Upper Deck e(w)-Pack

Every card company has tried various gimmicks to try and separate collectors from their money. Whether it is on-demand cards like Topps and Panini have produced or art cards like this year’s Topps Project 2020. Upper Deck’s gimmick is e-Pack, an experience aimed at collectors that chase hits and toss the base cards aside. I hadn’t done much with them since their launch except claim a few free packs of the day which are pretty useless. That all changed when I came across a Mickey Mouse set that apparently had been released through e-Pack only. There were some fun inserts and the cards looked cool, so I purchased a box and clicked them open.

 

Clicking open a box of digital cards just isn’t the same as ripping open the packs of a physical box of cards. Now, these aren’t digital cards like Topps Bunt, but you can only be shipped cards that Upper Deck considers “hits.” Luckily, since the base cards in this set are serial numbered, you can get everything that comes out of this box. If you want the physical versions of your cards, you can have them shipped for a fairly expensive fee or you can have them transferred to Check Out My Cards and added to your inventory there.

 

 

It wasn’t long after opening my box that I found out one of the best aspects of e-Pack for collectors. You can get anything except for the rarest hits for next to nothing. I was able to complete the Mickey Mouse base set, even the highest tier cards numbered to 299, and pick up a handful of cool inserts for less than the cost of a second box. That’s a good final result for me and if the pandemic ever ends, I’ll be able to get all of these cards shipped from Check Out My Cards (without having to wait 3 months).

 

My next experience with e-Pack wasn’t too long after this. For some reason, I passed up on Upper Deck’s Clerks release when it first came out. It probably had something to do with the close to $100 price per box, but I was riding high on selling all of my basketball cards whose prices had skyrocketed during the pandemic and decided to try a box. The boxes are actually tough to track down these days, so I decided to give e-Pack a try. I figured that I could buy a set of the base cards online. but those turned out to be scarce as well.

 

 

I did alright with one of the two autographs in my box. I don’t think that Jeff Anderson does a lot of comic book conventions, so it was cool to get his autograph. I pulled a printing plate as well. Unfortunately, my base cards are forever lost to me, but I played the e-Pack game again and headed on over to Check Out My Cards. I grabbed all of the insert cards and a ton of the autographs for less than what a second box would have cost. It’s kind of insane how much e-Pack devalues the majority of the cards from the set. You can get inserts for thirty-seven cents and autographs for two bucks, but base cards are rare.

 

So, my take away from this is that I will most likely stick to just browsing Check Out My Cards for any set that’s been released through e-Pack to pick up lots of cheap cards. I still like to put together base sets and don’t open a box just to see what hits I’ve gotten (of course I do want good hits, but I also want a base set). It’s a good alternative to Upper Deck’s insanely priced Marvel releases. If you don’t mind collecting the e-Pack versions of the cards, you can grab a set fairly cheaply.

I pulled what, now?

One of the side effects of the current trading card boom during the pandemic is the unavailability of supplies. I purchased a case of standard toploaders in March that took a couple of months to arrive. The backorder wait times are even longer on a lot of things right now. I saw that Dave & Adam’s had 35 and 55 PT magnetics, so I threw a couple into my cart. I wanted to open something that wasn’t ridiculously priced that would also trigger free shipping and decided to grab a box of 2020 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions.

 

This is a set that I haven’t had a lot of luck with. It’s Upper Deck’s version of Allen & Ginter and it allows them to do yearly cards of athletes that they have under contract, but do not have a license for that sport such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James. This set hasn’t really caught on with collectors like Allen & Ginter has. The base set contains each person twice, once in a vertical orientation and once in a horizontal orientation. Why? This set also has ridiculous insert cards such as lenticular cards and manufactured patches of dogs. Sure, you’re most likely going to get three relic cards from a box of Allen & Ginter, but I’ll take that over most of the inserts that I’ve gotten out of Goodwin Champions in the past. I guess this shows how badly I wanted something to open.

 

The box arrives and I start ripping open packs. I got a lenticular card of softball player Stevie Wisz and a “memorabilia” card of Wander Franco. I’m not sure what the swatch is from, but it is certainly not a baseball jersey. After those two hits, I then pulled this...

 

I have to admit, I didn’t know that much about this card when I pulled it. I knew that autographs can be tough to come by in the product, so I may have pulled something pretty good. After a little research, I found out that this was an autograph of the #9 pick in this year’s NBA draft. Since this was also limited to 50 with an inscription, I started to feel even better about this pull. I went to eBay for comps and…$350? Wow. I had no clue that this card would be anywhere near that valuable.

 

So, I listed the card and got “generous” offers of $50 and $125 and a request for what my bottom price was. Decline, decline, whatever the auction ends at. Based on the previous sale of $350, if I had put a Buy It Now on this, it most likely would have been $400. It was a good thing that I didn’t.

