Retail Repack Adventures #8

Since it's a new year, it's time to dive into some new kinds of repacks. Yes, they're made by the same people who make the Walgreens repacks I've been diving into over the past year or so but these seem like you get a bit more variety for the price. For $7.99, you get four packs, 50 cards, and a "bonus" item. Let's see what's inside ...

First up, the bonus item and I'm not sure what they are. I took to calling them "baseball buddies" since I didn't know what they were when I opened them. If I had to guess, I'd say they're from the little knock-off Lego sets that MLB puts out.

Moving on to the 50 card box that was contained within, it's about everything you would expect from a repack. It seems like its mandatory that a repack have at least four 2014 Topps cards in it. 

A few cards from the 80s. Cecil Fielder looks like he's ready to mash some long balls into the stands during BP while Tony Phillips looks less that pleased at the umpire's call.

The 90s were well represented with junk wax commons among these cards. I only scanned the John Wasdin card simply because it's a Reserve Collection parallel.

And I'll round out the mini-box with some more recent cards. The Jeter is definitely nice and I'll add it to my 2000s binder but the Votto is a duplicate and will either go in my donation bag to Goodwill or in my trade box, I haven't decided yet.

Here are the four packs that were included. Getting two packs from 2016 is nice, even though I wasn't the biggest Heritage fan this year. I was completely unexcited about the two 2015 Series 1 packs so I ripped into those first.

Here are the best nine cards I could conger up from the two Series 1 packs. Nothing spectacular aside from the Brooks Robinson insert.

Here's the pack of Heritage. I'm still not the biggest fan of this but the Sonny Gray insert card is pretty nice.

Finally, the Gypsy Queen pack. Only five cards in the pack, with one of those being a mini. I'll take a Kris Bryant card as the top card. Yes, please!

Here's the mini, Todd Duffey of the Twins. I'll add it to the bag of minis I have right now that I need to find pages for.

Oh, wait ... that was only four cards wasn't it? Well, here's the fifth ...

My crazy luck with pulling hits out of 2016 packs continues. To say this was unexpected would be an understatement, especially out of a retail pack. While I'm not the biggest Mets fan in the world, I'm still planning on holding on to this just because it's a nice looking card.

I definitely feel like I got my money's worth from this. Granted I got a lot of junk commons from the 50-card mini box but the packs were fun to rip and the bonus prize was neat. All in all, I'll definitely be getting these again and for only two more dollars than the Walgreens 100-card packs, there's some really nice variety to be had.

2016 Donruss Optic Box Break

I got this from my aunt as a birthday present back in December. While the card shop was pretty depleted on their baseball wax at the time, they still had this in stock. I really liked the standard 2016 Donruss issue so I opted for it's Chrome brother, Donruss Optic.

Here's what the open box looks like. Much like Chrome there are only four cards per pack. Each box has 20 packs and promises two autographs on average. To be honest, I'm not much of an autograph person when it comes to getting hits from a box as I much prefer relic cards. Like I said, this was the best the card shop had to offer so lets see what I got.

Here's some of the base cards. They're exactly like the standard Donruss cards but only chromed. I like how the players sort of stand out from the background on these.

One thing I really liked about these were the Diamond King cards, which chrome up pretty cool. These weren't in every pack but possibly every other pack. I wasn't really keeping track. I did get a few duplicates which was a little disappointing.

Another Donruss staple are the Rated Rookie cards. I was pretty pleased to get all three of these out of the box, especially the Peraza and Schwarber. Say what you will about Panini and their lack of licensing but at least with the Diamond Kings and Rated Rookie cards, I feel like I get a lot more bang for my buck when getting packs or boxes.

As is the case with Panini products, there are a lot of parallels. I decided to show one of each color parallel I got out of the box. The Jose Fernandez is numbered 1/50 but I really dig the Lucroy, Rizzo, and Soler cards.

I was a little saddened by the lack of insert cards but with only four cards per pack, what can you expect. The Illusion card is an Optic only insert and came at one per box. That's the second Schwarber card I pulled out of the box and couple that with the Andrew Benintendi card, I'm pretty happy.

Here's the first of the two guaranteed autographs and to be honest I had to consult Baseball Reference to see exactly who Alex Dickerson is. Turns out he played in 84 games for San Diego last year hitting  .257 with 10 HRs and 37 RBI (sorry, I don't do sabermetrics, I'm old school when it comes to my stats). Judging by the info I found on the Padres site, it looks like he might be their everyday left fielder going into 2017.

Here's my other guaranteed auto and my THIRD Kyle Schwarber card of the box. I was pretty thrilled to pull this as my luck is never that good when it comes to pulls and hit. I don't really mind the fact that it's on a sticker either, I'm just happy to have a Schwarber autograph in my collection.

Despite the fact I got a Kyle Schwarber autograph and some really cool parallels, I don't feel that it was worth the $80 price tag. Ripping the box too went by really fast with only four cards per pack, even though I took my time. For 2017, I'll dive into some regular Donruss but will probably avoid Optic unless I find some neat singles at a card show or I get some in a trade.

You've Got Mail #60: San Jose Fuji

It's February and yep, it's still winter. One more cold and snowy month to go until March hits and spring arrives shortly thereafter. Luckily, back around Christmas, Fuji warmed up my mailbox with a package that arrived on Christmas Eve. Yes, that's how behind on trade packages I am. Something that arrived on Christmas Eve, I'm just now getting around to posting about.

I always love it when oddballs are thrown into a trade package, especially random food issues from the early 90s. My family never really bought Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage but on the rare occasion they did, there were baseball cards to be included. Like most oddballs, the uniforms had to be airbrushed. When I got these as a kid, I always wondered how they got the team logo and name off the uniform as I always thought said player wore a generic looking uniform for a day. 

No, you're not seeing double on these 2013 Bowman Platinum cards, they're just different parallels. One is the blue sapphire version and the other is the gold version. I'm not sure which one is the actual base version as stuff like this confuses me. These are really nice cards though and I'll find room in two of my three Reds binders for these.

Retail oddballs are always a guilty pleasure of mine, especially those from defunct chains such as Woolworth. These are from the 1991 Woolworth Baseball Highlights set, a 33-card set meant to highlight the best of the prior season. Nine of the last 11 cards in this set are Reds cards that highlight their unexpected World Series win. My personal favorite is the "celebration" card in the bottom right. Some day though I'll have to go through my cards and do a defunct retail post.

Unfortunately these cards scanned like crap but they are neat inserts called "Golden Idols" from the 1995 Topps Embossed set. I never had these in my original collection but I can definitely say they are unique.

Late 90s die-cut cards! I need to find more of these, especially from this time frame as my collection is sorely lacking in cards from this period.

Despite this being a very baseball heavy package, Fuji also threw in these two Bengals relic cards. As I've mentioned before, my Bengals collecting has slowed to a crawl recently and is going to focus on mainly vintage and current and past stars this year, which means I'm going to be super selective now when buying singles. However, relic cards like this I'm definitely happy to add!

A big thanks goes out to Fuji for all these cards plus the ones I didn't show off. Since I referenced it in the post title, here's a classic song to warm up your winter blues ...