Group Break Gamblin'

I've talked before about The Iron Lion card shop that I follow on Facebook.  The folks that run the store seem like good people and while I live on the east coast and thus nowhere near their Colorado location, the Iron Lion is able to serve me via their group breaks on Facebook. 

For the most part, I think football breaks are the more popular Iron Lion breaks but I'm not interested in collecting football cards so I always ignore those breaks.  However, they also run a decent amount of baseball breaks but those are (usually) also run like football breaks.  That is to say, they are "hit" oriented and the base cards are basically trash - in fact, they don't even ship base cards unless you specifically ask (I must say, they've always been great to me though and shipped the base for my teams since that's what I'm often most interested in).

Anyhow, all that is to say that I ended up joining a group break that was a pure gamble and way out of my comfort zone! 

First, it was a random team break which makes me super nervous right away.  I don't really collect anything other than Reds cards in terms of "random" stuff and since this was a hit focused break, me getting a hit of a Ray or a Brewer sounded like a bad idea.  Next, the cost was fairly high for what was being broken:  2019 Topps Archives Signature Edition (Retired Players).  It was one case which I believe had 20 boxes in it...with each box containing a single autograph card encased in plastic and that's it.  No base cards to be found here.

I looked over the checklist and saw there were a number of decent autos in the set...plus the real reason I joined, Barry Larkin has an autograph in the set.  Of course, that'd require that I got Reds as my random team...so all I could do was hope.

Unfortunately, the group break gods didn't smile on me with my teams.  I didn't get the Reds (and the guy who did wasn't interested in trading).  Instead, I ended up with two teams - the Tampa Bay Rays and some other team that I forget (but they didn't get anything from the case).  The Rays...just about the worst possible team for me to get in a group break since there are ZERO Rays collectors out there that I know of right now.  But...at least the Rays (somehow) had a hit out of the case so I wasn't completely skunked.

That's a Troy Percival auto #10/10 on the 2009 Topps design (one of my favorite Topps sets from the last couple of decades).  I'm actually quite happy with the card, even if it is definitely not worth the amount I paid to join the break.  It's still much, much better than getting shutout and when you join a group break you know there's an element of gambling involved (it's a big reason why I do "pick your own team" in most of my breaks because at least you can be fairly certain you'll walk away with something from the team you collect).

In the end, I could have done much worse with the break and I think the sheer anticipation and excitement was probably worth the price of admission (well, that and actually getting at least one autograph out of it)!  In fact, I ended up joining in a second "hit-only" group break via the Iron Lion Facebook page just a couple of days ago but the spoils from that break haven't yet arrived.  I can say that the second time around I ended up doing much better despite the fact that the cost to entry was about twice the cost of this Topps Archives break!  You'll have to stay tuned for my haul...at least I promise there's no Rays in that package!