 

47 bids later from 10 different bidders, this card jumped over $200 in the last 2 hours of bidding and ended at $510. Holy crap. That is just insane to me. What’s even crazier is that I pulled this card out of a box that I picked up as an impulse purchase from a release that I wasn’t that thrilled about. I will now never utter another bad word about Goodwin Champions.

 

There are some interesting cards in the base set. You’ve got Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapone from the National Women’s Soccer Team, and Scarface and Big Boi from the rap world. I’ve picked up a lot of singles in the past especially all the variations of Rob Paulsen from last year’s set. Narf! Is there really a lot of interest in a card with a swatch of a voice actor’s shirt though?

 

I’ll probably be more likely to pick up boxes of Goodwin Champions in the future, but I doubt that I’ll ever have this luck again. Does this card sell for less without the current hobby bubble? Probably not. I’m not complaining though. This will allow me to add some nice cards to my collection.

Boredom and "Investing" in Trading Cards

I’ve never been one to purchase trading cards with the intent of making an investment. That being said, it’s hard to not get caught up in the current hype surrounding the hobby. This is what collectors were dreaming of back in the 80s and 90s when they were squirreling away rookie cards.

Thanks to multiple posts on Twitter, I signed up for the lottery and was selected to purchase a box of Topps Chrome Ben Baller edition. He’s one of the best artists in Topps Project 2020 and his take on this year’s Chrome design looked great. The inserts looked even better than the base cards. Given that the cards looked great, the hobby was booming, and this release was most likely going to be limited, I figured that I would grab a box.

 

Mongomery Club members started getting their boxes… Boxes were selling for around $600 on eBay. Other people start posting that they had received their boxes on Twitter… Boxes were now selling for around $500 on Twitter. By the time that I finally received my box, they were selling for just over $400 on eBay and the larger online retailers were selling boxes for around $450. While a profit of $100+ after eBay fees for not doing much of anything isn’t something to sneeze at, it just didn’t appeal to me. So, I put the box away thinking that I might do something with it if the supply dried up and prices started to creep back up. Yeah, right...

 

Here’s where the boredom part of the post title comes into play. I was bored one night and looking for something to do, typical pandemic blues, and the unopened box caught my eye. Given the rookies that are available in the set, the inserts, the parallels, and the autographs, I figured that I should be able to easily pull $250 worth of cards out of the box. That was all of the justification that my weak will required and wrappers started flying.

 

 

The only rookie of note that I got was Luis Robert, but I got two of them. The collation on this stuff is terrible. Not 2020 Stadium Club terrible, but close.

 

I got ’85 inserts of Bo Bichette and Keston Hiura. Gavin Lux was my diamond insert. I pulled Andrew Heaney and Charlie Blackmon /99, Dylan Cease /75, Blake Snell /50, Nolan Arenado /25, oh and this...

 

 

While this isn’t super limited, the /75 blue Mookie Betts is easily his best looking parallel. The blue background makes this image of Mookie in his Dodgers uniform pop. Since looking at Mookie in anything other than a Red Sox uniform is too painful to bear, this card was on it’s way to eBay.

 

Opening a box of cards is always fun, but there was one card that made the box more than worth opening though.

 

 

Nico Hoerner Superfractor 1/1. I’ve pulled 1/1 cards before, but this was my first Superfractor. (Little did I know that my second one would come a little over a week later.) There was no doubt that this card was going to eBay. I’ve got a fairly focused collection and this card doesn’t fit into it. This card alone would definitely cover what I paid for the box and that’s good enough for me.

 

 

Cook-ing Up Something Awesome

I’ve been a fan of Katie Cook for a long time now. My wife actually first saw her art on LiveJournal in a cat community and started reading her journal. She ordered some cat art way back before Smashy Adventures of the Hulk and skyrocketing sketch card popularity. I think it was Smashy…Hulk that really won me over as a fan because it was pretty hilarious. It was so good that a page of it eventually ended up in one of Marvel’s Avenger books.

Katie’s got a unique and very cool style where she “cute-ifies” the subjects that she draws and it seems to have struck a chord because people go ga-ga over her sketch cards. She’s also seen a steady increase in the amount of comic book work that she’s been doing and is also currently tackling writing chores on a project as well. I haven’t even mentioned her great webcomic Gronk yet. There’s just bucket loads of awesome coming from the mind, pen and brush of Katie Cook.

For those who may not remember, the three commissions that I had done for Boston Comic Con were from Stephanie Buscema and Katie Cook. I’ve already posted about the phenomenal Death painting that I got from Stephanie and now it is time to boast about the awesome art that I got from Katie.

