Mailday Monday

I haven't picked up much lately online seeing as I had a card show coming up and then to process afterwards. But I do have a few stragglers from purchases I made a couple of weeks ago that finally came around.

I've been trying to clean up the gaps in my Throwback Thursday cards. I started strong with those but kind of lost interest when the same players were being chosen again and again. The new Living Set kind of solves that problem, but I also liked that the Throwback Thursday cards usually had some kind of unifying theme each week.

The Kris Bryant cards above are from Week 8 of the 2017 edition. The one on the left is the original error version where the photo they used bled into the border. Everybody who ordered the set received all six cards this way. Topps then corrected their mistake and sent everybody the corrected version (above right).

I picked up the correction a while ago, but just recently found the error at a reasonable price. Luckily, the print run is exactly the same (615) so the cost is similar. The other five cards in the sets with errors include Corey Seager, Bryce Harper, Adrian Beltre, Mookie Betts and Francisco Lindor.

 

Fast forward to set #25 from last year and you have this L-shaped Anthony Rizzo. Normally a six-card set, this particular set bumped it up to eight. Each of the four remaining playoff teams were represented twice to spell out ALCS and NLCS. Kris Bryant was the S (still needed) while Clayton Kershaw and Cody Bellinger were the N and C respectively.

ALCS was spelled out by Aaron Judge, Jose Altuve, Didi Gregorius and Carlos Correa.

In my attempt to be a Jose Quintana supercollector (ha!) I added the Gypsy Queen logo swap. The regular card is on the right with just a GQ logo. The swap is on the left with the profile of an old Gypsy woman. Otherwise the card is the same.

Topps reuses the GQ logo on the back of both cards. I think it would have been more interesting to do an actual swap and have had the profile on the back of the regular card.

Another Quintana variation for the collection, this time out of Heritage. The front is the same as the regular card...

...but the back has the "traded" variation. At the bottom of the top white box, the "Acquired" line is present, whereas the original is blank.

Last but not least, the Cubs (and MLB) season started off with a bang. Card #1 for this year's regular season edition of Topps Now is literally from the first pitch of the entire season. Ian Happ teed off on a first pitch home run to get the Cubs off to a great start. What's happened since then has been kind of...meh. Despite being just 7-7, the Cubs already have four(!) Topps Now cards. The others are on their way.

I really like the back this year, very clean. You can't really tell from the scan but they have a rainbow security feature. They are pretty easy to download and print out yourself (though much lower quality) so I'm wondering if Topps ran into some kind of counterfeiting problem with that? Or if they are just anticipating problems with all the Shohei Ohtani cards they are pumping out?