My First Hobby Box in a Long Time

Happy Father's Day to everyone.  I am up early today because my family get to attend church for the first time in 3 months.  Our church opened back up 2 weeks ago with very limited numbers, so everyone is taking a turn.  It has been strange just watching from a live feed, but things are so different right now.  We cannot do what we did in years past.

Speaking of which, this weekend would have been spent in Peoria.  The Chiefs always seem like they are home for Father's Day.  Our routine usually involves make a stop at both my father and father in law's place on Saturday, then heading north to catch a couple of games.  My son and I did get our baseball fix though.  Instead of going clothes shopping with my wife and daughter, we went to Menards for some landscaping supplies.  We also made a pit stop at the card shop. 

Friday was new release day with Topps Finest, Panini Prizm, and Topps Big League all coming out.  I love Finest and the Panini Prizm parallels, but cannot justify paying over $15 for a single pack.  Big League is more our style.  We choose to go the hobby box route with 18 packs for $45.  I found it odd that the card shop was selling the same box on EBAY for $40 with free shipping.  At any rate, it was good to open a full hobby box.  I am not 100% sure, but I believe the last time I did that was in 2002 or 2003. 

This box had 18 packs with 10 cards per pack.  Jasson Dominguez is not in the set, so no need to hoard this brand.  Hits are hard to come by, but that is not why we bought the box.  The design is great and it was just fun to spend an hour opening and sorting.

 The base cards have a nice clean and crisp design.  We received 5 out of the 8 Cardinals.

 The backs are great.  Vibrant colors with stats from the last 5 years and a short write up.

New this year are the 1 per hobby pack orange parallels.  I believe the blue parallels are in retail blaster boxes.

 Star Caricature Reproductions return this year.  We beat the 1:4 odds by getting 5.

There are quite a few new inserts sets this year.  Defensive Wizards are 1:4.  I was hoping to get the Paul DeJong card, but these 4 are pretty good.

Flipping Out is another new insert set seeded 1:4 packs. These were my son's favorite.

 
Roll Call is also a 1:4 insert set.  That seems to be the norm for Big League.

These were our 2 biggest hits.  The Anderson Rainbow Foil numbered to 100 is 1:38 packs.  The Ballpark Oddities is 1:554.  Not sure why a card of an Orioles outfielder is so hard to pull.

We have not decided if we will complete the 300 card base set.  We received no doubles in the box, but are a little shy of half way with 136 of the base cards.  It should not be a hard set to complete with no short prints or photo variations that I know of.