Vacation Breaks

I've been on vacation for the last five days in sunny Phoenix, AZ. That's the reason for the lack of updates to the blog. Reality punched me in the face last night when I returned to temperatures in the 20's in Washington DC.

While I was in Phoenix I couldn't resist the urge to check out a Target and Wal-Mart to see what they had. I ended up buying a blaster of 2010 Bowman Platinum Baseball and a 2010 Best of Chrome value pack.

Bowman Platinum Blaster These come with 8 packs for $19.99. I've been seeing some great breaks in the various forums and figured I would give one a try. I really don't like the base cards. They're not chrome stock, just regular cardboard. The cards are flat silver but come off cheap looking to me. The nice thing is that these packs are loaded with prospects and rookies. It gives you a good shot at getting a base rookie or prospect card of many different players. I did end of getting an autographed refractor in my blaster, like many others that I've seen. Mine was Justin Marks of the Oakland A's. You'll see the card design below. I included a base rookie, base USA and the autographed refractor. The scan made the base cards look really dark, sorry for that.




Best of Chrome Value Pack These come with a nice looking 5-card refractor set of Stephen Strasburg, Jason Heyward, Starlin Castro, Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle. You also get 2 Million Card Giveaway Redemption code cards, 5 packs of 2010 Bowman Chrome Baseball retail packs, 5 Topps Chrome Baseball retail packs and 1 2010 Bowman Platinum Baseball hobby pack. All of this will set you back $29.99. I like this assortment. Kudos to Topps for putting a great Christmas gift out there for a young collector at a reasonable price. I would much rather open one of these than a blaster.

I didn't fair so well from these packs. The hobby pack of Bowman Platinum yielded all base cards. The best card from Topps Chrome packs was a Roy Oswalt National Chicle refractor. The Bowman Chrome packs did yield an orange refractor but it was Ryan Dempster. Still pretty nice to hit a refractor that rare from retail.