The first Affordable Group Break of 2021 is in the books. While it was nice having a few weeks off, it was also fun to be back in the saddle and hosting again. To open up the new year we opened two boxes, 1999 Pacific Invincible and 2004 Upper Deck R-Class.
I was excited about featuring this hobby box of 1999 Pacific Invincible. I love Pacific and I've made no bones about it. It's getting harder and harder to find sealed boxes of Pacific product, but rest assured I will continue to buy them as I can find them!
Packs of Invincible only contain 3 cards, 1 base, 1 Sandlot Heroes and 1 Seismic Force. The base cards are really nice and I wouldn't be upset if packs contained 2 more base cards over the inserts.
The base cards feature a small acetate window that features a headshot of the player. The window is integrated into the design of a baseball, complete with stitches on the acetate. Being that packs only contained 1 of these cards some teams were shut out in the base card department...which always sucks, but we have the inserts to still look at.
In the parallel department, our box hit was this Jim Thome Opening Day numbered to 69.
The Sandlot Heroes inserts look much better in hand as all the foil on the front is a silver holofoil. The colors really pop on these. There are two versions for each card, one batting and one fielding.
The other one per pack insert is Seismic Force and like Sandlot Heroes, there are two versions for each card. There were a few players where we pulled both versions, like Frank Thomas.
Flash Point were seeded 1:25 packs and feature a lot of goil foil. As you can see we pulled a Mark McGwire.
Thunder Alley were seeded 1:121 packs so we definitely beat the odds here...too bad it was A-Rod.
I think there were some high expectations for this box of Invincible and I hope everyone that participated was happy with what their team(s) yield. Perhaps I should look for a retail box for a future break?
The second box in the break was a retail box of 2004 Upper Deck R-Class. I wasn't sure how this box would go over, but can you really go wrong with a UD product? While most of the RCs in the set never panned out, the checklist was decent and it had a nice design. As a bonus so to speak, each box was to yield two R-Class jersey cards.
I thought the base cards had a nice, clean design on both the front and back. Perhaps the faint R-Class words running down the face of the card could have been left off.
If you're going to have a jersey card insert it needs to at least have a unique design to keep things fresh. Even by 2004 the whole game-used jersey insert had been done over and over and over, so kudos to UD for at least making these R-Class Jersey cards stand out...if only a bit.
R-Class did yield a good bit of base cards for each team...which is what I was hoping for. I knew I needed a good companion box since the number of cards coming from the Invincible box would be small. Hopefully everyone will be happy with these cards once they are in hand.
I've got just one box on tap for this week and the sign up post will go live on Monday evening, 01/11/21. Thanks again for everyone's support and participation.
