A Final Unpolitical Political Discussion With Box Break

The set was created and designed by Brian Wallos, who is probably better known as the man who created the Bench Warmers sets. Leaf is assisting with distributing the product but they have no other connection to the set.

The checklist is 110-card checklist plus an additional 24 High Number short prints. I was able to nearly complete the set with 105 cards plus one High Number card. I was disappointed considering that I pulled 25 duplicates, not very good collation.  The checklist is broken down in to subsets made up of Base cards, Influencers, Spouses, The Debates, Finalists, Campaign Moments and Future Stars 2020. The High Number short prints are actually considered inserts, not a subset. There is one parallel the “All American” foil cards, which are also different colors so there are parallels of parallels.

There are quite a few inserts and the more commons ones are Candidate Portraits, First Ladies Portraits (Retail only), Trump Under Fire, Road To The White House Letters (Hobby only) as well as a number of relic cards.

One thing that you will notice when you grab a box or pack is that there are no guarantee hits or even insert promises. On top of that there are no insert rates for anything and from what I have heard neither Leaf or Decision 2016 are releasing any info.

On the plus side I have watched a couple of case breaks, as well as my own box break, and it appears that you will pull one hit, 4 Trump Under Fire cards, 4 Candidate Portraits and 2 parallels. It should be noted that there are various parallels and since none are numbered it is difficult to figure out which are rare.

Here are the base cards, including all subsets.

High number short print:

The Candidate Portraits. I like these inserts, there is a First Ladies Portraits insert too but is a retail only insert.

What would the political world be without a daily Trumpism? Why not make an insert based on that? I got a couple of silver, a blue and a gold.

My hit wasn't too bad, a Ted Cruz God Bless America flag patch. It is one of the better ones to pull so I wasn't disappointed. Early versions sold for a pretty good price but I was away on vacation so I didn't get a chance to put mine up on eBay. I still plan to sell it but don't expect as mush as I could have gotten two weeks ago.

 

 

Box Topper with checklist

 

Box Break: 2013-14 Panini Immaculate Basketball

First I would like to thank Tracy Hackler and Panini for holding the contest, otherwise I would have never had the opportunity to open such a top-end box of cards. The box comes in a cool tin, with sleeve, and inside is a velvet-like inner pack which holds the gold colored box.

Each box contains one numbered base card and 5 numbered hits made up of autographs, patches and relics. Some of the top hits are 1/1 Logoman autograph patches, booklet cards, Insignia patches and Game-used Nameplate Nobility patches but the top of the heap, be all-get all hits are the Sneak Peek shoe relics. These Sneak Peek relics contain a large sneaker swatch  of star players like Kyrie Irving, Shaq, LeBron James and Kobe with the cards all numbered to either 1/1 or #/2 and even the cheapest cards are running a couple of hundred with most selling well over $1,000.

One thing to remember though is that these boxes are high-risk/high-reward. If you are lucky you can make out big but if you don’t have a four-leaf clover growing out of your butt you will have buyer’s remorse. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to seem ungrateful, this was a unique experience, and I pulled cards from my two favorite teams but if I paid for the box I would have been disappointed.

 

First up is the Joakim Noah base card Gold Parallel #/10

 

A Kendrick Perkins jumbo relic #/75 from my least favorite team, the OKC Stolen Sonics

 

A Bill Sharman autograph #/99

The card has chipping along the green bottom

 

A Michael Kidd-Gilchrist Sole Of The Game shoe relic #/35

 

A Gary Payton Scorers Club autograph #/49

This card is very cool with the gold auto on black paper

 

Finally, an Alex Len Rookie Patch Autograph redemption

 

I collect Suns and Sonics so I got two cards for my collection, including the amazing Payton autograph. I also got a shoe card, just not the kind I was hoping to pull. So there you go…

Box Break: 2013 Topps UFC Finest

The second half of my box break from last week was a box of 2013 UFC Finest. I am a huge UFC fan so when I do have the cash for a box or two I prefer picking up UFC products and UFC Finest is one of my favorite releases.

Each 2013 UFC Finest master boxes includes two mini boxes with 6 packs each (12 packs total). There are 6 hits, 4 inserts and 12 parallels. I pulled a nice variety of cards, no duplicates (which was nice).

The base cards are clean, most show action shots with a couple of post-win shots.

