The Best Cards are Free Cards

I hope you had a great National Hockey Card Day!

Here's the contents of my free pack!

I can't complain about a new Karlsson for my PC, especially since he'll remain with the Senators, at least for a few more months.

I also grabbed a box of comfort food of 13-14 Rookie Anthology to go with the free pack, and I'll be showing those goodies off next time.

Redeemed! 1 Becomes 2!

Time once again to open up a redemption envelope from a card company - this time from Topps.

The product may have only been on the shelf for a couple weeks, so it was unexpected to see this turn into this:

so quickly. But here's my first George Bell auto. I love the 1984 design this is from, but only wish he'd been wearing the blues in that photo, since that look didn't debut until years later. But that is picking the nit of a really great addition to my Jays collection.

But wait there's more!

A week and a half from entering the code isn't really a delay, but I'll still take a bonus card.

Amazingly, it is a card for my other team collection. What are the odds? (Rhetorical question) This is my second auto of his, joining a '14 GQ. They will both be freed from their plastic prisons and moved into binders sooner rather than later.

To the picker of said bonus card, I thank you!

Fall Expo Post #1 - A 'Mic Drop' kinda box break

Upper Deck had a redemption program at the Expo, with a silver pack containing some combination of a /25 Midnight parallel from S1, a Victory rookie or a Priority Signings auto. It was available with a box purchase of either 2016-17 Series 1 or Artifacts. I went back and forth between the two, but settled on Artifacts. Maybe it is because I love the set build of S1 and S2 and don't want to go through it in one shot.

PCs hit via the base card. A Kitchener Rangers alum and a pair of Senators cards, or a pair of Kitchener Rangers alum and an Ottawa Senators card. Either or.

Getting into the numbered cards portion of the break, here's the veteran content. The Forsberg is the base silver version, while the Roenick is an emerald parallel. The green looks really nice with the slight green portion on the shoulders of the old Coyotes jersey.

Here's the numbered rookies. Nylander is one of several Leafs rookies that are nice to see pop out of a pack this year. The Fasching is the ruby parallel.

And my redemption is for an emerald parallel of a Dallas Stars rookie. The youngest player on the team this year to be making his rookie debut and not have a card is Gemel Smith. I'll guess it is him, but who really knows?

Hit #1. A nice double relic, and since it features Larry Robinson, it will be bound for my Rangers alumni collection.

And one card with a Hall of Famer deserves another. Right? Grant will be bound for the hits portion of my mask binder with these two nice blue swatches.

And the boom of the box. A pair of all-star patches, and there really is no doubt that it came from the same jersey pictured on the photo. I'm yet unsure if I'll be keeping or COMCing this card, as Brodeur makes a lot of appearances in the base card portion of the mask binder, and there is still one more amazing card to come.

But before that, there were a couple bonus packs with the box.

A group of Oilers cards associated with the Heritage Classic held a few weeks back in Winnipeg.

And a very Pavelski filled pack of 2016 Overtime.

And the UD box breaker bonus pack:

Card #1:

Here's one of the Midnight parallels, and perfectly enough, it falls right into my Senators collection. What more could I ask for?

OK. This will do. And easily so. And this is also why I'm waffling between which of the two cards to keep and which to COMC. While it is a sticker-graph it is a pretty nice addition to my collection as well. It is also probably the one I'm more likely to keep from the break, but either one should be able to put a major dent in the box price.

Things downscale a bit the rest of the way home, but I still have a lot to get to between then and now.

A (Literal) Free Pack Friday at Mojobreak

And I do mean it literally. I picked up a free pack a few weeks back at mojobreak. Generally, they only send hits out on these. But, since I was in a Father's Day break of '14 Court Kings and had the Bills in a case break of Bowman '15, other cards were included. I'd only wanted the two numbered cards, 1 for my PC, 1 for someone else's. But, who am I to refuse a pack of cards?

I'll actually start with the hit.

And it is probably one of the better ones to get. Considering sets of this nature can be loaded with guys who never got out of the minors, getting someone with a big league career is a plus. The penmanship isn't the best, but if you look at some of his later cards, such as 2012 Triple Threads' on-card autos, his penmanship actually improved as his career progressed.

And now, the numbered cards.

A /250 for my Jays collection.

And a /500 for someone else's Verlander collection.

One of the interesting things about this set was the World Baseball Classic inserts. Here's the three of those. And Liddi actually made it to the bigs long enough to get a Topps card.

But it was this that got me thinking. How did other the rookies  in this pack do?

