One Card Only: PenLADYship

If your gimmick is that you are a classy lady, you'd better have handwriting worthy of the title. Fortunately, Lacey Evans does. No nastiness here!

One Card Only: Game 1

The Raptors start the finals tonight. One of my first thoughts was hoping that I had at least one card in my "to be posted" box that I could post for Game 1.

Whew!

The Impressionist Ink auto comes out this year's Court Kings release, and showcases a player who was, and probably still is one of the most popular Raptors in team history. It is hard to believe he only spent a couple seasons in town.

With the games starting at 3:00 AM over in France, I'll probably sleep my way through most of the action of the finals, unless it reaches 6 games.

There you have it!

2019 Adventures in Repacks: Part 17: A Long Overdue Surprise

It has been way too long since I've best a Dollarama surprise Bag, so here's one of them:

Here's your content. I believe this is the first time I've found a pack of H&P in one of these.

The 90s pack was strange, especially since it included a card that was more than a decade removed from the 90s (10/11, to be precise). But that is offset by a Sens card, and a really great entrance photo of Bill Lindsay.

Two HOFers in that repack. Seeing Federko in any uniform other than a Blues one still looks odd.

Only one really interesting card in the Original 6 pack, but it is a good one with the Lionel Hitchman. Hitchman was the first team captain in Bruins history, but really doesn't have too many cards outside of ITG releases.

The H&P pack was all prospects, but with the appearance of guys like Lucic and Giroux, it did have a really good selection of prospects, as all would reach the NHL.

And there you have a satisfying $2 spent.

Je suis en vacances

Away time! I'm spending the next two weeks in France and Belgium as part of a tour for the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Prepare autoposts! So, if I speak glowingly of a player over the next two weeks, only for them to appear in an article with the phrase "multiple corpses", it is not my fault.

Also, if for some reason you send me a package that requires a signature, you should probably hold off.

What better to prepare for a trip to France than with an OPC card? I doubt I'll have to translate "He has a workshop at the house" in conversation, but I'm ready for it!

The anger on the front of the card needs no translation.

Murray Mania

I'll spend Monday with the COMC to-be-posted box and some of the latest additions to my Jamal Murray PC.

Let's start with something garish. But, you kind of expect that from any set that is part of the Kings family.

This card from his rookie season is shiny, but at least the shininess is in team colours for this.

Stars in the background mean that this card out of Revolution is an Astro parallel. As the logo indicates, this is another card from the rookie season.

This post will jump around a lot in terms of release dates, but I'm really just going through this first part in the order they're uploaded. Even though there are only three years covered in his basketball career. This is from this year's release of Optic, and isn't just a blue parallel, but a blue velocity parallel.

Finally! Something subdued as the unnumbered cards end.

Off to the second year, and a dazzle parallel out of threads. The shiny portion of the card definitely has a twinkling marquee feel to it.

This numbered parallel comes from the 2017 release from the National Convention. There's a really nice use of team colours on the borders.

Here's a hit! Despite this card being part of the pre-game materials subset, and despite the photo obviously being a pre-game photo, the description of the back of the card describes it as game used. Sure thing.

I'll end with a base card. A very high-end base card, but a base card nonetheless. While I'm generally not a fan of the bland white and foil that permeates sets like National Treasures/The Cup/etc, at least there's some team colour added to the design.

There you have it!

Retailing

I only need a handful of cards to wrap up this base set, let's make one attempt before I post a wantlist and look for singles. This wasn't the best idea on my part, as I needed 11 base cards beforehand, and after this, I still needed 11.

I have to show off some base cards, right? I know I showed this one when I was recapping my hobby box, but this still deserves another spotlight.

I know that when recapping the box, I complained about how the great photo choices weren't transferred to the rookies. But this precipitation-enhanced photo is a standout.

You're promised 4 purple parallels in the hanger box, and these were the regular base cards I landed ones of. Incredibly, both these two were part of the 11 regular base cards I needed for the set. Perfect.

I'm not sure why the purple extends all over the veteran base cards, but not the rookies. Shurmur was undrafted, but signed with the Chiefs.

The inserts are also given the parallel treatment in retail releases. Of course, the one I get is from my least favourite subjects for insert sets - fantasy sports.

That's a good enough choice for a card to segue into the inserts in the box. More Fantasy Stars with the regular cards, but at least this has super intense eyes on the photo.

Yup. These are still obnoxiously shiny in retail.

Strange that the cards you'd imagine to be obnoxiously shiny, especially given some of Epix's past usage of foil. The moment is supposed to be of Zeke leaping over an opposing player, but you'd think they'd at least try to include the hurdled player.