I pulled 7 Refractors (Not numbered) which have a crackled holographic look. (Mark Hunt, Donald Cerrone, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Joseph Benavidez, Daniel Sarafian, Anthony Njokuani and Ian McCall) 

I pulled 3 Blue Refractors (#/188) including my favorite fighter Ryan Bader. (Brad Pickett, Ryan Bader and Vitor Belfort)

I pulled 2 Gold Refractors (#/88). (Urijah Faber and John Dodson)

 I pulled 4 inserts, two Finest Moments and two Valor inserts
With the Finest I got Jon Jones and a Blue Refractor Cain Velasquez (#/188). 

 

With the Valor inserts I pulled a base Valor Frankie Edgar (Not the Valor 1/1 parallel version) and a Heart Ian McCall (#/88).

 

 A Liz Carmouche 1^st Autograph

A John Dodson Finest Threads Auto-Relic

Two Jumbo Finest Threads Fighter Relics; a base Chan Sung Jung shirt relic and a Blue Refractor (#/188) Rashad Evans shirt relic

Two Jumbo Mat Relics; a base Quinton Jackson mat relic and a Gold Refractor (#/88) Benson Henderson (my second favorite fighter) mat relic.

This was a great box break, I got nice cards of my two favorite fighters, a Blue Refractor Ryan Bader base card and a Gold Refractor Benson Henderson mat relic. This was a nice change from the disappointing 2010 Triple Threads Football box. Each year Topps does a wonderful job with the UFC line and Finest is among my favorite.

Box Break: 2010 Topps Triple Threads

With my tax refund I decided to splurge a bit and bought two boxes of cards from Dave and Adams Card World. I had already decided on a box of 2013 Topps UFC Finest and since they were offering free shipping plus bonus items if I topped $150 I added on a box of 2010 Triple Threads Football, which was on sale for $90. I have always wanted to open a box of Triple Threads but with prices topping $150 (usually more) I wasn’t going to buy in but with this sale price I figured what could go wrong plus I would scratch off another goal of my personal collecting.

Each box contains 2 packs and each packs contains 3 base cards, 2 parallels and a Triple Relic card. So I pulled 6 base cards, 4 parallels and two Triple Relic cards.

I love the base cards, they are well designed and Topps used some nice player images. The backs contain the previous year’s stats and some tidbits about the players. The base cards are #/1350 and there are five parallels; Sepia (#/499), Emerald (#/299), Gold (#/99), Ruby (#/25) and Platinum (1/1). I pulled two Sepia parallels (Kevin Kolb & Ronnie Brown), one Emerald (Calvin Johnson) and one Ruby (Chad Henne).

I also pulled a Ben Tate rookie card, the rookie cards contained an autograph and three relics and they were #/99 or less. There were 7 parallels plus printing plates. Tate spent the past 4 years with the Houston Texans, though he was injured his first year in the league. He is an average backup, never topping 942 yards in his three playing seasons. He is currently an unrestricted free agent and he has made it clear he will not return to the Texans. His name has been rumored with both the Browns and the Falcons.

My second Triple Relic card is a gold (#/27) triple card of Arrelious Benn, Eric Decker and Mike Kafka. The term says “College Face Off”, I had to look in to it to figure out the three players have a Big Ten connection. This card was kind of a kick in the nut, even in 2010 this was a crappy card.

Arrelious Benn was originally drafted by the Buccaneers in 2010, he has a career total of 862 receiving yards, including a whopping 26 yards in 2012. He was traded to the Eagles prior to the 2013 season but was injured and spent the entire year on the IR. His contract will be up this year (March) and his future is uncertain.

Eric Decker was drafted by the Broncos in 2010, he was a little used receiver until Manning showed up in Denver in 2012. In the past two seasons he has 2,352 yards and 24 TDs (he had 718 yards and 9 TDs the previous two years) and now that he is a free agent he is looking to make a nice paycheck off of his two explosive seasons. Rumor is that he is looking for a contract that will pay $10 million a season.

Mike Kafka was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 2010 and since then he has played for 4 teams, signing with his 4^th team (Buccaneers) just last week. Saying he played for 4 teams is a stretch, he has played in a total of 4 games (all for the Eagles in 2011), he has 11 completions for 107 yards, no TDs and 2 interceptions.

I can understand why people are so tough on Triple Threads, the quotes sometimes do not make sense without explanations and the price point is significantly higher than the value that most people will pull. I am not saying that every box needs to be a winner but if you look at what I pulled, it may be about $20-25 worth of card sales while the box costs $90. Could you imagine someone paying $175-200, we are talking a major disparity between cost and value. In the future I will stick with hunting for the singles that I like instead of buying a box, unless I can find a box for $50 or so.

I will cover my 2013 Topps UFC Finest box break next week, to spread the breaks out a bit. The UFC box was significantly better, including nice cards from my two favorite fighters.