A Steal of a Retail Deal (Part 1)

I told myself I was going to stop buying stuff just to review on the blog. Well, that kind of went out the window with this purchase. Over the Easter weekend, Target had a whale of a deal on cards. Blaster were on sale for $16.99 each and hanger boxes were on sale for $8.49 each. Also, on the Cartwheel app there was a $10 off a $50 purchase coupon and there was a free pack coupon on each blaster of Heritage. To go along with this, my mom got me a $75 Target gift card as an Easter gift.

Naturally, I had to take advantage of this rare sale. I had come in search of some Gypsy Queen but they were well stocked with Heritage. I settled for eight packs of Gypsy Queen (four of which came out to be free thanks to the $10 off coupon and the free pack coupon on the blaster), one Heritage blaster, and two Heritage hanger boxes. Grand total for all this? About $48.

I'll focus on the Heritage cards here and share the Gypsy Queen cards in a follow-up post. I can't remember which cards came out of the blaster or the hangers so I've just sort of mixed and matched here.

First off, before I get to the cards, I wanted to take a moment and comment on the Heritage pack design itself. Since I'd yet to open any actual packs of Heritage this year, this was my first glimpse at what the pack itself looks like. I have to say, I kind of dig it.

I'm going to try and show cards of players I don't think I showed on my initial round of Heritage. I can't guarantee though there won't be repeats. 

Yay! Rookie Cup cards! It may just be me but I kind of think the Rookie Cups fit better on Heritage than on flagship.

Nice to see that the Mariners finally signed Ichiro. 

When Strasburg was a rookie, I had club seat tickets for a Reds game to see him against Johnny Cueto. That was quite the game.

Between the hangers and the blaster, I got four short prints (including two Lonnie Chisenhall cards). I'd forgotten completely about Brandon Phillips' stint with the Angels last year. 

The lone Reds card I got that wasn't already a duplicate and it's one of the baseball flashbacks insert. 

And here are the Target exclusive inserts. I think that Rhys Hoskins might be a duplicate but I'll have to go through my Phillies cards to make sure.

While these weren't the best boxes and I didn't get any variations, it was still a fun rip. I think I'm good on Heritage now probably until High Numbers comes out this fall. If I want any more singles or inserts, I'll probably dig for them at card shows or the like.

Variations on a Theme (aka Five Packs of 2018 Donruss)

Despite the fact that Panini doesn't have an MLB license, Donruss is one of my favorite releases of the year, mainly because every time you open a pack, there's usually something neat included (parallels, numbered cards, etc.). I had to stop by the card shop for a friend to see if they had any more bowling coupons as she was taking her son and a bunch of his friends bowling for his birthday. The coupons were all gone but I just had to make a purchase. There were two different pack prices on the box, $3.49 and $3.99. I asked the shopkeeper about it and he said "well, I'll just let you have as many as you want at $3.49". Fine by me. I grabbed five packs plus two Pokemon packs for my son to put in his Easter basket and headed home.

The first card of the first pack and it's Nolan Ryan. Pretty cool! Two other things that make this a really neat card, at least to me. First, it's a throwback 1984 design and the other is it's Nolan Ryan pitching as a Met against the Reds at Riverfront Stadium. How can I tell it's Riverfront Stadium? Check out the color of the seats in the background. Riverfront was the only stadium I knew that had blue outfield seats above the right field wall. I managed more of these 84-style cards but thought this was the best one by far.

A handful of base cards. Donruss is finally getting to the point where I can actually differentiate the respective sets. The first few issues looked pretty much identical but last year with the 1990-ish design, Panini finally got out of the basic designs and put a little more effort into it. This year, it's a completely crazy and wild design. I dig all of these cards, especially the Cozart card and it lists him with his new team and the old school uniform on Odubel Herrera.

The lone Reds card, if you could call it that, from the packs. With the background and no official logos, it looks more like Tony Perez and Davey Concepcion at an old-timers softball game.

Can't say I'm a big fan of the Diamond Kings design this year. I much preferred the old school style of Diamond Kings in previous releases.

The thing with Donruss is the variations and the parallels and, oh boy, do we have those this year. First there's the "nickname" variations. The only one of these I've ever heard of is "Iron Man" on the Cal Ripken card. I honestly think the other two are made up.

Here we have a parallel of the same and a parallel of the Kirby Puckett variation as well. We now have parallels of the variations, are you keeping track yet?

This Bryce Harper is numbered 01/25 ... you'll just have to believe me as I tried to take a picture of the serial number as proof but it was pretty much impossible. This must be one of the Mother's Day Ribbon cards.

I though this Jose Abreu was weird because it's in black and white, it turns out it's just a variation of the base card. My head is now officially spinning because of all these.

So, thoughts on this year's Donruss ... it's, well, different. I don't mind the base cards and the 1984 style cards but the crazy parallels, variations, and parallels of variations I could do without. Normally, Donruss is one of my favorite issues of the year (I really enjoyed last year's cards) but I think I might have to stray away from most of these this year, unless we're talking the 1984 style cards.

You've Got Mail #83: A Cracked Bat

A while back on Twitter (a month nearly by the time this posts), I mentioned that everything that could possibly go wrong in one day did. My five year old had a 102 degree fever and couldn't keep any food down, I had a $1200 car repair bill in my future, and a host of other minor issues. Not long after that, a padded mailer arrived from Julie at A Cracked Bat with a nice little note of encouragement. It had been a while since I received anything from Julie so this was a nice, welcome surprise.

2018 Topps Heritage was the last thing I expected to see included. I'm guessing this has to be near the entire Indians team set, or darn close to it. 

My three favorite Indians cards of the batch, Encarnacion, Lindor, and would you look at that ... another Jay Bruce Indians card! I think I like that one more that the Series 1 card. Yes, I know I showed the Encarnacion card in my Heritage post.

Some Reds Heritage cards were thrown in too. Too bad star pitching prospect Tyler Mahle has to share a rookie card with middle reliever Jackson Stephens, who didn't exactly set the world on fire last year with a 4.68 ERA in 7 whole games last season. Again, I know some of these cards were previously featured in my Heritage post, the pictures were already in the can and the cards have already been filed.

Heritage wasn't the only thing that was included. These green crystal 2013 Panini Cooperstown parallels are pretty sweet. I'm pretty sure I've got the base cards of each so the parallels will go perfect with them. Also, when was the last time you saw Edd Roush on modern cards?

Some miscellaneous Indians cards, including a framed Earl Averill parallel from last years Diamond Kings set. The most curious thing there is the card of Ron Wollenhaupt, the trainer of the Waterloo Indians. I had no idea TCMA was making cards of single-A Midwest League teams in 1982, let alone for a team in the middle of Iowa. If your curious, the 1982 Waterloo Indians, finished second in the south division in 1982, 4 games behind the Quad Cities Cubs.

Here's some of last year's Topps Chrome set which I can proudly say I didn't buy a single pack of. It was nice to see the Reds lock up Eugenio Suarez with a nice long contract, I wish they'd do the same for Adam Duvall. 

Much like this envelope was a surprise from Julie, getting an autograph card included was another surprise. I don't have too much in the way of auto's and relics from the Indians. Also, it's a 1987 style card, I can't really complain too much.

Thanks for the cards Julie! These definitely made a pair of bad situations much better. As for the problems I mentioned earlier, it turns out that my five year old had an adverse reaction to his booster shots but he slept it off and was better the next day. My car finally got fixed too and now I have AC in it again for the first time in two years! It's the little things.