Celebration was probably my favourite subset last year. The Mile High Salute during the Steelers game was the specific one getting the nod in this photo.

But at least I got a bright red player-worn swatch in all this.

Anyhow, I've finally updated the set building wantlist to include the cards from this set. Only two weeks after busting this. Efficiency!

PWE Chronicles - Cards on Cards

Another day, another mailbag. This time, a pair of PWEs from Cards on Cards. I've had PWEs show up in staggered groups of 3 before, so I feel confident that there were only 2 envelopes sent. 2 wonderful envelopes, but just 2.

Might as well strike while the iron is hot and lead with some Kawhi Leonard. I haven't picked up the Raptors spot in as many of the group breaks as I'd liked this year, as they've lacked a rookie in any releases (aside from the brief period of Deng Adel was in the system) this season. So, I really kinda welcome any base cards from sets other than Hoops, Donruss, Prizm or Select.

It doesn't scan well, but this one is a green foil parallel. As best my time spent watching a couple breaks on youtube showed me, these were hanger pack exclusives.

A Lego card? Hell yeah! 

Here's the wrap-up of the Raps portion of the envelopes. 

The baseball portion leads with a Sky Blue parallel for the Jays, their only representation in the mailer.

Parallel Jays cards deserves some parallel Mets cards, and these were them. The Rosario doesn't show up as well in the scan, but this one is the chrome variation. I'm glad that they maintained the stripes on Diamond Kings, since it makes a better look for the Independence Day parallels.

There you have it! 

Another Subjective Mailer

Another mailer today, this time from Brian at Highly Subjective and Completely Arbitrary.

Brian always seems to take a look at my varied wantlists before dropping mailers my way. Here was one of the cards on it, an odd rookie card of Quincy Carter that salutes his baseball background. You can find Bowman cards of him on the Cubs.

Brandon Mashinter is a Kitchener Rangers alum, who spent parts of 4 season in the NHL. Despite 64 games, he only got a couple mainstream base cards, both from Panini, and both /999.

While Felix Heredia did get more than a couple cards from his career, this seems to be his only mainstream card to commemorate his 2002 season in Toronto. As I'm looking to get at least one card of anybody who got a pack-pullable card as a member of the Jays, and played at least one MLB game for them, that's a nice one to drop off the list.

A bunch of cards also dropped off my set-bulding wantlist, highlighted by this Joey Bats card out of Optic.

All 4 sports made an appearance in the bubbler. It is baseball the rest of the way home, but first, here's a Raptors break.

And a nice way to segue into the rest of the envelope. Just Mets stuff the rest of the way home.

A bunch of miscellany to start off.

And here's some David Wright stuff, all with a definite retro vibe to the whole grouping.

Will he ever be healthy enough to play for the Mets again?  Darned if anyobdy knows the answer, but here's a swatch regardless!

A few autos will end this, and Kevin Plawecki is probably the best known of the group. Behind Travis D'Arnaud, he was never going to be the catcher of the future for the Mets, but he's still in the big leagues.

Mo Bruce never reached the big leagues at all, but I do like that he signed his full first name to the card as opposed to the abbreviation. It's the little things like that which can improve a lower end hit.

The name should be familiar, but as a Met? This is Ronald Acuna Sr, the father of the Braves star. According to him, he had the talent, but not the attitude to progress beyond AA ball. But, he then worked hard to make sure those mistakes didn't get picked up by his son. Despite Sr's lack of success, I still wouldn't mind seeing a combination card of father and son. Even though it would have to be logo-less in a Panini release.

There you have it! Thanks for all these goodies! I'll be sure to hunt for some Twins the next time I'm ready to get a shipment from COMC!

My first Twitter Trade

After returning from the Expo, I posted to twitter an account of some of the goodies I pulled at the show from the boxes. Namely, all of the goodies from the box of Synergy. I was contacted by @GridironMast, a Miro Heiskanen super-collector, and it worked out for me to swap that for some additions to my Sens collection.

The oddness of SP Game Used means that this card is a base card in the set, being numbered to the player's jersey number. In a post Karlsson world, he took the opportunity to shine and ran with it. His rise was among the few highlights of the season.

Another highlight was Brady Tkachuk showing that he was worth hanging on to the first pick in the previous draft versus this upcoming draft, although that might not have been the case had the draft lottery worked out differently. Here's his first appearance - a pair of (redemption) relics out of Artifacts.

Staying with Artifacts, here's his second appearance, and my second autograph overall of his.

Thanks  for the hook-up, GM, and my first trade on the ol' twitter machine. A more traditional, for me, blogger package is up next.