Two Boxes of 2025 Allen & Ginter: Diminishing Returns

I almost didn't do it.  As you probably already know, Allen & Ginter is the only new product I buy almost every year - including flagship Topps.  This year, I heard ahead of time that there would only be two "hits" per box.  (Not that "hits" are why I buy ANY product in the first place.)  And that the price would be higher, but you wouldn't get as much out of a box as before.  

So I considered just looking for a base/SP/main inserts set on eBay for less than I'd probably invest in boxes and singles to complete that much.  Hopefully I'd find second copies of my PC guys in base and inserts and maybe luck out and get a "hit" from one of them as well.  Boxes were going for $169 on most major dealer sites. 

But I didn't....

I found boxes at Bergen County Cards in New Jersey for $139 each.  That was only $10 more than last year, so I got two.  Unfortunately, they're sold out right now.

 
Let's tear in!

Have to go straight to the first pack, since there are no box toppers, N43s, or buybacks any more.  Take off points for that at the jump... 

 

First card was a musician dude (no idea).  First card I actually saw was the back of Eddie Murray's Sweet Victory insert.  Nice to start with the Orioles at least.  Forgive the warm incandescent lighting in my new card room.  Nothing is going to look white even though most of this stuff is.

So I tore through the packs and sifted out the base, minis, inserts, and shiny parallels.  (Shiny is getting to be a much bigger thing with Ginter.  Can't say I'm overjoyed about it.)  I won't go through every pack, but will just hit the highlights.  Above are all the base minis, A&G backs, black borders, (most of which will be trade bait) then a new N222, a Light the Night insert, and a chrome Matty mini. (Spoken for.) 

The other insert minis from the first box.  Birds and fish have been done before.  Trust me, I researched it a while ago.  Several states elected Cardinals, so these aren't dupes.

A closer look at the N222 and Chrome Matty.  I wish the 222's had retired players too.

Only pulled one Filigree this time.  Don't know this guy either.

And the Chromes and Silvers are at least one per pack now.  I'm already working on two sets of the Silvers from previous years, so I'm not keeping these.  Just need Bo, Torre, Campaneris, Fisk, Sutter, and Mussina in all forms.  Above are all the Chrome Chromes I pulled.

First hit came about halfway through.  Pretty decent player and non-white swatch.  

Second one was a really nice framed mini auto /25.  But I'm not a Survivor fan, or MTV watcher, so Ms. Fitgerald is not familiar to me.

On to Box #2.
Here are the minis for this box.   Beaches are another well-worn subject.  The Ginter Creative Team is phoning this one in for the most part so far.

 Got three filigrees this time, and two HOF'ers.  That's better.

First hit was a Bellinger bat piece.  This one will go to my Pirate/Yankee friend most likely.

The other hit was the prize of the break...

 

 
BOOM!  Double Rip Card!  And with one of my PC guys on the back!

 And it's #1!

Well, if you've seen my posts on how to deal with Rip Cards, you will know that the above images are AFTER I extracted the minis inside.  Don't use the tabs, slice them along the edges.

These are what I got.  A stained glass Oriole (who I don't know either), and an extended series Yordan #372.

And that's about it.  Pretty standard A&G fare, but missing a few things from years past.  I like the base design just fine, but the reduction in extra stuff just leaves the whole thing a bit lacking.  I'll finish the base, SP's and two regular inserts, but that's about all.

Back On Exhibit, With Two New Additions

The eBay purchase that arrived last week brought my closer to finishing the oldest team set in my collection (by almost 50 years).  Though it will most likely be a while until I get the last one.

You may recall from past posts the photo of the 1909 New York Giants that I got from my Dad several decades ago.  In the early 2000's, I decided to start a project to profile the members of the team.  I printed out biographies of each player pictured, and got reprints of their T206, T205, and a few other cards of the era.  

Then I got my first real one. This team set is the only group of cards that I seek graded copies of.  I have a few other slabbed items for recent set builds, but only because the price was close to what I thought a raw one should be.  Since these are so different and can be easily faked, I figured at least they should be officially authenticated - for whatever that's worth.  The grades I have don't generally approach level 5.  And they aren't all actually graded either.  But I digress...

Here's the whole set (without the two variations).  I'm only after one brand on the back too.

I set up a separate web page for this collection when I was on the Google site.  Unfortunately, the images I used for the full views of each card were lost when Google stopped having decent websites and shut them down.   The new version of this page (linked above and here) has been "under construction" for a long time.  Last week I finally filled in the thumbnail images with the date of purchase.  (The fonts are inconsistent, so I'll have to fix that).   

