The Big Finale

 

With the addition of this card, I've now completed the 2022 Heritage, 2022 Heritage High Numbers and 2022 Heritage Minor League set. Nothing better as a set builder than putting the final card into the binder.

Only about 4 years or so after starting it. 

And worth every second of the wait!

2026 Adventures in Repacks - Part 7 - A Holdover

I haven't seen any of the baseball value packs at the Dollarama lately. Fortunately, I kept several around from last year when I have the mood to show some off.

So, these were the repacks contained in the repack.

I was expecting an early 90s card to be the 300 HR card. So, Pujols out of Prizm was a nice surprise. Another nice surprise -  that Bankhead was an O-Pee-Chee entry! 

2015 Heritage was not the set I'd expect to make two appearances in the first repacks, but there we are. 1989 Fleer on the other hand - I wouldn't have been surprised if that was the first one to make two appearances instead of one in the repack. Luis Rivera shows up on a really cool photo, although for the sake of George Bell I hope he landed safely. Tom Niedenfuer is sporting a definite fashion 'Don't', in terms of looking uncomfortably warm for a summer's day, and also looking really goofy.

At least there wasn't entirely early 90s  stuff in 90s pack, with that Grieve stretching into 1999. A random minor league card is fun to see as well.

I could not have told you with any level of certainty that Juan Gonzalez played for the Royals. It was only a part of a season, but he seemed to get way too many cards out of that brief stint. Gripp never made it above AA ball. Hawpe does get a nice photo, although it would be elevated if you actually saw the ball in the glove.

Enough interesting cards in this to give this one a thumbs up!

There you have it!

The Nose Wheel Feels Mushy

 Another MST3K-related card!

Here's David Hartman, whose thinly-disguised TV movie San Francisco International was used in Experiment #614. He was the pilot of a plane that had to have its take-off delayed for convoluted, movie reasons. Mike & The Bots got a lot of riffs out of David's face.

Tom: He needs more facial hair.

Crow: And less face.

I'm sure his Fan Club President in Glendale was quite upset by that.

"What a Neat Guy!"

There you have it!

The Finale

Blue Jays content will wrap up my show-off of the content of the latest TMV mailer.

I'll start with a mascot card. BJ Birdy preceded Ace and Diamond taking over the role. I'm amazed it took the team as long as it did to realize the name could be viewed as slightly filthy. 20 years long, to be precise.

Just a single, solitary base card among the Jays stuff. But it was from a mid-range set, and Bo is rocking the powder blues. 

I guess these are technically base, but since they're stickers/stamps, I won't group them with the Bichette. My collection. My rules. That's Dave Stieb, Otto Velez and Damaso Garcia on the top, with John Mayberry and Alfredo Griffin on the bottom. There were also Mets versions of these, but since it wasn't a complete group, lacking Mookie Wilson. I added that to my COMC inventory, and will show it and the rest off when it shows up. Considering I haven't hit ship yet, that will likely be August.

There's a flashback to lockout years with the George Springer Prizm parallel. It does answer my question about unlicensed baseball entries having to Photoshop away any logos sported by the crowd. 

The sole numbered, non-hit parallel was this /250 of Adam Lind.

There's never a bad time to show off my newest Carlos Delgado acquisition. It doesn't really feel a plain white swatch for a card if it features a favorite player.

And some autographs! Trent Thornton is the only one of these that is new to my collection among this trio. I remember being way too excited for Nate Pearson's debut. At least he did get to pitch part of a no-hitter after leaving.

But wait! There's more!

Just like last time, there was an All-Star program from the 2001 that featured Mike Piazza as a cover boy (there were several versions), one was also included this time, featuring the only time Toronto hosted the game. It was fun to look back at the time where a retractable roof was considered to be innovative, and the program includes an article marveling at it.

The cover opens to a 4-page thread covering team histories. That's a little unwieldy to post here, but the summary inside is just right. There's also a baseball card article that I might scan and post on a day I'm not feeling too verbose.

So, thanks for all the goodies, Dennis. I'm reloading at this moment, but might have a package ready for you by mid-April.

There you have it!

Getting Down With O-Pee-Chee

 Time for some low-end hockey!

There wasn't any Topps S1 on the shelves at the Walmart when I stopped by, so I went for one of these.

Here's my first pack-pulled card of the 25-26 season. I like the design, except for the tiny font used for the player's name and tinier one used for the team. Still, the photo is incredibly clear, and even the white jersey doesn't look too bland with the grey borders. 

The backs. Recycling the front photo means reducing the stats to only 5 seasons worth.

You don't buy OPC for the photography, since they mostly use just the most basic skating photos. But here's a sample of them.

While I did get my first true Utah Mammoth card earlier in a repack, here are my first two pack-pulled ones.

Only one pack and hitting the big rookie this season in Schaefer shows up. Who needs to pack search? I'll assume that Suzuki and Robidas are super-nice people, but it is a given they're battling for runner-up.

