2021 Chronicles Baseball Box Break - Part 1

 While the acquisition of single cards for myself was pretty sparse, I was at least able to add some volume to my show loot bag with a couple boxes, with a couple Panini baseball releases. 

And here is one of them! There is a slight lie on this box, as only some of the packs contained 8 cards, as some had 9 or 10. But I guess that's the direction you want these types of errors to go. 

Pack 1:

And the first card out is a true base card for the CanCon PC. It is always a good way to start a box when the first card out hits a PC.

This year, the Magnitude cards switch to an acetate format. And my first acetate card of the box is one for the Blue Jays PC.

We get the relic out of the way early on. Interesting player, bland swatch. 

And the first pack is a 10 card pack. I guess it also a Fernando Tatis hot pack. But you do get a nice bunting photo among this 7. I think this is Zenith's first appearance in Chronicles baseball. The Bohm is also the prizm parallel, so there's shininess there too! Much like the acetates, I think the Obsidians are one-per-pack this year as well. Overdrive is a new set, and it gives me the top NL rookie.

Pack 2:

Mets content in Pack #2! WOO-HOO! He had a busy season, having stops with 3 franchises before landing in Queens. 

And I get the first autograph of the box as well. Just a beautiful design here, and even with the white background, the silver signature really pops. It might be a total rip-off of Inception, but if you're going to rip off other products' designs, at least take from good looking ones.

And the rest. The simple Classics design makes it my favourite here, despite some more shininess in the Varsho.

And the backs are pretty nice, despite the complete lack of statistics on them.

Pack 3:

No hits. No PC cards. With Spectra getting its own set this year, the America's Pastime cards become this year's version of the 'hit' in the packs that have no hits. I like the Ohtani, but it would have been nice if they'd gone for a pitching photo alongside the hitting photo. A design like that is too perfect for it not to have been done.

Another 3 packs, with 2 more autographs to show off in the next post!

Miscellaneous Expo Cardboard

 Only 3 posts - one being a single card - that show off the single cards I picked up at the Expo? I guess I was either underwhelmed by what was available in terms of singles, but I guess that some other bloggers will be happy in the long run, and those will be shown off when they appear there.

I really don't show off the base cards that I pick up as set builders, but this one was the set completer. Thanks to the later release of 21-22 OPC, at least I can say I finished the previous base set (including the Update out of UD S2) before the new one dropped.

I probably wouldn't have shown off any of the set builders from Update since I didn't get all of them, but this uniform is worthy of an appearance.

With this OPC pick-up, I've now completed my second 1975 Mets rainbow (Topps, OPC, Mini) as Bob Gallagher joins Cleon Jones. Just slightly miscut!

Random Grizzly card!

The Boston Celtics might be the team that looks the best when they appear on a wood grain background. 

Holographic Vladdy!

A great photo available in gold medallion format! I hope this was one of the 9 TD receptions that Keenan McCardell got in the previous season.

2 base cards for my respective team collections.

Here's a scanner bed worth of Raptors for that collection. While I did go perfect with the McNair pickups for that PC, I missed out here with a couple of those Stoudamires (the Step-It-Up and the bottom base card) being dupes. 

At least since my Dikembe collection is just getting started, I can be be sure that these aren't dupes in this bunch.

And that's it. The extent of the singles that I picked up for myself. Fortunately, I at least grabbed a couple of boxes as well, getting some 2021 Panini Chronicles and 2020 Extra Edition for some lower end box busting. Those will be shown off over my next posts. 

2/14s at the Expo

 Today, the 2/14 content I picked up at the show.

While I already showed off this Ryan McKenna card when I pulled it from my hobby box of Update, I did need a second one for the 2/14 collection, and here it is.

That Yermin Mercedes in the lower corner also made an appearance in the hobby box, in the first pack, in fact. So that was the second one I needed, but I did get a few more to keep it company. The Fire entry probably wins this battle though, since the design goes perfectly with the retro uniform in the photo. The Optic is also a nice "what licensing?" pic as well. 

I think I'll keep this Bledsoe in the pack, even though I'm certain I have the coin around somewhere to go inside the hole on the card. The 49ers logo is on the Steve Young card behind it. Oh yes, and PACKERS! PACKERS! WOOO! PACKERS WON!

Although there will be more basketball content in the more generic post to come, here's the only 2/14 card I got, as the Rip Hamilton portion continues to grow.

But here's your big winner, as I added 13 Steve McNairs to that collection. Amazingly, I didn't access my list while I was there, and all 13 of these were new to the collection. I like these odds! 

There you have it!

Realization

 When going through the my box of singles I picked up at the Expo, I had the realization that while I'd picked up cards for my trading partners, I'd only grabbed a grand total of one hit for myself. Among the relics and auto in the box, only one of those was for my collection.

And here you have it!

At least it is a nice rookie autograph of someone with a solid career, even if more of it was spent in Jacksonville as opposed to Buffalo.

So if you wanna see the hits, you best read some other blogs.

From Zed to Vee

 Normally, at this point in time I'd start showing off my Expo goodies. And while that will come, there was a more important card for me - one that I'd secured of the Clouts & Chara (my LCS) Facebook trading group a week ago, and one that arrived in my mailbox while I was at the show yesterday.

It may have taken almost 4 and 1/2 years, but I've finally completed this manu-nameplate. 

And it has a big reunion with the rest of its compadres in this set. I'd picked up a complete Brandon Sutter about a year ago, and now that will have company. 

I had budgeted a stupid amount in order to find the missing card in the collection, so I was able to order in a few more 2/14 Sens cards for what I was willing to pay for the 'Z'.