So before last week's purchase, I was down to four.  Now I'm missing half that number.

 You can guess which one is going to take the longest....

These are the latest additions:

The thumbnails on the T205 page are going to be linked to the images like these for all the cards I have.  For the moment, these are the only two that are.  I have to reshoot the others. 

Mr. Raymond has been very elusive.  He's apparently a decent star of the era, so he's priced above the majority (but way below guys like Cobb and Cy Young).  Ames was just the last of the common guys that finally showed up in a decent specimen for a reasonable price.

So stay tuned for further progress to bring that page up to date.  I hope to get the images done during Easter weekend.

Blog Bat Around: [Overproduction Preferences]

Time to jump into another Bat Around.  This one was perpetuated by three of the all-time top bloggers.  DimeBox Nick started it in 2023 with a post called Junk Is Junk, then Night Owl put a more positive spin on it, and just this month, San Jose Fuji contributed his take.  And that's where I saw it.

All three guys set their lists at six or seven choices.  I've only collected around 15 sets from that era in total.  I've (over)stated many times that I wasn't active with cards back then ('87-'94), and actually skipped everything from '85 to '03.  (Including '84 Fleer update, which I regret now.)  So I have really no nostalgia to go back to when ranking these products.  Instead, I made two lists of the sets that appeal to me (and I completed).  The first was in order of the most to least graphically appealing design.  The other was in order of how memorable it was building the set (many years later), and/or how much of it I still deal with it as far as trading, buying and selling.  Like how some sets I still handle all the time, and others were forgotten once I finished them.  I then combined the two lists to get the rankings you'll see here.  I'll do my Top Ten and a few Honorable Mentions in reverse order.

I could do a supplemental post about how the complete/factory sets have sold on eBay for me in the last year on top of all this.  I'm shocked any of it sold at all, but let me know if you want to hear about how they moved out.

So here we go.

Honorable Mentions - just outside the Top Ten are these sets that I liked but didn't make the cut.  All the rest that aren't shown here somewhere have never had much of any appeal to me.  You'll notice some omissions that are popular elsewhere.  Leave a comment with the ones you expected to see.

1990 & 1994 Leaf

'90 Leaf is one of the more simple but elegant designs.  I didn't own a set until a couple years ago when I bought one at a shop.  Singles of this set are scarce in the wild in my experience.  Again, the history of this set and it's "eliteness" is lost on me.

'94 Leaf is a nice visual with the marble swoosh and foil logo, but it's the opposite of it's '90 counterpart in that singles are all over the place.  It's probably the default set that makes me think "Don't need any of those" the quickest.

1990 Fleer

 I like the look of this one a lot too.  Simple but colorful enough (frames are several different colors), easily readable, with team logos.  I think this was one of my Summer/National week projects in the 2010's where I'd build a set from the OVP era for cheap with Stuart from SR75's help.  Either way, I got the bulk of it from him, so it didn't take long.  The Canadian flavor would be interesting, but I don't think there are any radical differences from the regular one like '77 OPC vs. Topps.

1994 Triple Play

Yep, I'm going outside the Big Six with this list.  Since I'm coming from such a late perspective, everything from this era is basically the same for me.  The Fire Red premiere of TP is over the top, but I like the other two incarnations a lot.  Distinctive logo, nice treatment of the name, and prominent team logos.  Maybe a thin line on top of the name with the postition would have been nice, but these are still cool.  I have no memory of how I built this one, so it falls short.

1988 Topps

Simple graphics with overlapping photos - always a plus.  The minus - everyone's got six tons of this in their extra stuff.  Love the variations.  There's not much more to them when you think about it though.  One of the least represented in the Heritage/Archives/Flagship tribute cycles.

Now the winners:

#10 - 1994 Pacific

I am the King of 1994 Pacific.  SR75 convinced me to buy a huge box of packs back in the summer of 2008.  I opened them all up and sorted them into a few sets.  Still searching for some of the inserts and very elusive checklists.  My extras box has finally shrunk to two rows instead of three.  Quite often I'll trade someone a whole team set at a time.

#9 - 1990 Donruss

Yep, that's right.  I LIKE 1990 Donruss.  The speckle and line design isn't the most fantastic, but it's more about the error quest and all the other peripheral sets that go with these - Aqueous Tests, Bonus MVPs, Grand Slammers, Best of AL & NL, Learning Series, and The Rookies, and Pack border vs. Set borders.  Not to mention the quasi-nostalgia of 2016 Donruss football, that improves the look.  I'm casually after the Master Set - but that doesn't include the "INC" vs. "INC." variants.