This was the one gold parallel in the pack. Concerning the career of Jose Barajas, he never got past A ball, and spent 2013 and 2014 in Mexico with an ERA over 7 both years.

The Chrome Rookies:

None of them made it out of A ball.

And the base rookies.

Ryan Verdugo is the first of these guys to have made the bigs. 1 game in 2012 for Kansas City. Even though this card, and its parallels remain the extent of his cardboard career. Tyson Brummett also had 1 big league game, but did get himself a big league Topps card, sharing a 2013 Heritage issue with Hechavarria. He's listed as a Blue Jay there, but never played beyond AAA for them. Jacob Goldberg was the only Met in the
pack. Again, A ball was as far as he got. Rigoli's minor league career stopped at rookie ball, finishing up in 2010 in the Frontier League. Kenneth Gilbert is another A ball guy. Seth Garrison made it AA, but no further, in 2011. But, the final card is yet another guy who never progressed beyond A ball.

And finally, since I scanned all the rookie/FBC guys, here are the veterans.

A Rich Harden to my CanCon collection, a nice phoot of Longoria, and an appearance of Ken Griffey Jr makes this a worthwhile portion of the pack.

Not a bad pack, considering the price point. I'll continue my way through the box that showed up tomorrow. Whether I post the Bills, the Court Kings or the Father's Day cards themselves will depend on how verbose I feel.

The Best Cards in Life are Free

I decided to wait until Saturday to hit the LCS for my second pack of Jumbo S1, since Saturday was National Hockey Card Day, and some free packs awaited.

Last year, this meant two packs.

Both of which were collated identically. Will the same fate await this year?

Here's the checklist of the cards in the small set. No Johnny Hockey?

The Toews was actually a card shop give away. I'm not sure if they can be picked up through packs or not - at least I didn't get one in either of mine.

Speaking of the packs, here's the first one. 16 cards in a set means that the packs will be loaded with goodies.  A great rookie, big names, classic Nordiques blue, but those all take the back seat to that Terry Sawchuk. He's definitely someone I would not expect to find in such a limited release. But, given the current crop of Leafs...

Hey! The packs weren't identical! I automatically like this better than last years, even if I didn't pull the only Sens card in the set.

Free Pack Friday at Mojobreak - Part 2

A couple weeks ago, I autoposted a rundown of the football goodies picked up during Free Pack Friday at mojobreak. Today, the baseball.

With the football, I closed with a pair of cards that were adds to my PCs. Today, just one add to my PC, and it isn't a direct one. Michael Conforto wasn't yet a Mets draft pick when this card was released, but he is now, and this card is definitely heading into my Mets hit binder. It might not technically be a hit, but it is numbered to 25 and nice and shiny, and that's good enough for my binders.

USA baseball came up quite a bit, and I actually have a pretty decent collection of swatches. I've sent a couple off in trades (A Trea Turner bat piece is on his way to someone who I hope won't have a Breakdown when it arrives). In addition to this one of a promising slugger, I've got a Josh Elander, Trea Turner, David Berg and an Austin Cousino. All are nice blue swatches that work well with the design and theme.

But, I've ended up with a pair of autos as well from this, with a pair of stickergraphs with odd numbering. At least I know how many stickers they had around for each subject. 855 and 473 each.

This year's Donruss didn't bring me a hit, but did land me some low-numbered parallels and an insert. That Altuve looks really nice in hand.

Only one player has showed up twice for me - that being Alex Meyer. He's a pretty strong prospect in the Twins system, and some have him as part of their starting rotation coming out of 2015 Spring Training. So, that makes this orange /10 parallel a pretty interesting addition. And a second minors relic for my Heritage binders is also a nice addition. In fact, the pinstripe makes this far more interesting than the plain gray Kris Bryant.

Surprisingly, the two USA cards of Lee and Green were the only stickergraphs among my baseball autographs. Even though Lee was the only auto of a non-prospect, there were some promising ones among the minor league guys, such as this Henry Owens. It isn't licensed, but it is a bold and interesting signatures. I appreciate the S in the middle of the O to make it a little more than just initials.

Here's my second on-card auto. Andrew was a second round pick, but he has struggled at A ball this past season going 7-9 with a 5.38 ERA. At least the photo here is more flattering than the one on his Sterling card.

And a couple shiny autographs to wrap up this up. I have no idea if Jason Hursh has potential in baseball - but I do love his signature on 2013 products. Although he has gone down a bit in terms of his Bowman cards in 2014, with more focus on just the J and the Hs.

The best cards in life are free, and these were some nice ones.

