my favorite card of 2017

This is in response to Tom's contest over at Waiting 'til Next Year.

My answer to this question almost every year (for baseball, at least) comes from Topps Stadium Club. There would be no exception this year.

2017 Topps Stadium Club #135

Jameson Taillon

I have family in Pittsburgh, and our visits there often revolve around either the Pirates or the Steelers. I have minimal interest in the latter, but have always liked the Pirates a bit and PNC Park is simply the most beautiful place in the world where baseball is played. Enjoy. 

trading stains with p-town Tom

I started kicking around here a few months back, and after my previous tenured with plentiful trades, I wasn't exchanging any cardboard with y'all. That was until I opened up some 2017 Topps Fire, which I found was difficult to get rid of through ebay and my dire attempts to fire it into the sun where it belongs.

Luckily I came across a post at Waiting 'til Next Year (side note, still waiting?) where he was doing the charitable work of extracting this evil from other collectors in attempting to complete the set.
After I threatened Tom night and day with haunting visages of bent corners and miscuts, he finally agreed to take some Yankee-branded Topps Fire off my hands, and I managed to throw in an Edwin Encarnacion to top him off.

I would have been happy with one less Yankee and two less Topps Fire base cards in my house, but Tom submitted a care package anyway, full of Blue Jays from late 80's and early 90's.

That's right. Junk wax. Glorious junk wax. Let's take a look.

Some '88 Stieb in ideal '88 condition, rocking the white panel, Spring Training v-neck/chest hair and the unexplainable yellow name ribbon. Just perfection.

More Stieb, this time in green, pitching to a packed house. Magnificent.

Stieb again, this time with the accompaniment of the legendary Kelly Gruber. You might notice the Scotch tape on the Stieb, but do not worry - Tom isn't one of those domestic terrorists who use Scotch tape on top loaders, this was left over from an eBay transaction.

More Gruber Art, this time from 1991 Upper Deck. US chose Gruber for this checklist despite such powerhouse players on that Jays roster such as Kenny Williams, Greg Myers and Junior Felix. I kid. The core for the upcoming World Series Champions was in place - George Bell, Pat Borders, Tony Fernandez, Tom Henke, John Olerud, Dave Stieb. Fred McGriff would go a long way in helping them land Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar for the 1992 run. What. A. Team.


And what a card. Nowadays, a Topps intern just throws an Instagram filter on a card, like this - which was also in the trade:

Right. Gallery is a thing again, as Topps flagship previewed before releasing as a stand-alone product in the Fall. I assumed my Anthony Alfords would be my only Gallery entries, but here we are with a third. It's nice.

The Gallery wasn't the only Alomar, as this extraordinarily mis-cut 1992 Topps was there, highlighting the package for me - until we get to the final card in the post. This is one of my favorite Roberto Alomar cards, pictured as a Blue Jay for the second time on a Topps card (he was in Topps Traded in 1991), and rocking some baller threads.

My Guy Troy Tulowitzki showed up as well, unfotunately decked out in the incredibly terrible 2017 Topps designed, lessened by the Opening Day branding. This is one of the least offensive 2017 Topps cards I've come across.

Ah, that's better.

I was a huge fan of the Home Field Advantage cards from Upper Deck in 1994, a true golden era for eight-year old Roy-Z. The only one I remember having was Brady Anderson (?), so this was a welcomed addition.

As were these '91 Jays. This design has grown on me in time, but it's hard to find a Pat Borders or a Blue Jays-branded Al Leiter card that I won't love.

But the true gem, in all of its junk wax glory came at the end in this sticky beauty:

Another '88 Topps, this time gum-stained. The front is also miscut, but otherwise the card is in excellent shape. But man, that gum stain is just beautiful.

I liked this one enough to put it up next to my 1989 Fleer Bill Ripken.

Thanks a bunch, Tom.

i ripped thirty rack packs of 2015 prizm and now my fingers hurt

I hate you.

On Cyber Monday, an interesting deal popped up at Dave & Adam's Card World:

2015 Panini Prizm Baseball Super 12-Pack Box $19.99

Super 12-pack box? Neat! What I thought I was buying was something like a hobby box for a retail price, but what a super box really is, is a bit different.

You see each box (I grabbed two for a total of $40) contained 12 rack packs with three packs each and a bonus Red, White & Blue PRIZM pack in each.

So, yeah. That's a lot of cards for $40. And what it comes down to, manual labor-wise, is opening 24 rack packs, three foil packs within each (72) and additional 24 packs of RWB PRIZM parallels.

So if you're ever in the need to mindlessly rip packs on a budget, that's the way to go.

I should also mentioned that I ripped these mostly in the dark with just the light of the TV illuminating the room as the dog had scratched his eye earlier in the day (he's okay now.)

Here's the numerous spoils of the boxes.

For a fun little extra, try and pick out at which point in the scanning process I figured out how to deal with my scanner cutting the edged off of everything. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

The base cards are...awful. I love Pacific Prism back in the day, on its simple, thin, light stock and shiny foil frontage. PRIZM, though? It's basically Topps Chrome with a worse design, no logos, and bad photos. But I wasn't in it for the base cards.

PRIZMS were about 1:2, or maybe that was inserts in general. For the most part, good players came out of the inserts, and these refractors look exponentially better than the cold steel/Kia dashboard feeling of the base cards.

The Field Pass inserts are numbingly boring, but at least that Miguel Cabrera will go well into my DIRT collection. Each insert has a Prizm parallel, especially with colors (I think?) and again, make the cards so much better to look at.

