Nachos Grande Breaker's Club #1 in 2021 - The Highlights from Boxes 5 and 6

 This past Tuesday saw another fun night of box breaks as part of my ongoing Breaker's Club #1 of 2021.  This week, we ripped a box of 1997 Topps Finest (Series 1) and a brand new box of 2021 Topps Series 1.  

If you don't want things to be spoiled, here's the full break video.  Otherwise, feel free to scroll down and check out the highlights from this past Tuesday!  

We'll start with the highlights from the 1997 Finest set.  

We pulled a number of nice base cards - and every card in this set comes with that protective layer of plastic on it which meant absolutely no card sticking as I went through the packs!  For the 1997 set, the "common" cards are the Bronze cards (shown above).  The one negative to the base cards from our box is that we pulled a TON of duplicates/triplicates and yet we didn't come close to pulling at least one of each Bronze card.  For example, I was hoping to land the Barry Larkin bronze card in this set and it didn't show up in our box at all.  

The next rarest type of card are the Silver cards - seeded 1:4 packs.  In our 24 pack box, we pulled our requisite six Silver cards.  

By and large, I thought we did fairly well with the player selection here as well.  

The rarest base card tier is the Gold tier (seeded 1:24 packs or one per box).  Our lone Gold base card was of Sammy Sosa - again, a pretty nice pull out of the box!

In addition to the base cards, there are a bunch of parallels in the 1997 Finest set.  In fact, the parallels take three forms:  Refractors, Embossed, and Embossed Refractors.

Bronze refractors fall 1:12 packs.  Our box was right on the mark, yielding a pair of shiny cards for us.

Marty Cordova and Dave Nilsson...not exactly the best two names on the checklist but I guess we can't win them all!

Now, for the rarer stuff beginning with a one-per-every-other box Silver Refractor!

The Silver Refractors look sharp - and I love the Masters subset so for me this card is a definite winner.  Hopefully Rod needs this one for his collection as it is a fairly rare pull (and he claimed the Padres in this break).

The final two cards of note from this box are both of the Embossed variety.  We pulled one Embossed silver (1:16 packs).  

William VanLandingham - I can honestly say I had never heard of this guy before opening up this box.  At 1:16 packs, it's possible to end up with two Embossed Silver cards but I don't mind that we only found one because our final card of note was another Embossed card...but this time of the much rarer Gold variety!  

That's Jim Edmonds of the Angels and it's a Gold Embossed card (seeded 1:96 packs)!  Notice that the edges on this card are sort of "deckle-edged" - Topps did that I guess to further differentiate the gold embossed cards.  

Overall, collation was an undeniable issue and definitely hurt my overall view of the 1997 Finest box.  On the other hand, I think we did do quite well with our parallels including that 1:96 Gold Embossed card plus the 1:48 Silver Refractor.  

And with that, we've finished the highlights from the 1997 Topps Finest box.  Now, on to the newest box of the entire first Breaker's Club - a box of 2021 Topps (ripped on the day of its release, no less)!

First, a quick look at the base cards:  

By the time I get this post actually up on my blog, you'll probably be sick of looking at 2021 Topps base cards but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least show a few of my favorites.  Honestly, I think the best thing about the base set is the reminder of what a weird (terrible) year 2020 was - we pulled a number of cards that alluded to (or directly referenced) the pandemic.  

If you are someone that likes Topps flagship because it's sort of a history lesson on the previous year's baseball season, well, I think you'll be happy with what Topps did this year.  

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that I kind of think the base design is...ugly.  It's wayyyyyy to "Bowman-y" for me - and in fact, I'm fairly certain I'll be forever mixing up 2021 Topps with the countless years of white bordered Bowman cards that I still don't know how to differentiate without squinting at the tiny copyright numbers on the back of each card.  Also, the player names are annoyingly difficult to read quickly - who thought slanted lines with itty-bitty text was a good idea?

Enough negativity though, it's still the first new cards of the year and even better, it's the first sign that maybe winter will finally be on its way out once again.  Of course, as I say that there are multiple winter storms in the forecast for my hometown so I guess winter's just a cold jerk who won't go away regardless of the release of a set of cardboard pieces with pictures of dudes on them.  

Moving right along...how about a look at the rest of the box's highlights?  

Let's begin with the second most common insert in the box - the 70 Years of Topps set.  

We pulled three from this particular set and all three are quite nice.  I mean, how can you not like pulling a new Nolan Ryan card from a pack today?!

If the 70 Years of Topps are the second most common, then what's the most common insert you ask?  Well, it's the 1986 set!  

We pulled six of those or one for every four packs in the hobby box.  The set is kind of a hodgepodge of current stars, up-and-coming rookies, plus retired legends.  

Looking at the two sets, I think I prefer it when Topps focuses on a single year's worth of reprints - in this case 1986 rather than a reprint set where each card has a different design.  At least there's some level of continuity with the 1986 insert set.

If you buy 2021 Topps, you better like the 1986 design because in addition to the regular insert set, you also get a box topper pack of four sparkly 1986 cards.  In our case, I thought we did exceptionally well with our player selection!  

That Jackie card is beautiful, as is the Trout.  Hard to find two better names on the set's checklist and we got them both in the same four card pack!  I think it'd be pretty cool to build the entire shiny 1986 set...(but don't worry, I'm not going to attempt that myself, I promise).

And finally, one more 1986-inspired card and it happens to be the lone promised hit of the box:  

Yeah, a Rays relic is kind of a yawner but like I said during the video, you don't buy (or at least, you shouldn't buy flagship Topps for the hits).  

The rest of the box yielded four more inserts from a variety of sets.  

That Yadier Molina card bothers me the most because the photo choice was terrible - is he snorting the flag?  Smelling the flag?  Getting smacked in the face by a flag?  I can't tell, but I don't like it.  On the flip side, the Pedro card is die-cut which is kind of fun!  And that Chipper with the all the cacti, I mean...speechless.

Phew, that's a lot of cards...and a lot of scanning...and a lot of typing...but we aren't quite done yet!  Last, but certainly not least, we have our parallels from the box:

The D'arnoaud and the Espinal are both Rainbow foils and are definitely nice and shiny in person.  The Nelson Cruz was our lone Gold parallel (#/2021).  The Griffin Canning is an Orange parallel (#/299) and it definitely looks like it belongs in a Bowman set to me!  Finally, our best parallel was the Vintage Stock parallel of Daniel Johnson (#/99).  Unfortunately, as I noted in the video when we opened the pack, the card does suffer from some paper damage on the back.  

And now we are done with this week's Breaker's Club wrap-up!  Between the two boxes, we ended up with a LOT of cards for me to sort...and now everyone's team stacks are getting quite large (and we are only halfway done with the Breaker's Club)!  It's been a fun ride so far and I'm definitely looking forward to some of the other boxes that we still have on tap to rip.  As for 2021 Topps, I think it's alright on it's own merits but overall it simply looks too much like Bowman for me to get overly excited about it.  I will say that I welcome the return of white borders - but maybe less slanted text, yeah?