cards, but then Panini released another 100 rookie/update cards in their Rookie Anthology release later that year.

Douglas has a penchant for busting cases of Rookie Anthology, in fact I suspect it might be his favorite hockey product of all-time to open.

As a result, he has provided a steady supply of cards to help me complete the high-number portion of the set over the years.

In this package he knocked another 7 needs off my shrinking list as far as those final 100 cards go.  Also, remember David Clarkson?!?!

Vincent Lecavalier was the lone horizontal card in this bunch.

With these in hand I'm missing just 2 cards from the 650-card base set (though I may have them laying around here somewhere, things are a bit cluttered at the moment), 5 of the update cards, and 4 of the update rookie cards.  At that point I could finally put this one to bed, which would feel pretty amazing.

I'd like to say I'll just head over to COMC and bang out the missing cards now, but they don't crop up as often as you'd think, at least not at reasonable prices.  I must not be the only one working on this set years after its initial release.

The final card on the hockey card front as far as this mailer goes is this striking Brendan Shanahan from 2018-19 Chronology.  This is actually a base card, but being a high-end set it's numbered to /222.  This came from the same group break as the great Ray Ferraro autograph I showed last Sunday.  This is the only Whaler on the checklist, instant team set!

As if the two autographs from Sunday and all those great hockey cards weren't enough, Douglas also included some other Red Sox cards in the mailer...

My very first card of any sort from 2019 Donruss Optic, a Mookie Betts Highlights.  As unlicensed Donruss goes this isn't too bad an image, I have to say.

Next up, a couple more cards of Red Sox prospect and subject of last Sunday's autograph post, Nick Decker.  From 2018 Panini Elite Extra Edition we have his base card (#'d /999)...

...and this crazy loud die-cut card!  Two serial-numbered cards and an autograph, now I really have to keep tabs on how this guy does (hopefully) progressing through the minors!

Douglas also hit me up with a nice trio of Sox from 2019 Heritage High Numbers; pitchers Nathan Eovaldi...

...Matt Barnes...

 ...and Ryan Brasier.  Enough bullpen arms there to get you from the 6th or 7th through the end of the game!

One straggler need towards my 2019 Topps Big League team set, which is getting there.

This one is really cool; a die-cut W.A.R. insert from Panini's 2019 Revival of the formerly Donruss 'Leather & Lumber' set.  I really like the design here, and in fact I think I recall possibly commenting on this exact card, or one very similar, on Douglas' blog a ways back.  Awesome stuff.

We'll close it out with the remaining 'hit' of the mailer, a Michael Chavis Dual Silhouettes Red relic, serial-numbered to /49.  Michael's future is somewhat of a mystery, at least to me.  Appearing in under 100 games for Boston in his first season this past year, he put up some good power numbers.  The stats seemed to come more in the earlier portion of the season though, before injury caused him to miss some time.  I'm very curious to see how he fits into the plans for the team for the 2020 season.

Well, we've at last reached the end of another great package of cards from Canada.  Thank you so much Douglas for this amazing and thoughtful array.  I know I'm certainly in your debt at this point as far as cardboard goes, and I'll try to find something to return fire with soon here.

To everyone else, thanks as always for stopping by.  Visit again tomorrow if you're curious to see my haul from last Monday's card show!