The Diamond Marshals inserts are very solid die-cut set, shaped like a badge. Goose Gossage and Brian McCann are not in this set, despite their constant attempts to police the sport.

Oh yeah.

Agian, the refractor version is much, much better.

Around this point I decided that the key to making any Panini Prizm card look good it to have a colourful uniform in the photo. The Late 90s teal Mariners uniform is a perfect example of this, as is the Giancarlo Stanton Marlins uni above.

The Fresh Faces/please like our Rookie Card logo insert is fine enough. These must have been a bit more rare, as only three fell out of the two boxes. You'll see the third later. 

U-S-A! U-S-A!

I've collected Team USA cards in the past, but I could go without yet another Alex Gordon USA insert. It was 10 years ago, man. Move on.

The Fireworks took an old Pacific Prism (~2000) idea and translated it into a modern chromiumed insert and...let's just say there was plenty lost in translation. This could have been great but are, well...fine. 

Not on to the refractors PRIZMSZ.

Camouflage! Are you sick of these yet? Yeah, so is everyone else.

Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

SKAfractors!

I don't know what these are named, but the Bautista was the best-looking card in the box(es). I didn't even remember I had pulled the Kazmir until I scanned all of the cards. I just wanted it to be over by this point.

Blue! After taking a o=look at the coloured Prizms, I have to wonder why the would even make the base chromers. These are /75, I think.

Orange! Card producers currently think orange is a good idea. On anything other than a Giants, Orioles or Marlins card - it isn't. 

Hey, autographs! They're both terrible. It could have been worse. A meteorite could have struck the house at this point.

As much as a pain in the ass it was to open all of these packs, jamming all of these on to the scanner bed that cuts off the edges was even worse. Hopefully that's remedied. Oh, wait. 

There's still 72 more red white & blue Prizmsz to sort through...

Yeah, neat. 

My fingers still hurt. 

november nue jays (pre-comc binge)

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.

getting blasted: 2017-2018 upper deck series 1 hockey

It's been quiet here, between some increased work activity, the holiday(s), birthday(s), and some other things, but yesterday I was able to saunter on out through the writing hoards of half-dead Black Friday shoppers to finally get my hands on some 2017-2018 Upper Deck Series 1. While never a cheap product, it's always damn near the top of hockey releases - featuring excellent photography, plenty of nice base cards, limited parallels, and some decent, 90s-esque inserts and of course: Young Guns.

This year's cover boy is none other than Toronto Maple Leaf Auston Matthews:

Matthews isn't a guy I collect with much vigor, as his huge breakout rookie season in 2016-2017 has inflated his value among collectors, pushing us hobbyists out of the picture. Your basic foil pack is found 12 times in each $20 blaster, with just five cards in each pack. Cartes par paquet. 

With Upper Deck, you come and stay for the unique photography. Here we have Marc-Andre Fleury, fresh off his drafting by the 17-18 expansion franchise Vegas Golden Knights on draft night in a new, well-selling jersey. 

From new to old, we see Oliver Ekman-Larsson, featured in the best sports uniform, period. Just fantastic.

I'm always amazed at how much product NHLers use in their hair before they cram it under a helmet for the next two and a half hours.

Patrik Laine, AKA Diet Auston Matthews, models our card backs. Laine has just one year of service, showing off the Winnipeg Jets logo in the background of the ice-cool card. Upper Deck hasn't changed much over the years, and I take comfort in that.

Portraits fall 1:14 and I was lucky enough to land this Vladimir Tarasenko, the Russian Tank. I'm not sure lucky is the best word, though, as this season's version of the Portraits insert is black-and-white and could not be more uninteresting.

The Canvas "parallels" are 1:14 and the highlight of the inserts, using a canvas-like feature on a light cardboard stock with an alternate photo choice, usually one of the players in a rare pose or from a different angle, such as this one that looks like it was shot from ice-level in an ensuing scrum. Brodie wouldn't be my top choice of players to receive here, but I am appreciative of the Canvas inserts as always, regardless of the player pulled.

The Shining Stars (Defenseman in Series 1) looks straight out of 1998 or so Upper Deck, featuring an impossible to scan foil board with stamped, gold-foil logos. While very nice in-hand, they're a nightmare to scan. Here we have Seth Jones in the awesome Columbus Blue Jackets third jersey, featuring the cannon logo.

And here they are, the Young Guns. Falling 1:6, I grabbed the guaranteed two per blaster. Pierre-Luc Dubois was one of the better ones in the 2017-2018 set, but we're not even close to the class of 2016-2017.

The Sharks' Marcus Sorensen was pulled as well. This year's cards are very blue in design and look great with the teal Sharks jersey.

Now on to the Leafs.

Here's a great shot of Uncle Leo playing in the outdoor game. Komorov has only played in two outdoor games, the 2014 Winter Classic in Ann Arbor and the 2017 Centennial Classic at BMO Field. This one is from the latter.

Mitch! makes an appearance. Marner, like Matthews and William Nylander, is also a tough guy to collect right now.

Nazem Kadri - not so much. With so many Maple Leafs collectors losing their minds over Auston Matthews, Kadri has fallen behind, even though 2016-2017 was his best season and 2017-2018 might shape up to be just as good. Its another one of those alternate photo type UD cards, featuring Kadri in a third grade class Maple Leafs team photo.

As much as I complain about the secondary market on Auston Matthews cards, I can manage to pull him once a blaster on a good day. Aside from an action shot, Upper Deck couldn't have made a better card than this one, featuring a very old school Toronto St. Pats uniform. Just awesome.

So there you have it. UDS1 has been found, and it's beautiful. The End.