Group Break Recap: 2021 Bowman Platinum

Our second (of three) boxes in this week's group break was a retail blaster of 2021 Bowman Platinum.  This particular box promised 7 packs (plus 1 extra pack) with 4 cards per pack.  The retail gimmick here was "4 exclusive ice foil parallel cards inside."  

Let's start with the aforementioned ice foil parallels:

I'll probably never be a huge fan of any Bowman set mostly because I'm not a prospector.  For me, getting cards of guys like Bryce Jarvis and Nick Loftin might be cool in five years but right now I'm just like "who?"  At least we pulled that nice Molina ice foil card - a great score for the Cardinals in the break!

We also found one other parallel - this being a foilboard parallel numbered out of 299 (seeded 1:137 packs)!  With the foilboard parallels being the most common (non-ice foil at least) parallel in the set, I can't help but wonder exactly how many cards Topps produced in Bowman Platinum.  1 in 137 packs is crazy rare for a card for which 299 copies exist...and then multiply that times the total number of cards in the set.  Yikes!  On the bright side, this is a great score for the Cubs in the break!

Our blaster also produced a trio of inserts:

All three of the inserts are kind of cool.  The Renowned Rookies card probably has the classiest design but I'm more partial to the over-the-top "Meteoric" design of the Austin Martin card.  No matter, at least we had more teams represented here which is always nice to see during a group break!

Overall, if I had to collect a Bowman set year-in and year-out, it'd probably be Bowman Platinum.  The cards are suitably shiny and designed nicer than most Bowman stuff (in my opinion).  It was certainly a fun blaster to rip (but with no Reds showing up it was kind of sad for me personally during the group break)!