The Time That Saturday Was Card Shop Day

I took a trip away from the craziness of the MN State Fair to visit the 2nd location of Three Stars Sportscards in Bloomington, MN. For showing up, a pack of Topps National Baseball Card Day 2018 was mine. For spending $10 on Topps products, I earned the Rhys Hoskins you see above.

I think I will keep Rhys, and I plan on sending Kiermaier to France as part of the next Triple Break / trade with The Card Papoy, but the rest are up for trade.

How did I earn the Rhys? I bought a jumbo hobby pack of Topps Chrome.

Bregman and Bradley are different versions of refractors, Didi and Max are the European representatives in the pack.

I actually pulled a refractor auto! It's a Marlin, though. I have now pulled three autos in packs in 2018, and they've ALL been Marlins. Let's hope that the third time is a charm and it won't happen again.

I always like to dig through the various boxes they put out at the store, scoring this die-cut Bartolo Colon from 1995 Classic.

There was a 3 / $5 auto/relic box, and I found several things to my liking, along with a fair number of cards to add for future trades. The Jesse Crain auto graph is numbered to 99, I think it is a variation because the stained glass is not colored in like the other cards I've seen from that set . . .

There was a stack of oddball box sets, and I picked up three Kraft Singles Sets- 1993, 1994, and 1995. I'm fairly certain I already have the 1994 Puckett, but the others are new to me, and again there's some more trade bait. The sets were all American League only.

National Baseball Card Day (Observed)

I had a floating holiday since New Year's Day was on a Sunday - I decided to finally take it today, and of course I took the opportunity to head over to my local card shop. Finding Clemente above was worth the trip alone!

I missed National Baseball Card Day on Saturday, so I decided to celebrate today! The shop had a quarter box with 2017 Archives, Heritage, Stadium Club and Series 2.

I felt like I had purchased a lot of Archives already, but I still managed to find a decent stack of new to me cards.

Not a big Pedroia fan, but that's an instant classic. Series 2 had several fantastic shots as well.

I snuck in one more vintage card in there - this one had about 5 staples in it at some point, which made it very affordable for me!

My first Topps Silk parallel! There was a box of odds and ends with sigs, parallels and relics, ranging from 2 bucks all the way up to 20.

I found this Park pinstripe relic in the same box. Rumor has it that Park and the Twins might be working on a buyout, which would be understandable given his struggles.

I also purchased a pack of Topps Chrome, which netted me this bonus card, so I guess I didn't miss out on NBCD after all! Did anyone pull a Minnesota Twin in their packs? I think Sano was the only guy this year, maybe Joe Mauer was in the checklist too...