#8 - 1993 Stadium Club

I'm not sure which of the first few SC sets I actually have right off the top of my head, but I chose this one to represent the brand in general, really.  The red bar behind the name gives just a little more presence to the text than in the other sets. 

#7 - 1994 Pinnacle

Another fairly simple design, it's just the name badge - cool use of gold on black - and the team in a half circle underneath, that can go unnoticed.  I have memories of building this one for a while.  This set exemplifies the move to more sophisticated designs beyond the junk period.

#6 - 1993 Studio

Love the use of logos for the backgrounds.  Brings the graphical elements to another level.  Making them hat logos is cool too.  Studio is one of those secondary star-only sets, but I think they are consistently more elegant than regular cards.  Portraits can be lame, but Studio makes it classy.

#5 - 1989 Topps

As I mentioned before, I stopped building sets after 1984 until 2003, but I bought two boxes of '89 when they were out just to see what cards were like right then.  (Ironically, I have four wax boxes of '89 in the sale lot that could recreate the experience.)   Surprised these calculated out to be so high on the list since of the ten sets I had for sale, four of them weren't actually complete.  So now I have to trade for some singles, including Pete Rose.  That's points off, but I almost have them all now.

#4 - 1991 Studio

Yep, going there again.  This was the premeire issue of this portrait product.  The black & white gives it more sophistication, and the border color is neutral enough not to draw attention away from the image, but rich enough to be distinctive.

#3 - 1993 Triple Play

This product combines a few of my favorite elements in one.  Black borders, overlapping photos & graphics à la '88, distinctive team logos, and specialty cards (most of which you had to read the back to understand, though).  It's not the most beautiful design, or the most memorable, but there's just something I really like about '93 Triple Play.

#2 - 1987 Donruss

Black borders and big team logos again, and this time, a very balanced design.  I like the gray band of baseballs with the yellow edges, and the varied colors in the name strip.  Even the company logo looks good.  (And kudos to Donruss for consistently putting the year on the front so you don't have to check the back for copyright date.)  I bought my set for like $3 at the LCS that I frequented for decades.  I've finished the matching Leaf set too.  The Opening Day set is even nicer in dark red. 

#1 - 1988 Score

It's not because I'm still trading for the remainder of my original damaged set, or that I had 48 factory sets for sale at the beginning of the year (now down to half that).  But all that contributes.  The color choices are great, and there's six of them.  These just stand out over and above anything else in that year, much less that time period in general.  They're simple enough to blend in with the other sets, but appealing enough to me to set them apart.  '89 was decent, but a downgrade, and Score went to hell after that until 1996.

 

Don't flame me for the ones I left off (and don't especially like), but do leave me comments so I can tally up the votes for those I suspect you'll say.  Let's see if floating letters beats woodgrain, if you know what I mean...

Trading With Myself (Or The World)

Business is good.

Those sets are flying out of here, almost a couple every day or two.  I'm still in disbelief about how 1988-1990 sets are selling so well.  And if you don't know ~ eBay is a lot of work.  This is why I'm only posting a couple times a month.

But anyway, that's not what this post is about.  I finally photographed my last COMC order that I submitted in November 2024, and took delivery of in January.  I was trying to come up with a better way to show over 200 cards, but I ended up just laying them out and taking pictures with minimal glare.  I was only mildly successful at even that.  All the little bar-coded slips are still in each card's sleeve, though I did try to overlap them and crop them out.  But since they're all in penny sleeves, they catch all the reflections they possibly can, sorry.

Since my inventory on COMC is down below 100 cards, my credit balance is way up.  The last batch I submitted was 90% from the storage hoard (the upstairs batch in my house).  They've done well, and I've paid the owner his part, though I haven't cashed out the credit on the site.  I figure since I've paid out the money, I might as well get the cards from the site for myself.  My last order was over 200 cards like I said.  And most of them were around a dollar or less, so there are many more coming back than have gone out.  

  

The Trout above is one of several set hits that I knocked off with this purchase.  Set hits were not the majority of this order, though.

Stupid reflections...

The four 2006 Ginters are set killers.  The Trout is the penultimate 2012, but I still need Harper's rookie too.  Cal is the last one I've been searching for to finish that SP insert - and he's been elusive!  As you can see, the Pacifics are promos, and the first half of that group that I decided to dive into while picking out this order.  Jeffries is the proper Prism version - not the circular type.  And the Dominators and black GQ minis are both rather lifelong quests it seems...

