Wednesday, October 10, 2018

2018 Panini Chronicles Take 2

Due to time constraints on Monday, I was unable to attend the Mansfield card show, a fairly large show a little bit of a drive away from me that takes place around 1-2 times per month. If you've seen my recap posts from the past trips to the Mansfield show, you know I've had a great time and have done very well there.

Like I said, I wasn't able to go Monday due to not having enough time, but that doesn't mean I completely shut myself out of having cards. After having very good luck in my first Chronicles blaster and picking up another handful of cards from the set at my local card show on Sunday, I found myself taking another trip to Target for not 1 but 2 additional blasters of Chronicles.

The way I figured it was over this weekend, I spent around what I would've spent at the Mansfield show, just not all in one place. Additionally, besides my birthday coming up in a little over a week, I won't be buying many new cards until Black Friday where I'm debating between a trip to the same Mansfield show or taking part in the annual COMC Black Friday Sale.

The first blaster delivered 2 numbered cards, and I was interested to see what the next 2 blaster boxes would bring. Needless to say, they did not disappoint. 

While I love the light purple color that showed up on the scan, this is actually one of the parallel cards I ended up pulling during this 2-blaster break. Granted, it's difficult to get overly excited over Chronicles base parallels, but at least it's a low numbered card (77/99) and a rookie card as well. Plus, the Chronicles base cards from this year are ten times better than last years', so there's definitely something to be said about that.

It seems as if it's pretty easy to get lucky with certain rookies in this set, even if it gets to the point where you pull 2 cards of the same player in 1 pack. While that happened to me in the first blaster with Ozzie Albies, blaster box #2 delivered the same luck, only this time it was with Red Sox 3rd baseman Rafael Devers who I also pulled 2 cards of in 1 pack with those cards being from the Illusions and Phoenix sets.

The early parallel card pulls and landing 2 of the same rookie in 1 pack clearly show how the 2nd Panini Chronicles retail break is similar to the 1st, and the number of veteran cards pulled also help to demonstrate how similar these breaks have been, though only 2 doubles were pulled. This time around, each blaster brought with it 4 veteran cards with the highlights shown above, including my first veterans from each and every one of the 4 subsets shown above.

While the Ohtani cards per box did not stay the same after pulling 2 in the first blaster, I still landed a couple of them in this 2nd Panini Chronicles break. The Status card at the top of this post is from one of my favorite sets in Chronicles, but it's the Classics Ohtani that shows the 2-way player hitting instead of pitching that became my absolute favorite Shohei card pulled.

Even with the purchase of a few revolution cards at Sunday's show, this subset remained duplicate-free until I pulled matching J.P. Crawford cards in the 2nd and 3rd blasters. Regardless, these 2 new boxes also delivered some nice new cards that I need from the 25-card checklist, specifically Ronald Acuña Jr.

And speaking of the future 2018 NL Rookie of the Year.

The baseball card gods sent me a numbered card of Acuña to go with the Revolution card, making this Prizm Hyper parallel my very first card of Ronald Acuña Jr. of the entire Chronicles set. I have to say, I really love the way these Hyper parallels look, especially with the Prizm set design. A testament to what Panini is capable of, you wouldn't necessarily notice right away that this card if unlicensed.

As for the next numbered card, the big names kept on coming as Mike Trout and this Select Aqua parallel was the next numbered card to come my way. Also numbered to 299, the bold color choice for this Mike Trout card is one that I can definitely get behind, even if it is a little bit of an odd choice for a parallel. Although it doesn't do as good a job of covering up the no logos as the Acuña card, it's a numbered card of Mike Trout. There's really not much else I can say.

Well, besides the fact that this wasn't the last numbered card of the box, nor was it the lowest numbered card, and it didn't end up being the last of the big name numbered cards either.

As if pulling numbered cards of Acuña and Trout wasn't enough, the 4th and final numbered card to come my way, proving the theory that numbered cards are about 2 per box, is a Contenders Optic Pink Wave parallel of the 2018 AL Rookie of the Year, Yankees 3rd baseman Miguel Andujar. 

After pulling the Devers Blue Ice parallel in box 1, this becomes the 2nd parallel card I've pulled from the Contenders Optic subset and the 3rd rookie parallel pulled (Devers, Acuña, Andujar).

I really do comprehends that I've probably just had very good luck thus far, but I strongly recommend taking a small gamble with the purchase of a $20 blaster box of 2018 Panini Chronicles if you don't mind the no logos. It definitely wins the award for most improved product of 2018, and it's very easy to make back every penny you spend on it just by selling a couple of the nice rookie cards you pull.

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