Your 2019-20 Raptors

Not the entire team, but at least the rookies I might be chasing as the season progresses. With everybody chasing Zion cards this season, it was easy to swoop in and grab the Raptors in team select group breaks of the new Contenders release. They actually have rookies this season! With autographs and everything! Obviously, we'll have to see how things play out as training camp progresses to see if they're on the team, but it is nice to have players to hunt for as a team collector.

The Raptors only had one draft pick, a late second rounder. They used it to pick up Dewan Hernandez. Dewan was part of the corruption/bribery scandal in the NCAA, and missed the entire 18-19 season. But given their affinity for taking players that are projects with great potential, with various degrees of success (Siakam vs. Caboclo), he might fit in perfectly.

The rest of the cards were for undrafted players. I'm pretty excited for Terence Davis. He's been compared to Fred VanVleet in terms of attitude, although his philosophy is 'make 'em believe', vs VanVleet's 'bet on yourself'.

Fortunately, I landed a pair of cards of Sagaba Konate in this, meaning one of them will be bound for former blogger BobWalkThePlank.

And let's end with another player I duped up on. Brissett was born in Toronto as well, so dupes of him can make their way into the Canadian NBAers mini-collection.

There you have it!

From the Playbook

The last time I busted one of these, I landed a Gordie Howe autograph. What did I get this time?

This remains one of my favourite base designs for a card. So colourful, and a nice break from the generic white/silver foil that tend to accompany numbered base cards.

It is a David hot box so far!

There are usually only three cards per box, but I got a bonus relic in this one. The background here is pretty nice as well, and nicely fits the 'playbook' concept.

So, that means the autograph in this will be the booklet card.

And I get it about 5-6 years too late.

It is a nice design, though. Maybe he'll return from overseas and have a Jagr-like resurgence.

Or maybe not.

2019 Adventures in Repacks: Part 24 - Cubism

Another one of these. Thankfully, I don't come across any sex offenders in this one (to my knowledge).

The packs were pretty standard for this:

2007-08 Ultra
2012-13 Score * 4
2015-16 Series 1
2015-16 Series 2

The 75 miscellaneous cards also included the standard grouping from the MVP factory sets. Fortunately, #127 was in that grouping, meaning a new Ehlers for the 2/14 collection.

And I could let Joe Thornton and Jake Muzzin battle it out for an autographed copy of Sebastian Cabot's Beard Book. Joe has the volume, but Jake really lets his inner Amish fly with his.

There was a small stack worth of 1994 Leaf in these. I like the colourful backs on these almost as much as I like the design from the previous seasons.

Before I get to the packs, here's a teaser of the rest of the random cards. The Mantha silver rookie parallel was definitely the big winner of this group.

As for the packs, I did get one of the SPd rookies out of the Ultra packs, even though it wasn't a major name. Much better with the gold medallion though.

Here are the gold parallels from the Score pack. Only the Ryder wasn't a dupe.

But the only insert I got from them was a nice card for my Rangers alumni collection. And at least the photo was from the game where he got his first goal, if not the actual goal itself.

The S2 pack's insert was this Portraits card of Jared McCann. I was hoping that these would vanish this season, but they're back for 19-20, and more absurd than ever.

No McDavid YG in the S1 pack, but at least I got a nice teal swatch of Brent Burns. He hadn't fully-committed to the beard at this point.

And there you have it. With the relic, the Landeskog and the Mantha, no complaints about this. And I've got another nice storage cube.

Redeemed!

I'm still highlighting the mailbag goodies today, and I'm doing so with a one-card mailer today.

This one is 9 months in the making, however.

This redemption, has resulted in this:

It wasn't exactly as advertised, but I'm still very happy with the card. Status instead of Optic seemed like a bit of a downgrade in set quality when it was announced, but I never was too picky about that. But since the Optic likely would have been a sticker auto, and this is on card. That's definitely an upgrade there.

So there you have it!

Mailbag Time!

Several packages have shown up over the past little while at Chez Buckstorecards, and I'll open the recap of these with some from Blogland.

But I'm going to start with a former blogger. I'm still shipping off my excess Bills, and Mets, and Celtics, and Rangers, to Mark, formerly of This Way to the Clubhouse. In return, I got an envelope with many of my team PCs hit. Here's a sweet patch of Jakob Poeltl, a former Raptor who moved on as part of the Kawhi trade.

