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.