M-V-P! M-V-P!

 The first cards of the hockey season!

For me, they were contained in this pack!

And the first card of the season is one I won't be keeping. And that's not the only such card.

In fact, it was immediately followed by an Owen Power as the second card. Later on, there was a third Wolverines alum. All bound for Ann Arbor in a future mailer. 

In terms of collation oddness, back-to-back Wolverines to open the pack wasn't the strangest. It was getting three straight Penguins at one point in the pack.

As for my personal PCs, here's a couple Sens.

And a Kitchener Rangers alum, and it looks like he might finally make an appearance on ice this season, for the first time since the Stanley Cup victory.

No inserts. No parallels. But I did get one rookie SP and one star SP in the pack. A good pack if I was building the set, and also knew that the SPs will be dirt cheap after showing up on COMC post e-packs.

And the card backs? Exactly what you'd expect from a set that went to press before the regular season was even over.

There you have it!

Raptors Time

 And now, the small (relatively speaking in comparison to baseball) portion of the mailer.

I kinda knew I'd be leading with this card as soon as the 24-25 City Edition jerseys dropped. With Carter's #15 set to go to rafters in just over a month, this is even better. This is one of the best moments in team history, even though it wasn't game-related, and it deserves cardboard immortality.

Shininess dominated the insert/parallel portion of this mailer.

A trio of relics ends it.

Yeah, not too verbose today. Sometimes, you have days where you aren't too chatty.

2024 Adventures in Repacks - Part 26 - Back to the Box

 

This time, it is the football repack that appears. With there being 12 each in the order, it will be easy enough to alternate between football and baseball as I go through them.

The first card hiding is a Bills card! Nice! Even though he never took a regular season snap for the Bills, it is still nice. That's Gill Byrd on the Platinum card. Terry Taylor looks so much different out of his Red Rooster gear.

Pretty blah grouping. Roosevelt is a pretty cool name, at least. For the second nameless front, that's Jay Hilgenberg.

The hit! And it is one that is going to make an immediate entry into my penmanship binder. I love how he signed the sticker Joshua, thus making it not match the name on the card exactly. I don't even know if he has any actual cards where he's listed as Joshua, and he even did the full name thing on cards where he's listed as Josh.

Doc Gooden cards not withstanding, I don't think I have too many cards that include the player's doctorate. Next to it is Ann Arbor bound card of Jim Harbaugh, this one coming from some Super Bowl Card Show set. And infield dirt as well! 

A former Bill is the finale. He definitely wasn't a big risk-taker during his time with the Bills, but still got them to end the playoff drought. And that will make him much-loved in my eyes.

There you have it!

2/14s via Michigan

 Back to the mail bag, and I'll jump from sport-to-sport today with a bunch of new 2/14 adds, all courtesy of the most recent TMV mailer.

A relic helps Richard Hamilton to strengthen his 50+ card lead in the basketball portion of the collection. 

If that's not enough, here's 4 more, in varied degrees of shininess. 

Off to baseball, for an even briefer stay, as this was 1 of 2 additions to that part of the collection. I didn't recognize the release this was from - Shining Star seems like Panini's version of one of Topps generically named insert sets such as Stars of MLB. It looks to be some sort of Rewards exclusive card.

A plate is pretty much the only other option to add something lower numbered than that /10 of Yermin. That's Derek Norris of the Padres hiding behind the black ink. 

Alshon Jeffery joins the one-and-done and club in this post. Or the 1/3 and done club.

At least Jadeveon got the full card experience.

Jim Kelly gets 3 new entries into the binder. The red entry, out of something called Legends Sports Memorabilia is slightly larger than the standard 2*3 card, meaning it is a little annoying to stack prior to being moved to the binders. You'll be seeing more of those once I get to the Mets/Jays content. 

I could just as easily grouped that 4-in-1 sticker of with the Drew Bledsoe portion of the mailer, but since McNair's appearances were less than Bledsoe's, I opted to add him here.

See! More Drew!

I'm back to a single item for the finale, but if it is a plate, that makes it a nice way to end everything. Although the glory loses a little bit of glory by calling him DeMarcus as opposed to Tank.

But only a bit.

There you have it!

Forgotten Football Packs

 I also had a few 2019 packs from the gridiron I've never posted. Now seems as good a time as any!

I had two of these, but for simpler storage I placed the contents of both in a single pack - then never posted them until now.

When the veteran portion of the set is pared down to 100, you can expect it to be loaded with star quality, especially QBs. This one certainly was. There's also one rookie per pack. DeAndre Baker's career didn't get off to the best start, and getting charged with armed robbery didn't help. Even when charges were dropped, it was too late. He was last seen in the UFL.

This is an interesting grouping of players. A couple successes in one column, and a couple first round flops in the other. The presence of Josh Allen, even as a base card, and an orange /199 parallel does make it somewhat puzzling why I hadn't posted this until now.

I blame incompetence.

