An unexpected hobby box of Topps Prime Football

I stopped in to Don's Sportcards the other day after having lunch with the wife in the restaurant next door.  I love picking up cheap cards off his drop board and was surprised to see a great stack of boxes all marked down to great prices.  I knew I was walking out of there with a box, but I had to decide which one.  I could have picked up a cheap box of Stadium Club, Bowman Chrome, Panini Rookies and Stars.  In the end I grabbed a hobby box of Topps Prime.  I think Topps Prime is one of my favorite football sets.  It's just a well done set that reminds me of the glory days of great Stadium Club and Upper Deck football sets.

This year was the first year that both retail and hobby were printed on the same card stock.  Before hobby has printed on a thicker card stock than the retail version.  That meant if you wanted to put a set together you had to choose which product you wanted to buy other wise you had a mismash of thick and thin cards in your set.

Over the years I've pulled some great cards from Prime and I figured the price was right and I did want to build this years set.

The first thing I noticed was how few parallels and inserts are in this set.  I only pulled 3 gold foil parallels, one numbered rookie.  And there were only two inserts Prime Time and Prime Rookies.

I won't bore you with all the fluff or the inserts, I'll just give you the hits, because really that's why you're here.  Each hobby box comes with 4 hits.  With at least 2 autos.

First up is the Allen Robinson quad prime relic numbered to #75.  Allen isn't having too bad of a rookie year with 2 TD's and about 550 yards so far.  Plus I love the lover right patch with the threads sticking out.

But over all this was a Giants box for sure.  Next up we have a quad relic auto of Andre Williams. Not a bad designed card, but the relics are kind of boring.  This rookie from Boston College isn't having a bad year either with over 370 yards and 5 TD's.

Of course I bought this box before Odell's insane catch last week that's been a little ridiculous in the marketing that's followed, but hey good for the kid.  It's a nice relic card, it just seems like the relic is really small for this card.

And if one Odell Beckham card wasn't enough I also pulled this lovely relic, which has been redeemed.

Over all not a bad box, especially with all the attention that Odell's been getting have to see if he can keep it up.  I would have preferred a veteran player auto or relic or at least a Packer in my box, but what can you do.

The fine print

I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one who forgot to cancel their Collector Crate subscription.  I'm not sure if I just missed the fine print or they put it up after I ordered my one box, but I ended up getting sent and charged for another box.  I sent Collector Crate a snarky email and they were more than willing to refund my money, but in the end it was probably my fault anyways, so I bit the bullet and now I'm the proud owner of another bronze level box. So I'm going to share it with you.

Since I didn't know I was getting another box I couldn't put in three teams I'd like to get stuff from as a result I got stuff from all over the board.

In this month's box I got a nice selection, and I mean that, of packs, the manila envelope of goodies, a bag of sunflower seed, another plastic baseball featuring the Yankees, a pair of cheap sunglasses with the Yankees logo on them, two stickers, Mets and Tigers, and another small pennant featuring the Mariners.

I was actually really impressed with this month's selection of packs.

I won't bore you with the contents of each pack, I'll just show the good stuff.  The two packs I was most interested in were the mid 90's Leaf packs.  I don't think I opened any Leaf Limited or Preferred back then and both were both pretty top end at the time.

Super shiny.

Preferred comes with one metal card.  The pack was very heavy.

Here are the inserts and hits I got from everything else.

It was really nice to see that the retail pack of Masterpieces yielded a relic.

My goodie envelope was pretty thick

And that was because there was two extra cards.  The Griffey rookie was nice and it was also nice to see that my relic and auto were of players of I've heard of.  It's also cool to see Collector Crate doing some exclusive stuff like this custom Jeter art card.

Overall I would say that this box was a vast improvement over my initial box last month, the pack selection was better, the hits were better and even the extra stuff, though I don't want any of it, was better.  Luckily I have a buddy who's a Yankees fan that lives just down the street from me, so I know whats going into his Christmas present.

cb out.

A trade with A Cracked Bat

I love finding new blogs. I also love finding new blogs because of trades. I also like that there's a new female voice in the collecting blogosphere.  Recently Julie who writes the blog A Cracked Bat, emailed me that she had a card I had had on my Yount want list for quite a while and it was mine for my address.  How could I pass that up.

What we have here is one of Mr. Yount's cards out of the 2012 Panini Cooperstown Collection set.  This was a retail blaster exclusive and was one of the last inserts, other than Robin's auto from the set, that I needed. This is his Hall of Fame Classes Team card.  This is one of at two cards in the set that doesn't actually show an image of the Robin.  I suppose that makes them easy to produce since you don't have to send an image to the airbrusher.  And believe it or not, but these cards are kind of hard to find, hence the reason it's been sitting on my want list for over 2 years.

Thanks Julie, I'll have to dig some Tigers out for you.

COMC announces it's Black Friday Promotion

Once again COMC, aka Check out My Cards, is offering a Black Friday promotion.  This is always one of it's biggest promotions of the year and if you've got some store credit or a little extra money burning a  hole in your pocket it's a great time to find some awesome deals.

That being said it's nothing really mind blowing.  They are offering free shipping once again on orders over 10 cards.  This year they are giving away $10,000 worth of shopping sprees.  And if you ship over 100 items you get a $5 store credit.  Plus sellers tend to offer big discounts to move cards this time of year and I always come away with a decent haul.

You can check out the full announcement on their blog HERE.

A one sided trade with Tony L.

You all know Tony L by now. He writes the Brewercentric blog Off Hiatus Baseball Cards.  He came screaming onto the scene earlier this year, with his blog all shiny and new, with passion and excitement and posts.  Man that guys posts.  Go check it out HERE.  He started in February and already has posted over 240 times!! My god I wish I still had that drive.  I look at my sideboard and I'll be lucky if I put out 100 posts on this blog this year.

But it's nice to see another like minded collector, lover of the Brewers and their players, especially Robin Yount.  It's been lonely since Brian over at Thorzul Will Rule went almost exclusively to Twitter. And it seems like all the other Wisconsin team themed blogs have all pretty much died out.

Anyway, chances are if you read my blog, you probably read his, and if you read his, chances are you've traded with him.  Seriously seems like every other trade post is one with a trade with Tony.  That guy is everywhere.  Well now I get to do one too.

Tony is a regular commentator on my Yount blog.  Which is great because it's nice to have someone comment.  He asked if I had a 1982 Brewers Police set.  I did not and now I do. I still have to reciprocate.

Now Brewers Police sets are an interesting thing. This 1982 set is the first in what would be come a tradition in Wisconsin.  As a kid growing up I didn't spend a lot of time in Wisconsin as my father was in the military, but almost every summer he would take his 30 days leave and we'd head back to northern Wisconsin for vacation. That also usually meant we were in town for the 4th of July parade and it was during the parade that the local police officers would pass out these cards.  Each town had there own imprint on the card.   This set was given out by the Milwaukee Police department, but you can find 100's of town variations.

A couple things about the police issues.  They are oversized. Which sadly makes them hard to display and store.  It's a big set, 30 players this year.  The cards are unnumbered, but depending on where you look them up they are either listed by player number, which is how they are checklisted on the team card below or are listed alphabetically.

And just about everyone is in the set. But t most of the value comes from just 3 players. Robin, Rollie, and Mollie.

All the backs feature something that player "says".

Thanks Tony. Great cards and I hope to get you back soon.