I spent the last 9 days languishing in the sun in south Florida, trying to get away from the misery that has been our winter here in western PA. It appears that my wife and I picked a good week to get away, as there were a couple of storms that dumped some snow and ice on the region while we were gone. We came home last night to an inch and a half of ice on the car, and wearing only hoodies with no gloves, the first 15 minutes back in reality weren't fun.
But enough of that misery. You're here for the cards....
On the Friday before we left, my wife wanted to stop at Big Blue and pick up some travel size soap/shampoo for our trip.
I almost made it through the month of January without cracking any retail. I decided to become one of the last to the party, and picked up a couple of rack packs of Series 1, along with a blister pack of some hockey cards that I haven't purchased in quite a long time.
Let's start with old reliable, shall we?
As far as parallels go, I usually do a pretty good job of pulling decent cards for other peeps, and this years start is no exception.
The next couple of days you're going to see a lot of colored parallels and inserts. Unless they are Blue Jays, they are up for grabs, so don't be shy about speaking up.
Speaking of inserts, as you may know, I have never really cared one way or the other about them. Again, unless they are Blue Jays, they don't usually mean a great deal to me.
There are a couple of Mets here that are headed to Max (thank you for the envelope sir, post to come later this week!!)
The '89 minis, I like. Again, I tend to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but my thought process is that the minis remind me of the base set. Since I like the base set, it stands to reason that I will enjoy the minis. The fact that I've done fairly well so far with the players that I've pulled doesn't hurt either.
As each scan comes across, I'm reminded that I still owe people some goodies. The Banks is headed to P-Town Tom, who sent me a great card a while back that I never acknowledged (sorry Tom, I'll try and get a nice package out to you shortly).
Now, to coincide with the "North" theme, I purchased a blister pack (I believe that's what they are called) of 2013-14 Black Diamond Hockey. I haven't purchased any of these in quite a long time, maybe over a decade if my memory serves me well. The cards are exactly as I remember.
Shiny. Silver. A bit of a gamble.
I'm pretty sure the formula is still the same. Single Diamond are the base, Double Diamond a little more rare, Triple Diamond even rarer and Quad Diamond difficult as hell to pull (at least for me).
It's always easy to tell at least the "level" of card that you've pulled. The James Neal in the upper right is a double diamond.
I did pull one Maple Leaf, but was kind of disappointed in the player selection.
Don't get me wrong. A Leaf is a Leaf. But in a premium set such as this where 5 card packs go for $3, Frazer McLaren is probably the last Leaf that should be included in this set. O-Pee-Chee? For sure. Upper Deck base set? Sure why not. Frazer should not have been in the BD set.
It was also humorous to me that the triple diamond rookie that I pulled out of a pack was sent to the minors two days later...
Who knows, I may get adventurous during the winter and try and build the Black Diamond set. It's been a long time since I chased one of these.
All in all, a fun way to break my month long streak of not purchasing any retail. Tomorrow I'll look at the southern portion of the retail purchases I made while on vacation.
I fared better in the South than the Confederate army did. Yes, I'm using these posts to learn a little Civil War history. It's not my strong suit as far as American history goes...
thanks for reading, Robert
No comments:
Post a Comment