Anybody want a Kinsler Cycle Mini?

Hi folks.

This image was pulled from Ebay because the original is at home, and this image by no means is representative of the type of parallel, but rest assured that over the weekend I snagged a second blaster of T206 and pulled a cycle mini of Ian Kinsler #/99.

I am perfectly content to stick this card in a binder sleeve with the rest of the mish-mash, but I know you Texas fans might prefer to have it in your collection instead.

SO I thought I would toss out the offer of my cycle for another cycle from the set. While it would be nice to have a cool player, it does not really matter to me. If you would like the Kinsler, and have a cycle card to trade straight across for it, let me know and we can do a tidy little one-stamp trade!

Grudgematch part 2: The Blaster

*ALL CARDS FOR TRADE, MINUS THE MINIS

During my Target run the other night I could not choose between retail Topps T206 and Blaster Topps T206, so I decided to try a bit of both and run a product comparison. My summary? The cards all look alike! Actually it should also be noted that you get the same odds out of Blasters as Retail boxes. I don't know if they have a wall-hanger product out or not...if so those might have tougher odds.

So here are the highlights of my blaster. Remember that my five packs of retail pulled an Ellsbury NNO and a Strasburg Caramel mini, so that might be a bit tough to match.

Pack #1


Colby Rasmus
Tim Lincecum (with hat!!!)
Gil Meche Polar Bear Mini
Ryan Dempster Bronze
Chris Volstad
Andrew McCutchen


Pack #2


Frank Robinson
Yogi Berra
Hanley Ramirez Caramel Mini
Andy Pettitte Bronze
Curtis Granderson
Alex Rios




Pack #3


Jayson Werth
Brandon Inge
Jason Heyward Piedmont Mini
Lou Gehrig
David Price Bronze
Justin Upton





Pack #4


Ken Griffey Jr
Orlando Cabrera Caramel Mini
Jason Heyward Bronze
Ty Cobb
Adam Jones
Chris Coghlan



Pack #5


Jason Bartlett
Willie Keeler
Geovany Soto
Miguel Montero Piedmont mini
Travis Hafner Bronze
Kurt Suzuki





Pack #6


Jorge Posada
Adam Lind
Raul Ibanez
First Jet Engine plane mini
Dexter Fowler Bronze
Vernon Wells





Pack #7


Rafael Furcal
Matt Cain Piedmont mini
Melky Cabrera Bronze
John Danks
Kevin Millwood
Babe Ruth NNO





Alcides Escobar
Placido Polanco
Yunel Escobar
Troy Glaus Bronze
Nolan Ryan
Some Mini Card Currently On The Lamb (last seen hitching a ride down I-5)


Summary: I am a big fan of what Heyward is doing this season, so it is nice to pull a mini, and the Ruth NNO is pretty cool, albeit not necessarily unique. Some of these cards are reasonably nice, and some need to be put out to pasture. I guess that is probably about the same story with any product though. Nolan Ryan sure has pretty teeth, don't he?

Winner? I am going to have to go with the loose, retail box. Pulling a Strasberg Caramel, while no doubt not nearly as exciting as it would have been two months ago, is a nice little historic piece to add to JD's collection. "This is the guy that everybody emptied their pocketbooks to get a card of and made eBay very happy".

This will be a fun product to buy some occasional packs. The mini parallels and reasonably interesting card subjects, should make pack rips pretty exciting. I am uncertain why a continuation product is so vastly different than its predecessor, but I will give Topps this much, at least the set seems free of recycled images, at least from what I have seen in these packs.

Remember, all cards for trade, except for the minis! Speaking of mini's, here they are, except for the one that has gone mysterious missing. I wonder if JD knows anything about that.

Topps T206- Retail vs Blaster Grudgmatch!

Last night I made a trip to Target. I wanted to get my hands on a few packs of Topps T206 and see if I could score myself a few new minis for the collection. I was also curious to see if Topps was loading up retail packs with unique cards like Ginter was this year.

When I got to Target I was presented with two options. T206 retail at $2.99 a pack, or a Blaster at $19.99. Firstly, I think that $2.99 is crazy-steep for a retail pack, but since these were all nicely organized and don't look like they had been ruffled through by pack searchers, I decided the right course of action here was to grab a Blaster and five packs of retail. Mathematically I guess I could have grabbed one more retail, but my grubby little paws only snagged five. Either way I thought it would be cool to compare the two products and see if either has the advantage over the other.

Today, lets take a look at the offering from the five retail packs


Pack #1



Bryan Anderson
Jacoby Ellsbury*NNO back
Brian Roberts Piedmont Mini
Cristian Guzman Bronze
Glen Perkins
Victor Martinez


Pack #2



Kick Strass!

Ben Zobrist

Gil Meche

Stephen Strasburg Mini Caramel

James Shields

Koji Uehara Bronze

Daniel McCutchen

Pack#3

Carlos Ruiz

BJ Upton
First pro (minor league) game played under lights mini

Ricky Nolasco Bronze

Miguel Montero

Tom Seaver

Pack#4

Johnny Bench

Worlds first female cop mini

Jackie Robinson Bronze

Travis Snider

Chad Billingsley

Hideki Matsui

Pack #5

Ryan Zimmerman

Ryan Howard

Ryan Dempster

Jon Danks Polar Bear mini

Todd Helton Bronze

Edinson Volquez

And here are the new minis for my collection.

