Sampling, pt. 2

So I decided to not be "left out" and purchased a rack pack each of Bowman Platinum and Gypsy Queen on Saturday while at the big red box.  Neither product is one that I'm going to build, but hey if a card or two could be sent to peeps as part of a trade, then the purchase would be worth it.

Let's start with the Bowman Platinum.  4 cards a pack for a little over $3 is quite a bite for the wallet, but the cards do look sharp.  The rack packs come with a trio of purple parallels, with only one of the three players that I pulled being a player that I'd heard of.

I've watched Yelich play a few times this season against the Pirates, and given a year or two could be a decent left fielder for the Marlins.  Both Pederson and Williams are at the AA level for their respective clubs.

I was able to pull a decent card in each of the packs.  My luck with Blue Jay parallels continues with pack #1:

The gold parallels look really nice, and I was happy to pull a Jose Reyes for the Jays collection. 

Pack #2 yielded a refractor of Roman Quinn, plus a couple of New Yorkers that someone might be interested in.  Luis Heredia had a solid season in West Virginia for the Pirates high A team. 

The third pack was the best of the 3, pulling a Jose Fernandez RC and a sapphire reprint card of Giancarlo "Michael" Stanton.  I mistakenly thought it was an autograph card at first, even still it's a nice card to snag.

Let's move on to the Gypsy Queen rack pack.  Similar to the 3 card purple add on in the Platinum pack, the GQ came with a 3 card white framed parallel pack.

To me, these really are beautiful cards.  Maybe the nicest parallel in any of the Topps products this year.  I wonder how Jonathan Niese would feel having to face Frank Robinson and big Cecil Fielder back to back in a lineup? 

The first pack gave me a chuckle, as side by side I found the base and the mini cards of Yu Darvish.

In the 3 packs were a couple of inserts, a Dealing Aces of Roy Halladay and a glove stores of Coco Crisp.

The Halladay card is really sharp, and any card that features an outfielder robbing someone of a home run is always cool.

In the final pack, my luck with autograph pulls recently continued.  At least I remember this guy...

That's a pretty nice signature that John Kruk has.  I only saw a handful of these on the bay, with an interesting range in price ($7 low, $24.99 high).  I'll hang on to this for a bit, see if there's a Phillies fan out there that might want to trade for it.

All in all, some decent packs came from my sampling this weekend.  I may have to try that again sometime.

Thanks for reading, Robert