Opening some Opening Day

2020's Opening Day might be unknown at this point, but there's always time for opening some new product.

The box promises an extra, exclusive Jays card per three packs. I guess this is my first opening Day card for the season then. These parallels are exclusives to Canadian Walmarts, and I guess this rookie is the one you want to pull.

Kershaw was the first pack-pulled card from the set. This does set a theme for the break through, as Jays and Dodgers were the most common teams in the packs.

But first, here's the only Mets card in the packs.

But I'll shift back to Toronto for the first Jays card of the packs.

And the Jays were also represented among the inserts, specifically this one that saluted the actual 2019 opening.

My favourite photo in the packs was this beautiful Matt Carpenter.

If photos that you'll likely see in Series 2 are more your thing, here's my favourite among those with this casual Robles catch.

Back to the inserts, here's a Traditions card. Interestingly, this pack also had the Aaron Judge base card. Yay, collation!

Sticker!

But this here was actually a pretty big hit for the packs. The Walk this Way insert, which commemorates walk-off homers, falls at a rate of 1:369 packs, so they're pretty rare pulls. As one can tell by the jersey, this would be the Dodgers walk-off homer on Jackie Robinson Day, making it one of the more perfectly timed walk-offs from last season as well.

And there you have it!

Padding the Lead

I'll admit to being surprised when I entered all my Alfredssons into TCDB and learned I was in top spot. I'm not going to sit on this lead, so I instead added a bunch more to the binder via COMC, sportlots, and nhlhockeystickers.com. Let's see some of them!

I did mention stickers, so let's got all these out of the way early! Panini really liked that shade of blue for borders at the time.

He might only take up a quarter of this card, but that's a nice, solid group of players in the top of the rookie scoring race in 95-96.

I'm amused that the titles for the stats remain abbreviated in English on this Finnish card. I amuse easily.

The best thing about these cards being from the entirety of Alfie's career is the variety of uniforms on the cards.

Even this one.

And if you want a nice look at this logo, there's this Atomic card, which is also a reminder to clean my scanner bed.

After all, they are little harder to see on minis,

I did throw in a few numbered cards. None of these are parallels, they're the base cards from higher end sets.

And these are base cards too. Pacific never really did anything normally, did they?

But there's some Alfie. There were about 30 more where these came from. And now I'm just south of the 500 card mark.

2020 Adventures in Repacks: Part 4 - Drugstore Cardboy

While I was grabbing a hanger pack of Hoops earlier this month, I also grabbed a couple of hockey hangers. They're pretty basic, featuring a couple packs in a hanger for $1.29. Or $1.39. I really wasn't paying that much attention.

Here were the three packs of cards. There was also a pack of 18-19 Panini Stickers with the Heads Up. I will work backwards through these.

A Sens card...sticker in this, and some shininess. That's fine, even if Sean Couturier looks like a human bobble head.

With a 15 card base set, you'd expect some star power in the Hockey Card Day pack. You'd be right. No complaints about a new Bobby Orr addition.

While these single packs of 06-07 Parkhurst have been pretty good for landing autos, that wasn't the case here. Still, this is a cool pack with a numbered addition to my Kitchener Ranges alum collection, along with Pierre LaRoche looking great in those blue Pens jerseys.

I don't think I'd ever busted the Heads Up before, even though I've added random singles to the collection in the past. I'd certainly remember getting more than one of these cards in the same pack.

And there's an insert as well! These 'Breaking the Glass' ones fall 1:25 packs, so that isn't too bad of a get from a random repacked pack almost 20 years in the future. Even though this more of a chrome card, without any real glass, or even breaking element to it.

And there you have it!

2020 Adventures in Repacks 1.1 - Straight from the Source

Last spring, I ordered a bunch of repacks from Presstine, the company that supplies Dollarama, among other stores, with their repack content. One of the items I ordered was a 250 card hockey cube. I actually ordered two of them. And after waiting for 9 months, I finally get around to posting it.

As with the last one, I'm listing all the cards, and scanning my highlights.

2009 O-Pee-Chee - Fernando Pisani - My first (posted) repack card of the year!

1992 Ultra - Paul Broten - The hockey version of one of my favourite card back designs.
1991 Parkhurst - Greg Adams
2015 Upper Deck - Jimmy Howard
1992 Pro Set - Larry Murphy
1992 UD - Alexei Zhamnov

1991 Score - Guy LaFleur - A drawn card. Which does lead into this card from my latest COMC shipment.

I generally don't go for PSA/DNA autographs of players, but I was looking for Lafleur-auto, and saw one of these available at COMC. I kinda like this more since it enhances a great card already,
2012 Ice - Kris Versteeg
1990 Score - Randy Hillier
1991 UD - Pat LaFontaine
2006 Heroes & Prospects - Jeremy Williams
1990 Pro Set - Rick Zombo