Brett & Brady are the entirety of my football set hits this time.  They are also two of the more elusive finds and set killers.  Favre is a throwback promo from 2005 and Brady kills my 2015 Field Access set.  There have been many attempts at a Stadium-Club-like, unusual photo themed product in recent times, but they never seem to last more than a year or so.  They just keep getting different names.  

Some hockey list hits from a few different decades.  Guy & Mark leave only the big rookies for those two sets (Yzerman & Roy respectively), and Gretzky for the former.  Pretty sure the three '89-90s should kill that set.  The Flames team card is from one of my favorite hockey sets - 2005 Parkhurst.  Still looking for the Leafs and some of the higher number cards which aren't short prints, but are still hard to come by.  The remaining inserts are from Parkhurst of '16-17.  I have more trouble finishing the huge sets of recent years than I do the older ones.  

While I'm working on hockey sets, I always have to get a second batch of the Capitals too.  Many of these complete the team sets either outright or by upgrading the last ones.

  

And finishing out the hockey theme, I updated my list of Manon Rheaume cards that I have and want and looked at a whole lot of her stuff on the site.  Ended up with these that didn't exceed the cost threshold - a couple bucks or less.  Her older stuff is still surprisingly costly.  I suppose she's the only reason that people still look at early 90's off-brand hockey.  She's officially on my player collection list now.  Like Edwin Jackson, and Jordan Addison, it's only on the Database for the moment. 

Let's keep going with the player collections, and I'll save the coolest stuff for the end.  (Sorry about the mammoth image count if you're on a phone or something).  Found a few missing entries from my smaller football PCs.  The Upper Deck on the lower left is Dan LeFevour in the CFL. 

Of course, my biggest football PC is still Priest Holmes.  I found tons of his and had to filter out my take just to the cheap ones.  Had to draw the line at these so I didn't spend all my credit.  Between him and Jordan Addison, I could go all night.  Except for a half dozen "easy" base cards, I've been down to mostly serial numbered and scarce parallels - and mojo hits - for Priest for years.

Now, here's where I really went nuts.  I said I narrowed down my choices for Jordan Addison.  And I really did cut out any regular base cards that I figured I'd get in trade on TCDB.  But I still ended up with all these.  I'm out of control.  Here's a look at some of them close up....

A couple jerseys among them.  Only a few bucks apiece. 

Got these "Keepsake" base and parallels.  Don't even know what they are, except low numbered.  

And there was this silly thing.  

And these are the epitome of the parallel glut that is happening these days.  These are, in fact, different parallels.  The left one is the "Mini Diamond Refractor" version, as opposed to the "Speckle Refractor" on the right.  Come on people, you're really running this stuff into the ground.

Rounding out the player collection theme, here's all the baseball PCs from this order.  Lou Piniella isn't really one of my major guys, but there are so many of his managerial cards out there for less than a buck or so, that I can't help but try to fill them in.  The Pookie Bernstine in the very top left is the eighth one out of his ten total cards.  The only ones left are the gold version of that one and a TCMA.  The MCI Sparky Lyle isn't normally autographed, but at only $3, I couldn't grab it fast enough.  Got a pair each of minor league coach cards and Chrome Anniversary parallels for Gene Tenace at the same time.  The bottom corner Edwin Jackson is a 2010 Printing Plate that was only $8.50 - one of about a dozen cards over $2 on the whole order.

Moving on to fictional beings, Deathlok is my favorite comic character.   The Specialist card finally ends that Marvel set.  The first two cards are the same Captain America cover shot, but vastly different interpretations as far as color.

More sci-fi, but this time the classic stuff.  The last card to finish all the color series of the entire Star Wars set.  I'm also whittling away the 1977 Star Wars stickers - the cheap ones of course - these were all less than a dollar.  I'll be finishing the 1980 Empire Strikes Back set soon too.

And now the bonus for reading all the way to the end.  A few lovely ladies to complete the package.  A strange playing card Sheena Easton - my first musical love, before I heard the sound of metal guitars years later.  A Farrah mini from Golden Age to knock another of the five backs off the list.  A recent Saraya wrestling card - AKA Paige from WWE.   And some colorful images of golf influencer and total smokeshow Paige Spiranac.

Thanks for plowing through all my mediocre images of some cool cards.  As if I needed to add more cards to my overflowing desks, I have yet another order kinda like this one (though not as large) being picked right now and shipment is set for early March.  Stay tuned for that one!

My theory is that I'm basically swapping the cards I sell for all this, so it's really a bargain. It's kinda like trading with myself - or several hundred COMC users all at once!