I bought an Allen & Ginter blaster a couple of weeks ago.
A&G blasters aren't the duds that other blasters are. First, if you buy them early enough in the set-collecting journey, they yield all kinds of set needs.
Even if you're a few short-prints away from finishing the set, you can buy an A&G blaster without fear of dupe overload because of all the minis. I always find minis for my frankenset out of every A&G blaster.
Until two weeks ago.
My rules for my A&G frankenset are simple and pretty much the same as others. If you're a mini, the only way you're not going to get into the binder is if there is a card that shares your number already in the binder and you're not as good as that one.
So the best ways to make the binder is to be a Hall of Fame legend, be from any team besides the Yankees and Giants, and not be a jerk. Oh, and this is just as important -- be vertical.
It's well-established that I dislike A&G horizontal cards, especially minis. The design doesn't work with them and the image is too small. It's not good and I wish Topps would stop it.
So ...
Here were four of the eight minis that are standard with each blaster:
A&G blasters aren't the duds that other blasters are. First, if you buy them early enough in the set-collecting journey, they yield all kinds of set needs.
Even if you're a few short-prints away from finishing the set, you can buy an A&G blaster without fear of dupe overload because of all the minis. I always find minis for my frankenset out of every A&G blaster.
Until two weeks ago.
My rules for my A&G frankenset are simple and pretty much the same as others. If you're a mini, the only way you're not going to get into the binder is if there is a card that shares your number already in the binder and you're not as good as that one.
So the best ways to make the binder is to be a Hall of Fame legend, be from any team besides the Yankees and Giants, and not be a jerk. Oh, and this is just as important -- be vertical.
It's well-established that I dislike A&G horizontal cards, especially minis. The design doesn't work with them and the image is too small. It's not good and I wish Topps would stop it.
So ...
Here were four of the eight minis that are standard with each blaster:
For the love of cardboard, it's a horizontal hot box.
The only way any of these cards were making it in the binder is if there was an empty slot for their number. In each case the slot was occupied and none of these horizontal even got a sniff.
Ugh.
Another frankenset rule is that insert set minis don't make the binder because they're not included in the 1-350 base set.
So that's two more cards that go into the "is anyone collecting these?" pile.
If you're keeping track, that's six of the eight minis that didn't fit into the collection.
One of the other minis was a vertical card of a ballplayer. But he didn't knock out the card in his spot and it's already been included in a card package, so I won't show it here.
That's seven minis.
The last mini was this one:
The "People On Bicycles" insert set is one of the unannounced inserts in this year's A&G. It's a kind of nice pull out of a blaster.
But it's an insert set and it won't make the franken-binder.
So that's eight mini cards from the blaster and not a single one fits with anything I collect.
That's a first.
And a dud.
A dud A&G blaster. I didn't think it could happen.
Will this horizontal plague ever end?
(P.S.: There are destinations targeted for all the horizontal minis already, so of course the blaster wasn't totally useless).
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