Featured Post

The Other Hanger Pack of 2018 Topps

Yesterday, I showed off the first of the two hanger packs of 2018 Topps that I purchased at Wal-Mart.  Today, it's time to dive into the second pack...and then I'll see how close I am to completing the first series of 2018! 

Hanger packs contain a total of 72 cards all stuffed into a single cellophane package for about $10 right now.  All things considered, I found that to be the best deal (even if you don't get a guaranteed manurelic like you do in the $20 blasters).  I don't have much use for manurelics in general, and this year's offer was particularly uninteresting to me.  Thus, it was an easy choice to spend $20 on a pair of hanger packs and end up with about 40 extra cards for the same cost.

So how'd I do?  Well, I can stop the suspense immediately:  no hits of any sort.  That said, I did get some nice cards including an early frontrunner for card of the year:

That Billy Hamilton card is getting a lot of love on the blogs so far - and for good reason.  It's a great image and all the red works particularly well for a Cincinnati Reds card!

Out of the remaining base cards in the pack, two others caught my eye. 

The first being this Joe Mauer which I swear looks like it ought to be a Stadium Club card (and that's a complement to the photo selection for Topps' flagship offering).

The other base card that I liked was this one of James McCann.

Now, the image of McCann isn't all that interesting...but imagine if you were one of those kids in the background?  You'd be forever immortalized on a piece of cardboard.  How cool would that be to open a pack and see yourself in the stands?  For the longest time, it seems like fans in the stands were blurred out or at least made so that you couldn't really make out for 100% certain who someone was.  For the McCann card, there should be no doubt if you happen to know who those couple of kids are.  Pretty cool.

My inserts weren't much to write home about this time (no image variation like in the first hanger pack).  In fact, I would say most of what I've seen out of the 2018 Topps insert selection has been lackluster.  I definitely wish that Topps would cut back on the sheer volume of inserts in this set, I mean, who buys flagship for the inserts anyway?

I did get a nice 1983 Topps throwback insert of Wade Boggs. 

I actually like this set, but at 100 cards in Series 1 alone, there's no way I will consider chasing it.  There is a Barry Larkin card in the set (which is kind of weird when you think about it, but whatever) which I definitely DO WANT - but otherwise I'll probably sit this one out despite it being pretty nice.

The one thing that I got in this hanger pack that I didn't get in the first one was a parallel card.  The parallel was the most common type (rainbow foil) but still, it's cool to pull one I guess.

That pretty much does it for the hanger pack.  Now, the real question is how did I do in terms of base card collation?

***about a 20 minute break here for sorting cards***

Alright, I'm back and wow!  There wasn't a single duplicate base card between the two hanger packs.  Maybe there is something to be said for grabbing packs at the same time from the same "master box" at Wal-Mart.  That's phenomenal, and now I can say that I own 128/350 (~36.5% of the base set).  Not bad at all for only two hanger packs.  Kind of makes me want to go buy a third...


Comments