The weather is cooling, and the singles from ebay keep trickling in. I've been more busy and avoiding retail strores as much as possible, so there hasn't been any ripping to speak of since the Topps Fire hate rip and the Heritage Minors, but there's always something interesting worth discussing, as long as I can find some images to keep the attention.
First up is the Stroman above, which, I didn't think I could hate a Marcus Stroman card...but there it is. I am yet to find a redeeming quality to 2017 Topps. I truly believe it's the worst flagship they've ever put out.
While I don't like Gypsy Queen so much either, the Glassworks box toppers from 2017 caught my attention, and Marcus was the lone Blue Jay from the checklist.
This monster is a 3x5" on a refractor board. It's a great-looking card, but on the back there is the token Topps "Congratulations" spiel. Stop congratulating me for buying your product, you pompous assbutts.
Keeping with Blue Jays pitchers, I've started working on a PC of TJ Zeuch, their first rounder from the 2016 draft.
This insert from Bowman Chrome basically just features where the player was originally drafted and where they were drafted and signed. In 2013 Zeuch went 924th overall, but in 2016, he was a first-rounder at 21st. It's a fair enough concept for a card and fits the Bowman brand. The colors in this insert are also unique, so it was an easy purchase.
He also wrote his name on it for some reason.
From Z to A.
I think this came out of 2017 Topps, possibly making it the only redeeming quality of this year's "effort." For the record, 1987 Topps was seven years old by the time Anthony Alford was born in Columbia, Mississippi in 1994, and Major League Baseball went on stike less than thirty days later.
To another A, Rick Ankiel. I have a low-key Ankiel collection, along with other players that were huge prospects at the time but along the way something went wrong, and their cardboard is now virtually worthless.
That's pretty much how I came into finally owning a Pacific Cramer's Choice card. This one is from 2000 or 2001 though, so it's not one of the originals with a gem-like appearance.
Still big, though:
I used a 2017 Bowman's Best of Anthony Alford, also autographed, to show off the size. The seller was kind enough to include a top loader, but I don't think soft sleeves exist for cards this big. Man, it's loud.
I've also been going though a bit of a 2017 Bowman High Tek binge now that the price has plummeted. High Tek offers awful reward for your money for breakers, and I'm taking advantage of that through ebay, pumping up my Lourdes Gurriel, Jr. collection.
Here's the base (left) and the autograph (right.)
Upon closer inspection, the autographed one is a diffractor, but since it's unnumbered, it fell through the cracks as a base auto for around the price of a pack of Gypsy Queen. Add another parallel to the pile.
Not to be confused, of course, with this Tidal Diffractor, which is numbered out of /199:
Right. So all of those look pretty much the same, but the final one has the "Tidal" pattern, which looks more like a simplified hurricane or whirlpool. I may further expunge upon this in the future, using photographs instead of scans.
Tek autos are reasonably priced on the secondary, as long as you don't go too hard into the parallels. Somehow, I managed to pick up the Bo Bichette (base) in a lot for an extremely reasonable price along with Sean Newcomb, Anderson Espinoza and Jorge Mateo (Tidal Diffractor.)
As November churned on, I finished out the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend with a few more additions. It only resulted in one auction that put cards in my hand before the end of the month, though, and that was these:
So, Topps Gallery is a thing again, but it doesn't' have to be. Especially when you're just putting shitty instagram filters on Getty Images. Want to resurrect a great Topps set? Bring back the original Topps Stars.
With that being said, I'm done with 2017 Topps Gallery.
But let's not end on that negative (though I do like the Alfords.)
You may have noticed the scans of the Bowman High Tek are...bad. I experimented with a couple methods, such as directly on the glass (above) and on top of a small snapcase. The answer to a good-looking Tek scan? Put it right in the snapcase and put it on the glass:
And there you have it, a 2017 Bowman High Tek Bo Bichette diffractor (/199) in all of it's holographic glory.
Stay hard, friends.
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