At least the base cards I pulled didn't have any retired players

Decided to pick up a blaster of Series 2 today, figured I would check it out and see if I felt like putting the set together.  For me, there were some good things in the blaster, and some that I could do without.

As far as the good goes, there were a few new inserts that I didn't remember pulling from Series 1 packs.  The first is called "A cut above", and is seeded one in every 6 packs:

I sort of beat the odds here and pulled 2 of them in the 10 pack blaster, and lucky for me I received a couple of good players in Kemp and Longoria as well.  One the back is a trait of the players game and a write up on that trait.  For example, Kemp's is durability, and the back goes on to mention how he had the longest streak of consecutive games played which was 365 (guess that was a jinx, huh?)

Another new insert is the "career day" insert, also seeded 1 in 6 packs.  I managed to pull two of these as well:

This to me was also an interesting idea for an insert set.  The Pedroia card was especially informative, as the card spells out his 5 for 5 day on 6/24/10, with 3 HR, 1 2B, a single and a walk with 4 runs scored.  Pretty cool when you can say you're only the 2nd person in MLB history to do that (Jimmie Foxx was the other).

The third new insert that I came across was mound dominance, and the two cards I pulled featured retired stars Gaylord Perry and Bob Gibson.

Same as the career day insert set, only for pitchers.  You get the idea.

There is also a bunch of returning inserts sets as well, including the gold parallel set, the '87 minis, and the other Golden themed sets (Futures, Moments, Standard).

I was lucky enough to pull a Gold Blue Jay for the personal collection, and the minis were decent players as well.

What disappointed me the most here though was the fact that the blaster included 2 full packs (!) of the Wal Mart blue parallels.  I'm not sure why they decided to do this, because now it's just overkill.  I didn't buy any blasters in Series 1, so for all I know they did this then as well.

Topps also brought back the manupatches for Series 2 as well, one per blaster (at least the boxes I saw at Wal Mart said this).   I pulled the Jim Palmer retired number:

All in all, not bad, but nothing earth shattering here as well.  Not that I expected anything earth shattering for $20, but hey, one can always hope.

Any of the cards (save the Henderson Alvarez gold parallel) are available for trade, just send me an email at rmitchell6700 at yahoo etc etc...

Thanks for reading, Robert