Birthday Cards

Last week I celebrated a birthday. My mother-in-law has always been a good gift giver and has supported my cardboard addiction habit collecting over the years as long as I can give her a specific item I want. I usually ask for a pack of 9 pocket pages but this year since she has a Costco membership,  I decided to ask for the 2023 Topps flagship collection. These particular packages are Costco exclusive.

Here's a good shot of the front of the package after I had opened the top lid.  I do like the presentation.  It has the curb appeal.  But man, I think I may have to buy some carbon credits to make up for the amount of cardboard and plastic this package contains.

The main attraction for me is the three packs of The Flagship Collection cards.  More on those later. I was also hopefully going to find an All Aces insert out of the series 1, 2, or Update packs or a Black Gold out of Update.  I got totally shut out on any of those inserts.  I'll spare you all the gory details of the regular packs.  Nothing really earth-shattering or terribly notable except for a select few.  I don't think I could cobble together another batch of oddball Christmas songs right now so consider yourselves off the hook this time.

I did pull this pretty rare card out of one of the Update packs.  I was pretty delighted to pull this card since I really enjoyed watching Seager make Rays, Orioles, Astros, and Diamondbacks pitching look silly this past postseason. I had no I idea that there were even parallels of the much maligned Stars of MLB inserts until this past spring when I pulled this:

This card has not left my desk since I pulled it.  I had some extreeeemely good luck with Series One this year.  I joined Nachos Grande's case break and got the Home Team Advantage Adley and I only opened three hanger boxes and got pulled this gem.  Also the one lose pack a few weeks back that yielded the blue bordered Gunnar. 

Pulling a card from a pack of Cal always makes the hair on my neck stand up whether it is a card I already owned or one I had never seen before.  I might have a crazy idea for this card so we'll see what happens in the future.

So the Trout card is the oversized card and the Alonso is the "companion card".  I'm pretty happy with the Trout since he's a player I kinda collect.  Nothing really special about the Alonso other than the numbering on the back.

So onto the three packs of The Flagship Collection.  I got a couple of cheaters, a two time beater, and a bunch of Mets.  I would say these are the best out of the fifteen cards from the packs.  I was hoping for a Gunnar, Adley, or Grayson.  I'm still happy with Mountcastle though.  These cards are on thick stock.  Think Triple Threads or Tribute base card thickness. The design is decent enough.  One thing I noticed is that the Acuna, Kershaw and the beater were all about a 1/32nd of an inch shorter and slimmer than the other 12 cards.  It doesn't really affect the cards much but I though it was worth noting.

Would I buy a box of these for myself?  Probably not because by now I'd pretty much seen everything I needed to see of the flagship design this year.  (Still looking for All Aces, Black Golds and most Orioles though). Getting this product as a gift was a fun rip  but the value is not quite there for me.  Flagship is produced like crazy right now so the base cards aren't hardly worth much anymore. We're not quite at the level of 1990 Topps but there's a ton of recent years of flagship just gathering dust in the back of most peoples closets.