National Baseball Card Day 2016

Yesterday was National Baseball Card Day and I thought it would be a good day to take my boys to the only LCS in my new area.  It is a pretty nice shop aptly named The Baseball Card Shop and has a pretty solid inventory of baseball, football and basketball cards and some oddball stuff as well.  As part of NBBCD, they were giving out a free back of cards and an extra special card if you spent $10 or more on Topps products.  The guys in the shop were nice enough to give each of us a pack and a copy of the special card so I figured I would start by sharing those cards.  Each pack has 6 cards and I was hoping to pull the Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner.  The card guy let me look through the packs as the top card was visible but unluckily no Giants on the top.

The first pack I picked had Bryce Harper on top.  While Bryce isn't having a very good season, he is pretty hot in card circles still.

Some decent star power in pack #1.  Altuve is hitting around 0.360 this year and Trout is having his typical monster year despite his team stinking up the joint.

For my second pack, I picked up one topped by Kyle Schwarber.  I am not really sure why but he is a fairly big name rookie despite being hurt for most of this season.

I was super happy to hit the Posey in this pack, it has a great picture as well in his full catchers gear and mask in hand.

My final pack I picked the super rookie from the hated Dodgers Corey Seager.  While I can't stand the guy based on his team affiliation, I do know he is a really good player.

No luck in pulling a MadBum but getting 1 of my 2 most wanted players in 3 packs of a 50 card set is pretty solid hobby luck.

Oh yeah, the free give away was a Kris Bryant card so we got 3:

I picked up some other stuff at the shop. I got each of my boys 2 packs of the 2016 Topps Series 2 flagship set.  Nothing notable in those packs.

I got myself 2 packs of Chrome...

 I was happy to pull the Samardzija but really nothing else for my collection.  I do have to say that the perspectives set looks amazing in Chrome.  My 9 year old screamed out a "Wow!" when I opened the pack.

I also picked up 2 packs of Ginter...

A couple of Giants in the 2 packs but I had already picked up the team set.

I also got 1 SP in Gomes, an insert of The Numbers Game (an insert set I really like), an insert of the Natural Wonders (an insert set I already bought), a couple minis and a hit!  A Missy Franklin relic.  At first I thought the relic was missing, upon touching it, it looks like it is a piece of her swim cap, pretty cool!

I dug through a couple boxes of 1972 Topps cards and picked up some cards for my set:

 I thought $10 for 25 cards was a solid deal and it inches me closer to the set.  For those of you that have completed this set or are close, any tips on the high numbers?  They are fairly scarce and super costly everywhere I have looked.

Finally I bought a box of 2016 Donruss Optic.  For some reason I was drawn to the product.  Here are the highlights of my box:

I believe there a couple hot boxes in each case where each pack has a numbered parallel in each of the 20 packs and I was lucky enough to get one of those boxes:

The Cueto was my Giants highlight in this group of inserts that are all numbered /299.  It was also cool to score an Ichiro card in this group.

These cards are a little more rare with the top row being /199 and the 6 with the dark blue border being numbered /149.

My two lowest numbered cards were this Jankowski /99 and the Burns /50.  No huge scores on the serial numbered parallels but it was cool to open each pack with some shine and color.

In addition to the numbered parallels, each box promised 2 autos and I was extremely happy with my pulls:

It isn't every day you pull an auto of a Hall of Famer, at least not in the ARPSmith household. This Kaline auto is a great addition to my HOF collection and while a already have one auto of Mr. Tiger in my collection, there is always room for another.  My other auto is a nice blue bordered Rated Rookie auto of Giants outfielder Mac Williamson.  The card is numbered 62/75.  Over all I have to rate this box extremely high and it made my National Baseball Card Day a success.