One Ilya Zubov deserves another - and here is another auto of his, accompanied by some fabric that he may have sported at one time. This is my 22nd unique card of his, and like with the Jeff Dellenbach I showed off not that long ago, it puts me in the Ilya Zubov lead at tcdb. That's mainly because that despite having 5 different letters in the nameplate, it still only counts as one card.

 There's no dispute over Matt O'Connor, though. I'm solidly in the lead there with more than twice the cards than second place.

And he's now at 23 total cards with this /100 auto/patch. 

There you have it!

Set Name Perfection

While this does look like just a typical acetate insert of a Senators prospect, coming from 2019-20 Clear Cut. While I'd already added a Brannstrom autograph previously under the "cheap 'cause of epacks" method.

So why would I hunt down this specific card?

It is a perfect card for the Senators if you're familiar with the history of their arena. For a short while when the building opened, and prior to it being renamed Corel Centre, it was known as the Palladium.

Hey! That's the name of this subset! A perfect card for the Sens! Even if the name change came 3 years before Brannstrom was even born.
 

Commence the Scottie Barnes PC!

 While the hanger box break wasn't the jump start to collecting the Raptors rookie, I was fortunate on a group break. It was a 4-box random of the product, and fortunately for me, the randomizer landed on the Raptors. And fortunately for one of my trade partners, my second spot landed on the Trail Blazers spot.

And it looks like a couple of rookie relic cards will be heading out west in a future mailer. Along with a couple more Greg Brown base cards.

But let's see the Scottie Barnes PC starter collection. I like that all the cards have different photos on them. The Gala would be an excellent pull out of the professional versions of Chronicles, but they're just regular base cards in the NCAA release, albeit very nice looking ones.

And while I didn't get myself a hit of Scottie Barnes in this, I did land a blue /99 parallel. 

But getting the Raptors slot means I got the chance at cards featuring some of their other rookies, and here is the first relic card for them in this post, featuring second rounder David Johnson.

And here's an autograph as well! Champagnie (pronounced SHAM-pen-ny) was undrafted, but he's seen the court this season already. The only other Raptors rookie not seen in this product is Dalano Banton, but seeing as he's also getting a lot of court time, he'll probably show up eventually. It will be nice to eventually get a card of the first player from Toronto to be drafted by the team.

I also got into a team-select as well of the new Recon product. It is a nice looking product, and I did land the complete base set of the team. I also got these two parallels of it, and they also give my first look at the purple/black alternates on cardboard. They work so perfectly with this design, and are also their only appearance in the product.

And here's some inserts as well. Any appearance of the trophy automatically makes a card great, and I love that I can still get DeRozan cards on the Raptors in recent releases. 

There you have it!

Basketball Retail? At a Canadian Walmart? Must bust some!

 

Let's go rookie hunting!

First card from the variety pack that is Chronicles is one of the 1990 Hoops Tribute cards. They were probably the design I was most looking forward to seeing in this, but how accurate are they of a tribute to the original?

Other than the colour being somewhat lighter than the originals, the fronts look fairly good. The fonts seem to match, which is always a good thing.

The backs? Not as much so. The "No.". The reused photo. And the logo on the back. Although the lack of stats might make the latter defensible. But considering how many other photos are used a specific player throughout the set, the photo is the big complaint. 

Unfortunately for the Raptors PC, I didn't land a single Scottie Barnes card. Fortunately, that was offset with a trio of cards of the #1 overall pick. While there are a lot of players represented in the hits, the top players are all over the base designs. 

In fact, the only undrafted player among the 30 cards in this pack was this one.

Both cover boys made a trio of appearances in this box. Jalen went 5th overall to Orlando, and got taunted with "SCOT-TIE'S BET-TER" chants when the Magic stopped in Toronto earlier this season. Good thing for the fans the Raptors hung on to win that game, or it would have aged really poorly that night.

But neither Cunningham nor Suggs won the volume battle in this box. It was Kai Jones, a first round pick of the Hornets. 

The Prestige cards shown in the Suggs and Jones groupings are exclusive to the hanger boxes, as are these black foil parallels. There's really nothing too spectacular to these, and if you weren't expecting there to be these parallels, where only the foil part is changed, you might not even notice them.

Most of the retail cards were from the first 100 of the base set, which covers the base design, Luminance, Donruss and Hoops. The rest are either the foil designs, or designs relegated to specific formats. Other than the black foil parallel of Dosunmu, these were the only two foil ones I'd  get. XR and Mosaic make their appearances here, but there are others to be found, such as Essentials, Flux, Marquee and Gala.

But no cards yet in the collection of the Raptors rookie Scottie Barnes off this break.

But some group break luck that you'll see next time will change that.

Wrapping Up The Trade

 With this post, the final nail is put into the coffin of the Michigan mailer.

While much of the 2/14 content was football related - there was this lone basketball entrant with a draft day photo of Richard Hamilton. Given all the photo shoot cards nowadays, this really is a retro card.

A couple Raptors. Anunoby is starting to emerge as yet another gem that the Raptors picked up late in the first round. Now if only they could play all their games on the road this season, they'd have a far better record. 

It is a little hard to see, as perhaps the ink started to fade the deeper they got into the numbering, but this Finite of Vince Carter is limited to 1999 copies.

Some baseball miscellany as I switch back to that sport with cards that aren't Jays or Mets. There's a bunch of Larry Walkers for the CanCon collection (that goalie stick photo remains a classic) and a single Mike Piazza for his PC.

You can't have Expos content without Vladdy, and here's 5 of his card, with a mix of early career and post-career cards.

An autograph is a perfect way to wrap up this, with a player that had a perfectly respectable major league career, and one that started in Montreal.

There you have it! Thanks for all these goodies, Dennis, and as always, I've been reloading for the next mailer.