One pic pack rip – 2008 UD Documentary

I was curious what this product was all about.  Turns out it’s a virtually impossible to put together monstrosity of a set from Upper Deck.  Good thing it was only a buck. 

But it sure beats a massively overpriced pack of cards guaranteed to be damaged, am I right?

Card shop haul

If you follow me on twitter, you would’ve already seen a quick picture taken of my Friday the 13th card shop haul.  You also would’ve seen a snap shot of the outside of my card shop.

My new phone makes it far to easy to take pictures and immediately “twit pic” them – or whatever you want to call it. For those that have yet to jump on the twitter bandwagon, I will continue to post my hauls from the card shop here if for no other reason than to stretch my money a liiiiittle bit further and milk a post or two out of the junk I buy.

I had planned on buying packs of ’09 Sweet Spot all winter long, but the recent 1/1 pull severely messed with those plans.  Not that I don’t appreciate the B.J. Upton autograph, but I figure things can only go down from there.  Kinda stinks, because I really like the base set design this year and had passing thoughts of gradually completing the set.  In time, I suppose I will start to crave to hit-per-pack goodness once again, but for now my collection is shifting gears just a bit.

Since ‘grandpa’ so generously purchased the complete set of 2009 Topps for Joseph III and I’ve peaked early with ’09 Sweet Spot, I was forced to do some soul searching.  What could I possibly go after next?  2008 Sweet Spot came to mind, since I’ve yet to pull anything better than a dual relic from it, but I was in the mood to get more for my money.  I wanted packs, plural.  A couple people had recommended collating Topps flagship in the past, so I figured why not go after the whole she-bang and put together a set of 2009 Topps Update and Highlights?  Surely, Joseph will one day appreciate having every single Topps (base) card produced in the year of his birth.

At seven packs for $10, I picked up a whole bunch of wax to bust:

I thought briefly about picking a single jumbo pack for the same price since autographs and relics are inserted 1:3 (as opposed to one per box for the regular packs), but quick math showed that more smaller packs would yield a higher amount of base cards, and that’s the point of the project.

I also needed a ton of supplies and had been given $10 to put towards the latest issue of Beckett (checklist purposes only – I promise!)  as a late birthday present, so I found myself with an awkward total of, well, less than I wanted to spend.

So just in case there isn’t a relic or autograph in the Topps Update packs (they should bring back “Traded”…) I raided the bargain bin.  Lucky me, it’d been replenished!

2008 Donruss Threads Jose Tabata, #’d 925/975.  It was shiny, I liked it, and I’ve heard of the guy so he must be decent.  The card says “New York (NL)”, but I’m almost positive that this is the same Jose Tabata who was in the Yankees organization before being dealt to Pittsburgh.  The $1 asking price for ‘junk’ autos seems fair.

2008 Donruss Threads Steve Carlton, #’d 15/250.  A hall of famer and a swatch of an old jersey!! I was thrilled to find this in the three-for-two-dollars bin.

2007 Turkey Red, Josh Hamilton.  Another good player, very nice.

2004 Bowman, Clint Nageotte.  I actually don’t like this card much at all, but I’m tired of seeing it every time I scour through the bargain bin.  It’d been the last baseball relic in the box for about a month now, and every time I’d get excited until I saw it and realized it was ‘only’ Clint Nageotte.  So I bought it, and now it’s no longer giving people false hope in the relic bin.  I win… sort of.

I somehow ended up a dollar short of a round bill, so on the way out I grabbed a pack of 2008 UD Documentary.  I’m fairly certain this stuff is pure garbage, but it was a buck and there’s a 1:24 chance of an autograph, so whatever.  In retrospect, I should’ve just picked up another relic or autograph.

Nothing too exciting from this trip, unless cheap relics excite you as much as they do me.