Birthday Blaster: 2014 Topps Update

My 31st birthday was last Friday the 5th and my 4 month old daughter surprised me with a blaster box of 2014 Topps Update.  Here's the most interesting cards I pulled out of the box.

While I am happy to have a red bordered parallel of an Oriole show up in my box, I wonder what Topps was thinking in the case of picking a photo of Nick Hundley.  Sure it's a fun photo but years from now when I'm flipping through my album of 2014 O's team sets, I won't think that I will think much of Topps "spoiling" the card.  Actually I don't think much of it now.  Surely there is a more "boring" photo they could have used to commemorate Nick's season with the Orioles.

Moving on, I pulled this decent looking insert of the hottest player on the planet.  Not much else to say other than its for trade.

My guaranteed manu-relic happened to be of a player I respect but a team I detest.  I don't need this card so it's for trade.

I guess it's appropriate that the first blaster box that my daughter buys me that I get a pink parallel out of one of the packs.  The particular odds on pulling a pink parallel is 1 in 230 packs.  Upon closer inspection, you can see he's wearing a pink necklace, presumably for Mother's Day. So doing a little bit of research, Elias did pitch 5 innings on Sunday May 11th.  He left in line for the win up 7 to 5 but the bullpen blew the lead.  Any Roenis Elias supercollectors out there need this card?

Here's another one of those pesky red bordered parallels.  Man, there were 20 of those suckers in this box, I would have much rather just had the regular old base cards.  Anyways, I was sad to hear about Taveras crashing his car and passing away.   Drinking and Driving don't mix.

Here's a list of all of my 2014 Topps Update cards I have for trade:

Blue Bordered Parallel: US-118 McHugh, 132 Colvin, 243 Chavez, 266 Smyly, 272 Ellis, 293 Koehler
Red Bordered Parallel: US-35 Stroman, 56 Street, 89 Drew, 113 Taveras, 117 Lackey, 136 Navarro, 144 Rondon, 157 Smith, 163 Santiago, 167 Francoeur, 195 Laird, 225 Avilan, 232 Carroll, 268 Shoemaker, 274 Withrow, 285 Allen, 291 Mcgee, 324 Amarista, 327 Gomes
Red Hot Foil: Us-120 Wolf, 314 Dickerson
Gold Bordered Parallel: US-226 Coghlan
Pink Bordered Parallel: US-220 Elias #d 26/50
1989 Mini Diecut: TM-BB Butler, CG C. Gonzalez,  Vizquel
Fond Farewells: FF-MM McGwire,  PM Molitor, WS Stargell
Future is Now: FN-GP1 Polanco, JA1 Abreu,  OT2 Taveras, NC2 Castellanos, YV1 Ventura, MW1 Wacha
Power Players: PPA-AG Gonzalez, FH Hernandez, GS Stanton, JU Upton, MTR Trout
World Series Heroes: WSH-JP Papelbon
World Series MVP Manu-Relic: WSP-MR Rivera

Continuing Adventures in Retail

This past weekend when I went to the card show, I didn't buy any packs to open when I got home and Chuck and Beardy made the pack ripping itch come back when they busted that box of 2010 Bowman Draft at the dinner table. I ran to Wal-Mart earlier this week and was able to pick up this discounted blaster of 2009 Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee for 12 bucks. Lets see how I did:

Here's a good shot of what the base cards look like. There are several subsets in the regular set. What really surprised me was some of the photography on the cards. There are some really good shots. I'm really digging the horizontal Hamilton card and the Lee card is just an all around interesting picture you don't see all the time.

Here's the 4 inserts I got out of the box. Nothing to special but it's definitely a Cubs fan's dream (or horror depending on their opinion of Soriano). All of these are for trade if anybody is interested.

Here's the best black bordered parallel that I was able to get from the box. It's a nice shot of former Royals Cy Young winner Zack Greinke. I'm really interested to see how he does with the Brew Crew this year when he gets healthy. In my last pack, I pulled this black bordered mini parallel of Hank Blalock. The odds on these minis are definitely not in the collector's favor at a staggering 1 in every 216 packs (1 in every 13 and a half blasters). These are both for trade if anyone is interested.

Overall my impressions of this set are pretty high. It has some good photography and it is printed on real cardboard. The large 600 card set size is a plus for me being a set collector. Its big enough to be a challenge but not too big to make it a burden. The only thing that left me scratching my head was the number of cards per pack. You only get six cards and one of them is a black bordered parallel. Why wouldn't UD have more cards per pack with less packs per blaster. It seems like such a waste of packaging. It would seem more "vintage" if there were more cards in a pack to me. So with perfect collation, it would take 120 packs to build the set (7 and a half blasters) so I'm kind of on the fence right now about completing it. I do vaguely remember seeing some rack packs not too long ago but I might be mistaken. Rack packs are usually a better value in my book but they might be hard for me to find at this point in the game. If anybody knows for sure, please comment below and let me know how many cards were in those.

So my pack itch has been scratched for now, and my interest in building another vintage themed set has been piqued.