Shopping spree!

I didn't think I'd do much from the road, but I did use the available office area at my hotel to check in to COMC. And I checked in to learn I'd picked up a $45 shopping spree at COMC. Due to all my credit through the challenges I really didn't plan to do much Black Friday stuff at COMC, but this was still welcome.

But, it appeared that I needed to use the money and have the cards shipped before the end of the day. I did this check on Monday morning, so I wanted to this before I headed home. I figured I'd have to get 10 cards to get the free shipping, so I did just that.

So, what does $45 get me? 10 cards that I'll likely repost anyhow once they arrive.

I picked up the relic immediately when last year's A&G came out, but the autos were quite costly. But, since this is a free card, this can be the big spender item. Not a bad signature for someone that was in his early 90s when he signed this.

And if it wasn't that taking the huge dent in my spree, then it would be this. Patrick Patterson is among the last guys who have had a Raptors card for me to get one of. I think only an outstanding Nando De Colo redemption is all I need.

An autograph of Winnipeg's second finest export to the wrestling world. Thankfully, she's still rocking it in Mexico's CMLL. I didn't realize this until after I bought these, but two of the cards so far feature Winnipeg exports. And hopefully, Sarah Stock will also get a street named after her at some point.

Filthy relic! Wrigley dirt and a pinstripe!

Bobby Ryan relic - Probably a Ducks sweater, but I don't care, since he looks to be in Ottawa long term.

I'm not exactly a fan of Terrance West, but I am a fan of the dog background. I guess I can call this a canine card and group it as such when it arrives.

These 6 put a huge dent in my $45, but I still had a couple bucks left on the spree. So, this was what I picked up with what was left.

I know nothing about Jeff Bateman. All I know is that I didn't have any Brampton Battalion green in my collection. So, that was reason enough to spend 68 cents on this. He was drafted by Dallas, but never played in the NHL.

Sure, Marvin McNutt's NFL career wasn't exactly the longest or most memorable. In fact, his entire career appears to be spent on practice squads. His auto really isn't an example of pristine penmanship. Still, his name is McNutt. And that counts for a lot.

And a pair of 39 cent Fred Jacksons to wrap it up.

So, there's my $45. What do you think, sirs?

Free Pack Friday at Mojobreak

More auto-posting.

One of the things that goes on during the Friday breaks at mojobreak.com is Free Pack Friday. It is simple. Show up for the afternoon breaks and watch. On the more hit-based products, you are given the chance to predict the team on an upcoming pack. Guess right, and they'll open up a hobby pack for you, and will send out any hits or low numbered parallels. Easy!

So, this seems like an appropriate time to show off some of the football cards I've got through that over the past year-ish. I'll hit the baseball portion at a later date.

Let's open with one that came up at the perfect time. I had this one on my COMC watchlist, solely for the fact that I like Khaseen's penmanship. A nice auto where are the letters are legible, and it is nicely placed on the sticker. Considering a lot of autographs look like a really bad game of Pictionary, I'll take an auto like this any time.

Speaking of a bad Pictionary auto, anybody want to try and parse this one? But, this is a Christmas card - numbered to 12/25.

Staying with '13 Score, these are Showcase parallels, but that's just another way of saying silver parallel. Anyhow, at least the colour looks really nice with Raiders colours. This actually came from the same free pack as the King.

The rest of the free goodies came from packs of '13 Topps Strata. 4 cards - all rookie hits.

Starting off, a really nice relic from Montee Ball. Every Denver Bronco relic should have at least some orange on it. Here it contrasts nicely with the green on on the Emerald parallel. Even the curve of the patch portion works with the design in the background. A nice aesthetically pleasing hit.

But on the other hand, this one would look far more pleasing with a large white swatch. Or at least being signed in a different colour to highlight the signature. Fortunately, the smoky design on the bottom helps a little bit with contrast.

As much as I liked the Greene, that wasn't my favourite free pack football hit. I'll just call it a tie for first. Both came from same box, as a matter of fact.

First up. Just an EJ Manuel auto for my Bills PC. Despite his struggles, his autos are still going for about $15ish on the low end, so I'm really happy to add this one, and stop then looking for deals on ebay autos listed as E.J. Manual.

And one Bill deserves another. Although Manuel is probably the better card in terms of not having to pay to add it to my collection, but this is nicer since the auto is on card (or on the plastic-ish thing). Marquise's autos that are on card are expanded to include his number, which is a nice addition to a signature that isn't quite on par with Khaseem Greene's.

The best cards are free ones, especially when they hit your PCs.