So that was the retail break. I now understand people's comments on the "hat's off" cards. It is literally ALL the cards. Whether this is accurately representative of the 1910 counterpart I do not know, maybe I should jump in my son's matchbox DeLorean time machine and find out. When you look at the cards as a whole, it kind of reminds you of a bad high school yearbook.

I do like the looks of a few star players cards and a few of the legends cards, but overall nothing really jumps out at me about this set. It was cool to pull a SP Ellsbury out of the first pack and although the Strasberg hype has died down, I am happy to add his RC mini to the collection.

No hits out of the retail...not a huge surprise but I am sure they are out there to be had. White frames though?

Next post I will give the results of the Topps T206 BLASTER. Does it hold enough punch to challenge the retail Stras/Ellsbury pulls?

Also, I plan on only keeping the minis and the Ellsbury from this break, so feel free to stake claim on anything else you may like.

Whoa, what is this?????

It appears that Mr Sharpe is holding a code-cracking contest! Great swag at stake. Go check it out here!

http://sharpesince92.blogspot.com/2010/09/blog-post.html

Tally Ho!

Hunting for a cover model

Either tonight or tomorrow I will be heading out to the local neighborhood Target in search of some Topps T206. I am interested to get an up-close look at the new set, as well as add a few brand new minis to the collection.



In the meantime, the eBay hunt continues for lots, singles, players, oddballs...basically anything not regular-sized. I bumped into an auction for a single mini last week that I immediately knew needed to be lost in my collection. Not only was he featured in the 2007 Topps Allen and Ginter set, but he was also on the front of the box. The face of the product, the point of purchase display! Joey Chestnut?



Nope



Abe Lincoln?



Noooooope.

Enter the Dragon!

Bruce Lee. Awesome card. I especially enjoyed the packaging on this card. I love the creativity that people put into justifying highly-inflated shipping costs. A top loader, a heavy chunk of cardboard, and some USPS packing tape...none of this can keep Bruce Lee down.

What I want to be when I grow up.

I recently dove into a fair sized lot of 2007 Ginter mini cards on eBay. a vast majority of them are base player cards, but there were a handful of oddball cards mixed in to the lot. The groundhog card is pretty sweet, the horse owner card is just pointless and then the card below...
Mike Aponte. I flipped it over and read the back and quickly realized that Mike is one of the MIT blackjack team (kinda like glee or chess club except you get to make mad mad money), that is a subject of the quasi-fiction/nonfiction "Bringing Down the House" about a group of MIT students that count cards and take Vegas and other casinos by storm.

I remember seeing the movie version of this, "21" a couple years back and just becoming enamored with the card counting system. Plus any movie with the Fishburne is worth checking out.

The system itself is pretty straight-forward. If the card count is high, time to bet, if it is low, time to seek greener pastures or order a drink and bet the minimum for awhile. Surely any ol schmo can do this, right?

My wife had a weeklong conference in Vegas coming up, and OF COURSE I had to tag along, so I figured between lounging around the pool and playing some 3-6 Texas Hold Em, that I can count me some cards and...........BRING DOWN THE HOUSE....YEEEEAAAAHHHH!

I practiced in my free time for a couple of weeks. It basically is learning how to flip though a deck of cards...or two....as quickly as possible while keeping count in your head. In my own head I got pretty fast!

So I hop the flight to Vegas and take the cab to the MGM Grand. My wife is on the flight behind me because she is flying with her corporate cronies, so I have about an hour or so to burn. I head to the bar and order a drink, play a few round of video poker, and then decide its time to put my plan into action.

I head out to the Casino floor. With my luck it is the Country Music Awards weekend and there are 10-gallon hats everywhere. If there were country music stars around I would not know them anyways, though I did see Jason Alexander playing poker and I shared an elevator with Seth Rogan rambling about $1000 bottles of champagne...gotta love Vegas.

ANYWAYS, I head for a table and plop down just in time for a new shoe to start. A shoe contains (I think) about 10 decks of cards. The deal begins.

And I kid you not, no matter how fast I thought I was out counting, and no matter how fast I was was at flipping cards during practice, I guarantee that the dealer was 10 times faster! The table became a blur of cards, arms, chips, and some annoying heavy drawling country bumpkin roadie who was trying to impress the dealer with all of the country singers that he knew personally.

So while I came in guns-a-blazing and feeling like this , in reality it ended up more feeling like this and that expression on his face? yeah that was pretty much what I felt like after about 20 minutes of sheer terror, in which I had NO idea what the count was, I had NO idea when to bet up, and apparently NO warning system in my head that I should walk away quickly, nay, run away quickly.

All things said and done, I think I lost about 1/2 of my week-long allowance in just over 20 minutes. I quickly decided that my card counting days were behind me and stuck with the pool, Pai Gow Poker, nickle slots and LOTS of watching television in the hotel room to pass the time. Heed this advice, never stay in Vegas for more than a few days tops.

Nevertheless, A salute to Mike Aponte for getting a Ginter card, winning the 2004 Blackjack World Series, and being able to count much fasterer than me!