When I was a young sports card collector, I didn’t really “get” the whole Donruss Diamond Kings thing. Diamond Kings was an insert in the Donruss baseball card sets with hand-drawn/painted images of some of the day’s most popular players. I always thought the drawings/paintings looked kinda lame, and the design of the cards was… Read More SportKings, Topps Gallery, and Panini Diamond Kings: Sports cards as art
I haven’t followed baseball all that closely the last several years, but for me there’s nothing quite like the time when the first baseball card sets of a season hit store shelves. There’s an excitement and a freshness that comes with a new baseball season that seems to exceed the excitement and freshness of all… Read More 2021 Topps baseball series 1: A base set to beat all base sets
The number one thing to understand about the sports card collecting hobby at this moment in time is that it’s very difficult to find packs and boxes on the shelves at your normal big-box retail spots, such as Walmart and Target. Anecdotal evidence from across the Internet suggests that stores across the country are haunted… Read More Blast From the Packs: 2020-21 Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey
I wasn’t a pro wrestling fan as a little kid, but at some point in 1997 (I was 15ish), I was at my friend Casey’s house playing the newly released Nintendo 64 game WCW vs. nWo: World Tour. That was and is an absolutely amazing wrestling game to play with friends. We had so much… Read More Blast From the Packs: 2020 WWE Topps Finest
Around the time I started my journey of re-discovery in the world of sports cards in fall of 2020, I was talking to my best friend since childhood, Casey, about collecting. He’s been a lifelong collector of a lot of things: comic books, Magic: The Gathering cards, books, toys, video games, movies, and even sports… Read More The Legend of R.L. Stine’s Shirt: Opening a box of 2020 Topps Allen & Ginter
To be honest, I haven’t followed hockey for several years. When I was younger, I loved the Red Wings. And I followed hockey pretty closely through college, and then into early adulthood. Sometime in the late aughts, I just stopped watching as closely, and I never picked the habit back up. So my knowledge of… Read More Blast From the Packs: Dipping my toes into hockey with Upper Deck and O-Pee-Chee
As the 2020 NFL season draws to a close, I thought back to one of the only current-year football products I opened recently, something I had never even heard of: SAGE Hit football. As part of one of those eBay wax pack grab bags I purchased in the fall, I received this nondescript white cardboard… Read More What did you SAGE? Hit High Series 2020 Football blaster box
When I first started collecting sports cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember when Skybox hit the scene. It was 1990, and Skybox’s parent company, which I now know was a spin-off of a tobacco company’s memorabilia business (strange and yet somehow such a 1980s American story), packaged futuristic looking basketball cards… Read More Blast From the Packs: An up-and-down box of 1990-91 Skybox basketball
I’m just a simple caveman — er, an old-school sports card collector who’s re-emerged, as though frozen in ice these last 25 years or so, into a hobby that bears little resemblance to the one I left as a high schooler in the late 1990s. Many of the new trends are still, even after a… Read More Blast From the Packs: Panini’s Absolute-ly fine football offering
I’m going back to my roots of reviewing cheap-ass food today because of this little bowl of dehydrated vegetables and chicken (!), noodles, and “flavor packet.” I wouldn’t recommend eating instant noodles on a daily basis or anything, but when (or if) the urge arises, I must say these Maruchan Taste of Asia bowls (99… Read More Shelf-Stable Star: Maruchan Taste of Asia Spicy Miso Ramen
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