1995 Parkhurst - Jeff Reese - Mask binder candidate, combined with garish mid 90s-ness. Looks like that's still his Whalers mask.
1991 UD - Ken Daneyko
1990 Score - Joe Sakic
1990 UD - Tim Kerr
1991 Parkhurst - Mats Sundin

1998 Parkhurst - Vladimir Tsyplakov - Despite 300+ games, I had no memories of this player. He passed away at age 50 a few weeks back.
1990 Score - Paul Ysebaert
1991 7th Inning Sketch - Jason Meloche

2010 Score - Nick Spaling - A Kitchener Rangers alum, and a Hot Rookie nonetheless.
1991 Pinnacle - Scott Mellanby
1994 Parkhurst SE - Patrick Flatley
1990 Score - Andrew Cassels
1990 Bowman - Pat Verbeek
2016 Parkhurst - Mike Reilly
1991 Score - Mike Ricci

2017 UD Shining Stars Red - Nikita Kucherov - I think these were retail parallels, so they couldn't have been common pulls. Unexpected in a repack.
1989 OPC - Kelly Miller
1991 7IS - Shayne Gaffar
1991 UD - Teppo Nimminen
1994 Pinnacle - Joe Nieuwendyk
1990 Bowman - Chris Govedaris

1999 MVP - Brendan Morrison - Here's some future trade content.

2000 Be A Player - Jamie Storr - Another mask binder card.
2017 OPC - Anton Slepyshev

2001 BAP Signature Series - Marc Chouinard - The hits aren't promised, but there were a few last time, so this wasn't a surprise. Nice penmanship!
1992 UD - Jens Schwabe
1995 Score - Patrick Poulin
1990 Score - Gerard Gallant
1993 Premier - Vladimir Malakhov
1992 Premier - Ron Hextall

2016 Parkhurst Centennial Salute - Brett Hull - Considering the Bills game on Saturday, let's kick Buffalo fans while they're down with this card.
1990 Pro Set - Rob Ray
1991 OPC - Red Wings Team

2005 Ice - Milan Hejduk - 2/14 content! Even if it is a dupe.

2011 Pinnacle - Nick Foligno - My first Sens card in this. I don't think there were any last time.
1992 Pinnacle - Alexei Kasatonov
1995 SP - Ilja Gorokhov

1992 UD - Teemu Selanne - Before Young Guns signified a SPd rookie chase card.
1993 McDonald's - Brett Hull
1997 Collector's Choice - Vyacheslav Kozlov

1993 Classic - Aaron Ward - Another card bound for Ann Arbor.

1993 Score - Ron Sutter - An interesting photo, because of the player flat on the ice in front of Ron.
1991 Pinnacle - Bob Probert
1995 Parkhurst - Petr Klima

2007 Between the Pipes - Mike Murphy - Mask card #3.
1990 Bowman - Grant Fuhr

2000 ITG - Eric Boulton - A rookie year card of a player with over 600 games of experience in the NHL. Not bad at all from a repack. The green would seem to indicate an Emerald parallel, but this one isn't numbered.
2003 UD - Alexander Mogilny
1991 Pinnacle - Dale Hunter
1984 Topps - John Anderson
1994 Pinnacle - Tom Barrasso
2005 Parkhurst - Serge Aubin

2014 OPC Stickers - Roberto Luongo - Mask binder car...sticker #1.
1996 Elite - Nicklas Lidstrom
1990 Pro Set - Troy Murray

2009 UD - Tobias Enstrom - Here's the end of the first quarter.

Definitely a solid start!

A post for the Coulrophobic

After yesterday's very Clowney post, here's one with no Jadeveon, but still featuring a bunch of 2/14 binder newness.

Here's the only new member of this collection. Although the only place I can find him listed as a 2/14 baby is tradingcarddb, that's enough for me!

This sticker of Herman Hunter sitting on the bench for the Eagles will be happy alongside all the cards of him sitting on the bench for the Lions.

I actually had a significant wait until this Barker card was available for cheaper than the parallel with an autograph.

There is a position designation you don't see on cards anymore. Special Teams. Mainly because they don't get cards anymore.

Here's a couple solid 1980s football card designs. That might be influenced by how perfectly the 1986 green borders work with Jets team colours.

Jim Kelly was, as usual, the star of the 2/14 portion of the mailer. Any card featuring him counts, including those tainted by the appearance of a QB that made me nostalgic for J.P. Losman.

Drawn card! This definitely counts as a "How did I not already have this card?" card.

If I can pick up a numbered parallel cheaply, then why not? This is an emerald parallel from Topps last go-around with Triple Threads as a football product.

Appropriately, I added 12 new Jim Kelly cards to my collection with the mailer. That SP Authentic card in the upper corner really looks like something from a higher end set than SP Authentic.

And there you have it! I'll be switching over to basketball in the next post.