First up is a Spider-Ham sketch card that is Spectacular, Amazing, Sensational, and Ultimate. Here’s Peter Porker in all of his glory. I think Katie did an awesome job of capturing him. Everything is there right down to the Spidey eyes on the end of the snout.

My Spider-Ham sketch card collection started back in 2010 when I spotted a Brian Kong sketch card at his table at the terrible Wizard World Boston convention. I figured that would be as good a character as any to get a bunch of sketch cards of. Well, as of right now “a bunch” equal two. I’ve got my eye on eBay, but if there were any Spider-Ham sketch cards in the Rittenhouse Spider-Man Archives set, they’ve found their way to other people’s collections.

The second piece is a custom 6”x6” painting that I commissioned of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. I loved this cartoon as a kid and it still holds up for me today. This was the first superhero cartoon that I remember having a ton of guest stars who were done well. Seven Little Superheroes featured guest appearances from Captain America, Doctor Strange, and Namor while another episode featured a ton of X-Men.

The cartoon was cheesy and it was campy and it was a lot of fun. Spidey has always been my favorite hero, Iceman was always a favorite amongst the X-Men and this version of Firestar seemed to be a lot more fun than the comic book version she would inspire. Infertility and cancer due to her powers? Not enough? May as well make her break off her relationship with Justice as well.

Brian Bendis did some fun stuff with an updated version of this trio in Ultimate Spider-Man and then took it one step further putting together the trio that was originally supposed to star in the 80s cartoon: Spidey, Iceman and the Human Torch. I’m such a Bendis fanboy to being with and this run had me in comic nerd heaven.

There you have it, my 2012 Boston Comic Con commissions. Looking back, I love these three pieces of art so much more than anything else that I could have purchased at the convention. Getting to meet and chat with Katie was a treat as well and I’ll always remember Stephanie Buscema inviting my daughter behind her table to watch her paint. The fact that these two ladies are great people makes it so much easier to support their amazing talents.

Thanks for checking out my non-sport divergence. Other than getting back in track with sports card posts, I want to put together a post highlighting my growing art print collection. Don’t worry, there is some sports related content that will be contained in that post.

Walk-off Spare

One of the things that I love about living in the Boston area is candlepin bowling. Imagine that they took ten pin bowling and made it challenging and you’d have candlepin bowling. I kid. There are some interesting differences between the two, but I’m not going to get into that now. One of the things that I love about bowling is that it’s a social sport. Bowling is like golf where you aren’t really playing against other people. There’s no defense. You’re playing against yourself as is everyone else. Whoever performs the best is the one who will win.

The great thing about bowling is that everyone roots for everyone else no matter what team you are on. If someone on the opposing team makes a great shot then you congratulate them on it and then you try and make one of your own. Tonight’s final game saw us up by a few pins when I got up to bowl my final frames. The guy that I was bowling against had been whining all night as our team destroyed his. Things were close until the 9th frame when I put a 5 box which allowed the other team to pull into the lead by 2 pins. The joker on the other team made the mistake of me catching him celebrating my bad box. That was it, there’s no way that this douchebag was winning the string.

He threw first and put the ball right in the pocket and dropped 9 pins leaving an easy spare leave. My first ball caught the 3 pin right in the middle and chopped straight through getting only 2 pins (called a Half Worcester). That’s one of the major difference between candlepin and ten pin bowling. You can put the ball in the middle of the pins and end up with only 1 or two of them. Try doing that with a gigantic ball and fat pins.

DB converts his spare all but sealing the game for his team. I step up, still steaming a little bit and throw the perfect shot. It looks a little something like this: (Ignore the fact that the bowler in this video throws a gutter ball on their first shot)

That shot drew cheers from my team and some people on neighboring lanes who were watching. So, the whole string now came down to one bonus ball for each of us with the other team up by 2 pins. He filled his spare with 6 pins which put me in a tough spot especially since I wasn’t having much luck with my first balls in that final string. I stepped up and got a huge 9 pin drop to take the string by a pin. That got an even bigger cheer. Walk-off spare!

Here’s a couple of fun candlepin videos to further demonstrate some of the differences between the two types of bowling:

Things will definitely bounce around the alley.

Fallen pins, or wood, are not cleared from the alley between throws. This can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Since the pins are flat on the top and bottom, it's possible that something like this could happen, but it's extremely rare.

Pins that roll over to knock another pin down are called messengers. Sometimes that'll allow you to make great shots.

Sometimes you'll even get some ridiculous shots like this. Again, this is pretty rare. If any of you ever come to Boston for a Fenway trip or something like that and want to check out candlepin bowling, let me know and a string or two will be on me. (Fun Fact: There used to be a candlepin bowling alley under Fenway Park. It closed around 2004 and wood from the lanes was used for the bar up on the Right Field Patio behind the roof deck tables.)