2021 Chronicles Baseball Box Break - Part 2

 

What else was in the box? Here's what was in the other three packs:

Pack 4:

While I will always love adding a new card to my 2/14 collection, it is always nicer when one pops out of a pack I personally open. Here's my 6th Yermin card in the binders. I've grabbed the White Sox in a recent 8 box break of this, so I'll have more of his cards to show off shortly.

Let's add a parallel to the bounty of this pack. A shiny ruby red parallel from Phoenix /299.

And my tendency to pack pull autographed cards bound for Ann Arbor continues! At least I continue to load up for that eventual package.  I think Black is another product making its first appearance in Chronicles baseball, and at least this card really does give the vibe that is might be the same at bat, albeit photographed from different angles.

And the rest of the pack. 

Pack 5:

Let the streak of numbered cards continue!

With not only the McKinstry /100, but this hyper parallel /299.

No hit in this pack, but at least the America's Pastime card was a Met...er...New York card.

And it is another pack with more than 8 cards contained within. 

Pack 6:

Not too bad for the final hit of the box, even though there are a lot of Nico Hoerner autographs available on the secondary market. Not that many of them are numbered /10, though. 

And the last batch of non-hits from the pack. The Mario Feliciano is an unnumbered holo parallel, an that Trout was the final card of the box, and that's definitely a solid player to wrap things up with.

And that's the box. It advertised more than 25 iconic brands, and I think I saw 23 of them in the break. Next time, something a little more consistent in terms of design with Elite Extra Edition.

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!