It’s taken me far too long to scan these. The break Chris (Nachos Grande) did to start off the summer was back at the beginning of June. That tells you what kind of summer I’m having, lol. Chris was busting a couple fun boxes (Bunt, DK and Archives x2), and I thought I’d jump in and grab the Red Sox. My normal hatred for Archives was slightly abaited this year, the designs they brough back aren’t terrible and the checklist was pretty good. I’m also a sucker for Diamond Kings, as most of you know. I can take or leave Bunt, but I will say that you certainly get your bang for the buck out of a box of it (got a whole team set and tons of dupes). It was also a double slot break, with one random team, and I got the Angels. So, let’s see what I got…

You can’t go wrong with a whole bunch of Trout cards. Along with Pujols, they’re obviously the faces of the franchise, and are represented extensively in just about every product. There were a couple other Angels cards, which will inevitably go into an Angels trade stack, but let’s be honest, you just want to see the Trouts.

Here’s a sampling of the 2017 Bunt cards. Most of the team set, a nice Benny rookie card, and a cross section of the inserts. I don’t “get” the “Perspectives” insert, there isn’t much way of an explanation on the back, and the photos are cropped weirdly. Is it supposed to be our perspective of them? The players perspective of the game? A different perspective through photography? I don’t really know. Save the candid photos for Stadium Club please. Also, the “Program” insert is considerably weaker than last year, which I really enjoyed. Speaking of…

Here’s the last of the 2017 inserts, “Infinite”, which I’ve already touched on through a few customs. Chris did pull a nice #/99 green parallel of Drew Pomeranz for me, so that’s nice. He also opened a blaster (if I remember correctly) of 2016 Bunt, which had a weaker design, but also included that really nice “Programs” insert I mentioned.

Up next, some of the cards from Archives. As I mentioned at the top, I don’t mind Archives as much this year. In the past I’ve felt like the material was so flimsy and the designs so recycled that it was nothing more than a cash grab for Topps. This year seemed a little better quality, the card stock is better, the designs are nicer and they even created some minis (see Trout above). 1960, 1982 and 1992 were all pretty safe choices for designs to borrow. No complaints there.

The last card from Archives, and honestly, one of the best looking Benintendi RCs available. Iconic design, bright colors, all good things. Also, my cards from the Diamond Kings box. A bit underwhelming, but understandable given the amount of total cards in the hobby box. I also had most of the team set anyway, with the exception of that Rice “Heritage Collection” insert, so checking that off the checklist was a big help.

Before I show the big hit of the break, I also wanted to thank Chris, not only for the break itself, but for including a good number of “bonus” cards in everyone’s boxes. He filled priority mail boxes to the gills with extra cards from his collection. Spring cleaning for him, bonus cards for us. Win-win.

I don’t know if he did it on purpose, or if was merely a conincidence, but included along side the 2017 Archives were actual 1982 and 1992 cards. It’s fun to see some originals along with their contemporary reproductions. Also included as some classics: 84, 87, 89, 93 Topps, 93-94 Upper Deck, even a 2000 Skybox Nomar that I don’t think I had.

In May Bowman Mega Boxes were apparently all the rage. I noticed a post on Reddit the other day about how someone “got in” on the Mega Box craze before the price sky-rocketed. I was confused. I had bought two of them with zero fuss.

I checked eBay and sure enough, people are asking $75-100 for these $15 boxes.

I didn’t really get it. What’s was the big deal? I literally opened two of them and there were plenty more at my Target at the time. Then I read about Shohei Otani.

People are apparently hoarding these boxes, looking for the first Bowman cards of the “Japanese Babe Ruth” and asking for crazy money for them. There’s also “Aaron Judge Mania”, which took these boxes from an absurd $100, to north of $200 the last time I checked. These are BLASTERS people.

Like I said, I had two of them, I could have made serious bank. What did I do? I opened them of course, and here are the results…

Right up front, I should be honest, I didn’t get any Otahni cards. I didn’t get any Judge cards either. Otahni was in a sub-set of WBC cards, which were hard to pull in general (although I did get one) and Judge was only in an insert set called ROY Favorites, which is ironic because the cards were produced months ago.

Also, it should be noted that I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to prospect cards. I don’t have guys in Single-A or Double-A on my radar, I don’t really pay attention to the draft, and I really only get interested in the next wave of players when my team needs to fill a spot, or because the media attention is too hard to ignore.

Most of my really valuable rookie cards were complete flukes. So, please, if any of these names stand out as valuable, please let me know, because I have no idea. If I scanned it, it was because I had heard of the player, or it was shiny. I probably missed a few good ones.

Might as well do these alphabetically since that’s how they’re sitting in my scan folder. We’ll do these in chunks and then get into the details in between. Since damn near everything in the box was “special” somehow, there’s a lot to scan.

That’s not a bad group to start off with. You guys liking the image grid? I’m liking the image grid.

The purple and green refractors are actually semi rare. These boxes (and the mojo parallels) are rare to begin with, but with only 5 packs per box and the purples being 1:6, you’re not even supposed to get one. The green are 1:15. So, statistically, with only 10 packs total, I could have pulled one purple, and zero green. As you can see as we go, I did considerably better than that. One box had an entire pack of purple (hot pack?). I ended up with 4 purple, a green and an auto.

As for these, the Benintendi RC was the ONLY card I went into this hoping to pull. Getting a Tyler Austin, Alex Bregman and Gavin Cecchini were icing on the cake. I had vaguely heard of Tyler Beede as well, so I’m assuming that’s a good thing.

Here’s our second group. The Dahl rookies are nice, he had started off red-hot last year but I think he’s come back down to earth. The Mauricio Dubon is probably the best of the group, he’s one of the better prospects in the Brewers system. Chapman cracked the top 100 prospects list. An RC for Fulmer isn’t too bad either.

Pretty solid third group here, as several of these guys are in the most recent “Top 100 prospects” lists. Mitch Keller is #22, Kevin Maitan is #44, Francisco Meija is #16 and Moncada is still ranked as #1.

Wow. I wasn’t expecting an auto. I really wasn’t expecting a Red Sox auto. I most certainly wasn’t expecting a Mojo Refractor auto. That pretty much destroyed the pack odds in these boxes. Not to mention a mojo version of Victor Robles (#5 top prospects) and the Gleybar Torres (#3). Rutherford is another in the top 100 (#45), and the purple mojo is my 3rd from the boxes.

There were also 3 “Talent Pipeline” cards in my boxes. I don’t think the Pipeline insert set was in regular Bowman, so these might have been exclusive to these boxes (someone correct me if I’m wrong). I got all 3 in the parallel mojo packs. The purple refractor also had different odds than the regular purple. It was apparently a 1:18.