Birthday break pt. 3

The next box I busted was one I was a little wary of. I had seen some people say that it was a rather boring set. It also came out during the strike shortened season. But the price was right so I bit.

2012/13 Panini Certified hobby box

10 packs per box

5 cards per pack

Every box contains four hits including at least one autograph

I didn't find the base set as boring as I had been prepared for it to be. I know some people don't like cards where the background behind the player is blurred or even non-existent. It doesn't bother me, at least to a point. Overall I would give the base set a B. Nothing special but not terrible either.

In edition to the promised hits the box also contained a good amount of numbered inserts.

Mirror Red parallel

And the hits

This one was a last pack winner. And based on my research this card should have pretty good resell value, if I did that sort of thing. Other hockey collector, what do you think? I didn't see anything Junior Class dual autos on COMC and eBay only had some lower end players.

Overall this was a so-so break for me. I wasn't wowed by anything in the box, save for the Phaneuf/Nugent-Hopkins dual auto. Not knowing nearly as much about hockey cards as baseball..I would guess that this is a set that debuts at way too high a price compared to the attractiveness and value of the content. But after a year plus of sitting on the shelf it came down to a price that was more around where it should be. I got the box for less than $50 which I think is an excellent price after factoring in that the dual auto may be worth a good bit more than that, (just an assumption). But I wouldn't have paid much more than that.

Birthday break pt. 2

When I was trying to decide what boxes to order for my birthday I was feeling kinda bored with the current selection of baseball cards. Heritage wasn't out yet and I had been kind of jonesing to open some hockey boxes for the first time. I ended up ordering three boxes, the first of which I will report on here.

2013/14 Score Hockey jumbo box
10 packs
52 cards per pack
Each box contains two autos and one memorabilia card

I'm not going to show any of the base set right now but it was fun to break. The photography is pretty good and I have some ideas of some new blog series that I can do to showcase these cards. The set itself is light on inserts but heavyish on parallels. Every pack contains four gold parallels and you have a shot at black parallels and alternate backs. I did manage to pull one black parallel.

And now the hits.

Neither of these autos are much of anything special, nor were they the highlights of the box.

The memorabilia was.

These Team 8's cards are awesome. Very thick cards that feature four jersey swatches on each side. They also seem to sell for pretty good prices online. Not the type of jersey card you would expect to find in a low end set. So it was pretty cool to pull this card. But even cooler was...I pulled a second one!

I particularly like the back of this one because all four swatches are different colors. 

Overall this was a really fun box to break. And if there's one thing I really like about Panini it's that quite often you will get more hits than advertised. If you like hockey and you're looking for a fairly cheap break with a lot of cards then I highly recommend one of these jumbo boxes.

Birthday break pt. 1

This past Sunday was my birthday and of course I asked for cards. I decided to change it up a a bit though and got some boxes that weren't of the baseball kind. I'll talk about those boxes and their plethora of hits in future posts.

But first, I ordered from Dave and Adam's Card World. As such I got a free gift with my order which happened to be six retail packs of 2012 Panin Prizm baseball. I bought a couple packs of this product last year. I liked it but the price point was too high for me with what was in the packs. I believe walmart had them at $4 a pack for four cards. That would be $2 too much. But in this case the packs were free so I was glad to have them.

I did like this cards when I first saw them last year. And I still like the design. Well, the border design at least. In opening these packs I realized how devoid of color this set is. And that has nothing to do with the lack of logos. Maybe that's an indictment of MLB uniforms in that so many teams normally wear a combination of white/grey/black/navy blue or red with only a little bit of color mixed in. That only changes when they wear alternate uniforms or 70's throwback uniforms, none of which are represented in this set. It doesn't help that the background in the photos is blurred and darkened to make the player stand out more. The background provides a lot of color in baseball cards that I guess can alleviate some of the uniform blandness. But Panini took that out of the equation. So I guess my two thoughts are that Panini should have better thought out the design of this set, and MLB teams need to have more color in their uniforms.

Moving on

An excellent pull for me as a J. Up fan. If you'll notice in the upper left corner some white specks. This card as well as some others came out of the packs with a powder that looked like they came from a powdered doughnut. The packs did not appear to be tampered with. So maybe someone in the Panini factory was having a snack while on the job.

Looks like he's in a Dodgers or Padres uniform. BOO.

Possibly the most colorful card out of them all thanks to Machado's sunglasses.

So nothing special but at least the packs were free. 

My internet access my be spotty for awhile but I will try to get the rest of my Birthday break reports uploaded soon. Thanks for reading!

Recent eBay pickups

One of my shortcomings are a collector is that I tend to spend money on cards from eBay that I probably shouldn't be spending. It's good for my collection but bad for my bank account. Regardless, recently I picked up three cards.

The first is this 1996 Leaf Signature Extended Jorge Fabregas auto. Sure he was just a platoon/backup catcher but I always thought he had a fun name when I was kid.

Next up is this excellent John Smoltz relic card from last year's TTT set #15/36. I can't wait to see him make the HoF next year.

And last is this awesome Chipper Jones Famous Four-baggers dual relic from 2013 Topps Tribute #79/99. The coolest thing about this card is obviously the dirt smudged on the swatch on the right. The one thing I don't get is if the sub-set is called Famous FOUR-baggers then why is it only a dual relic? Would make more sense to have four swatches. Oh well. I love this card anyways.

Need More Contest: 2nd Chance Drawing

Hey guys, I told you I would do a second chance drawing and tonight I finally got around to it. What I did was take all of the entrants into the contest, minus the two winners, and gave them each one entry. I randomized six times and the first name the sixth time gets the prize. The prize will be a brand spankin new rack pack of 2014 Topps Heritage!

And the winner is....

Congratulations to Richard from Dawg Bones, A Phillies Phan on winning the second chance drawing!!

Richard please send me an email at quinniethetrumpetman (at) yahoo (dot) com with your address.