Group Break RECAP: 1998 Topps Stadium Club "The Evens" Hobby Box & 2020 Topps Archives Blaster

This past Saturday, I held another fun and successful group break.  Actually, it was two group breaks in one since I opened the 1998 Stadium Club / 2020 Archives first and then the second break was the first 2020 Topps Stadium Club group break.

For today's recap, I'm only going to focus on the first of the two group breaks - 1998 Stadium Club plus the 2020 Archives blaster.

Let's begin with the highlights of the 1998 Stadium Club box...and I'd be remiss if I didn't start with the little "promise of greatness" paper that was included.

I don't think I've ever opened a box and found something quite like that before.  Makes you wonder how little Topps was trying on previous products though, doesn't it?  Earlier boxes didn't come with a piece of paper promising greatness.

As usual with Stadium Club, you don't buy the set if you aren't interested in base cards.  For most, the magic of Stadium Club is definitely in the interesting photography and I think we had a few neat cards in our box.

Truth be told, I don't think the photography in this particular edition of Stadium Club was as strong as in other years but I do like the base card design overall.  There were a few gems in the set though such as that Sean Berry as a pilot and the Jay Buhner at the wall shot.  On a personal level, I was happy to find a Barry Larkin in the box!

While base cards are the meat and the potatoes of Stadium Club, there's still the side salad in this analogy to show off:  the inserts.

Our box promised a total of five inserts and that's exactly what we got beginning with a pair of 1998 Bowman Rookie Previews (1:12 packs).

I'm not a huge fan of that particular Bowman design so I can't say this insert set excited me all that much.  That said, as a group break host I like to see some of the "smaller" teams get an insert now and then so having the Rockies show up here with the Helton Rookie Preview is a win in my book.

Our next insert set had a much nicer design if you ask me even if the name is kind of dumb:  Playing with Passion.

These are also 1:12 packs so we got our expected pair of cards.

And finally, our true box hit of the break (1:24 packs) - a Stadium Club One of a Kind parallel of Matt Beech of the Phillies.

Congrats to Ben Morris who had the Phillies in this break.  The Beech card is numbered 104/150 on the backside - a fun surprise for me as a host since I had no idea this parallel set was serially numbered.  I feel like serial numbering still wasn't all that common in 1998.  

That does it for the 1998 Stadium Club box but the break isn't over yet!  We also had a blaster of 2020 Archives included in this particular break.  

Each blaster of Archives includes a single 1964 Topps Giant card as a "box topper" of sorts.  Ours was a very nice George Brett card that went out to Jason McQuitty who claimed Kansas City in the break.  I was super happy to see the box topper go out to one of the claimed teams since there were a fair number of teams left unclaimed that I got stuck with!

You've probably seen the base cards from Archives 1000 times by now but here is a single representative from each of the three card designs in this year's base set:

Archives is a rather confusing set this year and it's full of all sorts of short prints, gimmicks, and other shenanigans.  I tried to go through our blaster carefully and pick out anything of note.  From what I could tell, we ended up with two Nickname Posters short prints (Hank Aaron and Mike Trout, hard to argue with those names).

I actually like the poster cards quite a bit as a set...but I don't really like that they are numbered as part of the regular base set.

We also pulled a single 1976 Traded short print, this time of Miguel Cabrera of the Tigers.

The Traded cards are also numbered as part of the base set but they have the 76TT prefix in front of the card number.  That's even worse than the Poster cards!

Finally, we landed three actual inserts - a 1960 All-Star Rookie (1:6 packs), a 1960 Combo (1:6 packs), and a 1955 Bowman Archives (1:7 packs).  

Nothing crazy rare to speak of but still nice to see a whole bunch of different teams get some love out of the Archives blaster.

Overall, I'd say this particular break was a nice success!  It was a relatively inexpensive break and I think that almost every team ended up with a healthy stack of cards (both new and old) which is all I can ask for as a group break host.  The only true bummer is that we didn't pull an autograph in either box but I guess we can't be too greedy!  

I'll have a recap of the second group break from last Saturday up on the blog soon (that one was the 2020 Topps Stadium Club box in which we did find a pair of autographs)!

If you'd like to see me open up all of the boxes (plus the bonus packs which I didn't feature in the group break recap), you can find the video replay here:

Thanks once again to everyone who participated...and if you think you might be interested in a future group break hosted by me I would invite you to join my Facebook page!