And the retros. The decision to not do the coloured backgrounds based on numbering and instead using team colours is a really nice one, and I'm sure it will look really nice if this is the one used for the shiny cards in OPC Platinum. They did use generic blue for the rookies/4 Nations portion of the set, though. I also went 2/3 for mask binder close-up additions as well. The size of the team name makes up for how tiny it is on the regular base.

Normally, I'd end the post here. But I also got into a group break, picking up the Senators to chase a team set, and the Bruins to chase rookies of 2/14er John Farinacci. How'd those work out?

It was only a part case, so there were no guarantees at a complete set. I ended up an Ullmark short. They didn't make any appearances among the rookies, so they were a cheap date.

But I did get their solitary SP in the set, Brady Tkachuk in the 4 Nations Face-Off subset. The little dabs of white, blue, yellow and red at the side are a really nice touch, covering the main colours of the countries that were participating. 

Back in the day, you had to turn in a bunch of hobby wrappers at the LCS for some red-only packs. Now, you just have to find them in packs. Sweet colour-match parallel, here.

Retros! I'm not sure why the red in this design seems louder than with the Kleven parallel. 

But those black border parallels, /100, look absolutely spectacular to double up on the colour match for the team. It is so perfect, I could totally buy this as being the design used for a team-issue card.

As for the Bruins, how did that go for the Farinacci hunt?

A base card and its retro parallel. I'm guessing there's some sort of pre-season strangeness as to why he's wearing the 'A' on his jersey, since his only NHL game also saw the Bruins sporting black jerseys.

Yes, the black parallels also look great here.

There you have it!

2026 Adventures in Repacks - Part 6 - The New Dollarama Double?

With a new type of insert/parallels-only repack showing up on the Dollarama pegs, maybe my repack purchases will change. For the time, I at least added several of the newer types to my basket with my most recent trip to the store, and will probably do the combos for several AiR posts over the next month or so.

For now, here's the latest one.

We're starting shiny! The Breaking News, at least according to the card back, was Leo picking up a hat trick in his 9th career NHL game. 

Good for him!

A shiny rookie is up next. These, and many of the inserts that appear in the repacks, are fairly cheap on COMC because of e-packs, but I do appreciate the fun of the randomness of which ones show up in this. 

Another factory set MVP. 

Yes, a player that can duplicate themselves multiple times during a shirt would be an extremely effective defense mechanism. And since the best defense is a good offense, the write-up on the back described Spurgeon netting an overtime goal.

It ends like it starts, with a shiny, patterned card. Unlike Leo Carlsson, Emil has moved back across the Atlantic to play. But this one is numbered. That's my first numbered card out of these, although there will be more in future posts.

Not as interesting as the first one, but still a perfectly fine grouping.

As for the Value Pack I'm showing off, here's the contents. I've had these sitting in my Scans folder for a few months. Worth the wait?

Steve Dubinsky is a rookie card from the days before Young Guns were SPd parts of the UD set. That makes this slightly more interesting than the usual 90s portion of these repacks. The David Shaw was a Kitchener Rangers alum dupe. 

I opened this repack so long ago that these were already posted as part of a mailer I sent to Dennis @ Too Many Verlanders. 

All over the place for the 5-card pack. I like that random appearance of some guy named Exentus. Scheifele hits the sweet spot of my design preference with his. If they're going to completely wipe the background from the photo, it should be replaced with the team logo.

The Score package wasn't the most interesting I've ever busted. When my favourite thing is that Normand Rochefort randomly got a horizontal card, that's a dull pack.

Yeah, so there was probably a reason this stayed in my "Scans - To Be Posted" file.

I really didn't design this post as a repack battle, but even without that, the first repack was the easy winner.

There you have it!

Mets in the Mail

 Back to the mail bag today, and the Mets content in the most recent TMV mailer.

It might not be the most notable entry in the mailer, but this was probably the most interesting one. 

Even better - valuable coupons on the back. I almost want to try and present one of these at a BK just to see what reaction it gets. Since they'd probably confiscate the card, I won't.

Here's the unnumbered inserts/parallels. I was very surprised that the Wright '71 mini wasn't a dupe. Despite all the shininess here, I'm picking the plainer Turkey Red of Carter as my favourite in this grouping. 

There was only a single numbered card that doesn't bring anything else with it. The colour match with this blue parallel (if not the exact hue) is nicer than the numbering. 

Dig the almost perfect placement of the pinstripe in the window on that Dominic Smith! That's the easiest way to elevate a swatch!

Finally, the autos. The more I think about how catchers in full gear are perfect for Panini releases, I wonder if they could have gone for a "Behind the Plate" standalone release in the vein of ITG's "Between the Pipes".

Mind you, said set would only appeal to sickos like me. 

So, maybe not.

But there you have it!

First Pitch

 Canada's first game at the World Baseball Classic is today, so here's a couple of guys on the team.

Even if neither player was from anywhere near the location shown in the middle of the card. Ah, the great snow-capped mountains of Southern Ontario.