Remember the not even one-and-done AAF? They got cards for their season as well. When you have to stretch out a 200 card base set over 8 teams, the checklists will go deep for each team. The Salt Lake Stallions provided the most interesting content in the pack, with a kicker, an OL guy and a coach.

For some odd reason, they didn't list the team names on the card and just used logos. At least with a couple you can infer from the photos that two of the other teams were the Atlanta Legends and Arizona Hotshots.

Bonus points for one of the players being named 'Bug'.

There you have it!

Last to be First

 

To be honest, I know I'm not the last to bust one of the Elite FOTL boxes and chase some low-numbered shininess, but it works for the title of this post. The configuration is just like regular EE, but with a few special low-numbered parallels.

Pack 1:

And the first pack isn't at all different from one I might have found in the regular box. At least that gives me something to look forward too. But at least I got a card of a guy named Belfry. And probably the dullest photo in the set with Jackson Cox.

Pack 2:

Now we see our first of the FOTL parallels, and it is one of the better ones to get. It might have been nicer to get it with ink attached, but Junior Caminero is one of the better prospects out there. But Tampa prospects have been problematic for me in the past, so maybe it is better that this isn't an auto. As for the ones I did land, Melendez has an amazingly great nickname - The Hispanic Titanic, so there's always that.

Pack 3:

I've come across cards of people with hyphenated last names. Not as much so with the first names until this one. There's FOTL card #2, and it shows there's autographed versions as well of their exclusives. I also hope you like Eric de la Cruz, because you'll be seeing him again.

Pack 4: 

Such as right away in the very next pack. I have no idea what type of material was used on that Brenner Cox auto, but it came out of the pack about as warped as early 2010s Topps Chrome cards. Not even having it share a pack with that super thick Elijah Green card helped keep it in shape. The patch card is at least taller than it when I place them on a flat surface, but it is pretty close. 

Pack 5:

You want more Eric de la Cruz - you get him here. I'm not sure why his FOTL auto is /10 when the previous one was /20. I also like that both autos are penmanship binder contenders. Dombroski even adds the III to his Bowman auto, I guess taking advantage of having more room working outside of stickers. Jacob Melton provides the lowest numbered card of the box, and I won't say anything juvenile about the last card being someone named Beavers.

Because that would be very wrong.

There you have it!

Bills! Bills! Bills!

 Will I curse the Bills to a loss by posting their content from the latest TMV mailer? Probably.

The best thing about some Bills content is that it could go in both my 2/14 and my Bills binders. I think this was intended for the former, but it is a dupe there. So off to the backup plan!

The base card portion was pretty small. I'm not sure what category the Thomas and Simpson cards fall into, but it really seem appropriate to include them here so the Jim Kelly (another 2/14 dupe) has company.

Lots of inserts and parallels. Still being alive did lead to Hamlin getting cards last season, but none yet this season from Panini for when he's actually been a busy part of the Bills lineup. The Any Given Sunday is a pretty appropriate name for that specific Josh Allen card, since the pregame talk for the game gave the Bills somewhere close to zero chance of actually winning that game in Minnesota. That was also his first NFL hurdle.

Here's a couple numbered cards. The Flutie is actually a Chargers card, but it is close enough for the binder. Johnson's is a dupe, but fortunately I have another Bills collector on my trade list.

And some relics. The Lee Evans is the big one here in terms of numbering, being /25. It's supposedly prime and game worn. YAY! Moss really didn't make an Instant Impact in Buffalo. Nyheim Hines, who he was traded for, certainly did in the first post-Hamlin game.

There you have it!

2024 Adventures in Repacks - Part 25 - Perfect Time for Hockey

Training camps are open, the pre-season is starting, so it is the perfect time to pick up a pair of Dollarama hockey repacks.

Here's the first one's contents. The pack might look very familiar, but look closer and you see it is actually from a Czech World Junior Tournament themed set. 

12 cards per pack for a 100 card set doesn't seem very much of a challenge to build. But here's 12 of them anyhow.  There's 2 HOFers in this set, and with both Niedermayer and Kariya appearing, I got both of them in the same pack. Also interesting that Sandis got the Latvian flag on his card front, but is still listed with the Soviet Union on the back. There were several others that had flags that weren't Russian.

Hey! That's 6 90's card! Not 5. All that means is more junk wax for the donation team bags.

2010s was pretty blah as well. At least it wasn't all flagship.

2020s saw a new Sens card enter my life! That's enough to make me give the thumbs up to the repack, but the World Juniors pack was probably enough to make me do so anyhow.

#2's contents. Those slider boxes are the ideal size for storing moderately sized relic cards.

2 rookies in the 2000s pack, with Wolski being the star of the two, playing in 400+ games, and even representing Canada at (the no NHL) 2018 Olympics.

The 90s pack was even more junk waxy than the first, but at least I got a Kitchener Rangers alum in the group. A dupe, but still a PC card.

At least there was a Platinum base card to distract from the 21-22 base card dullness.

The first repack wins easily.

There you have it!