The Bills of the early portion of this decade were questionable at best, but at least they were really solid at RB, with Spiller and Fred Jackson available. Bowman Sterling tended to be a very rookie-based product, but in 2013 they also had Stevie Johnson and CJ as available autos.

Senators content? But of course!

There was even some more specific Sens content with a pair of Daniel Alfredsson swatches for that PC.

There were even a couple more hits for the mask binder(s) collection. These were two of my favourites from the 00's, with the buggy Marc Denis card joined by Alex Auld, who frequently wrapped the team logo around his face.

And yes, there was Blue Jays content as well, in both unnumbered...

and numbered form.

The other mailer from a blogger was from someone still very active in the community. Crazie Joe provided a PWE that didn't even have to cross provincial borders. This also brought the Bills love, starting with this pair that put the Rookies in Rookies and Stars. So nice of them to use a photo of JP Losman where he looks baked out of his gourd.

If stars are more your thing, here's a trio of those. Bledsoe will likely be on his way to the 2/14 binder instead of the Bills one, though.

Best of all, here's a few cards dropping off the wantlist for my 09/10 setbuild of OPC hockey. I do wish they'd used retro colours for the border of the Sykora, though.

And there you have it! Thanks to Joe and Mark for the envelopes. Mailers are either on the way or will be shortly as a thank you!

2019 Chronicles Case Break Random Goodies #4: Blue Jays

Vlad chasing!

Amazingly, there were players on the Jays team checklist other than Guerrero. The second-generation love does continue with Cavan Biggio, one of the Jays three-headed monster of second generation talent.

The best thing about catcher cards in Panini releases is they can use photos where you don't notice the lack of MLB logos.

You couldn't have a 2019 release without an appearance of Rowdy Tellez RCs.

And if you would rather see some ink and some swatches with the hit, then here you are with those, all in one card. While I did prefer last year's design, with the infield-ish square in the background, the pattern still has a ballpark feel to it.

Let's keep the second generation greatness going with a second one. I seriously had no idea that Bo was even part of the set in any form, but there he is! I also love how the swing is perfectly placed between the swatches both here and with Tellez. anyhow, this is my first Bichette hit, and given that I'd already landed a pair of Vlads in a case break of Optic, I might be more excited about this one than the Vlad content in this.

But here's what you want to see when you have the Jays in a product like 2019 Chronicles - lots of Vladdy! Big head Vladdy, in fact!

And here's some more Vlad!

If numbered cards are more your thing, here's some of those. The Red Phoenix is /199, the Hyper Phoenix is /299 and the blue Crusade is /99 as well as being a perfect parallel for the collection.

3 of 4 posts in this had a hometown heroes dual relic card. Here's Vladdy's!

And yup, there's an autograph as well. He may have had some issues with staying on the sticker, but there's #3 for the ol' collection.

There you have it! This weekend, I'll be hitting the mailbag!

2019 Chronicles Case Break Random Goodies #3: Mets

About a year ago, I remarked that Chronicles was a great way to quickly expand the Amed Rosario portion of my Mets team collection. This year, Pete Alonso is the Mets' rookie of choice. How will that part of the collection do?

But before I get to Alonso, I'm going to show off another one of those 'big-head' Score cards.

Here's one of the true base cards from the set.

As does seem to be typical, veteran talent only appears in one or two portions of the inserts, unless one's name is Trout, Ohtani, Harper, etc.

One more veteran appearance before the rookie content starts.

Here's the Jeff McNeil appearances. There's nothing different about the card in the top left and the middle right - I just hosed up the organization of the cards. The purple-tinged Obsidian is a /99 parallel.

So, after all that, how did my Pete Alonso collection do?

Not quite as good as last year with the cards and numbered parallels, but 14 new cards is still pretty nice. And there's another big head parallel.

While last year got me a relic, an auto and an auto-relic of Amed, this year, I only got this dual swatch. But that's still my first hit of his, and it has to start somewhere!

And there you have it! The main event of the break goes tomorrow. Will I drown in Vlad Guerrero Jr content with the Jays portion of the random?