Last weekend, my wife went on a girls weekend to her hometown of Buffalo, showing the north country locals around and all there is to do when you're in an actual city.
They checked out the new stadium and a couple great restaurants (Buffalo has an endless supply) and several female-centric shops that make my eyes sleepy. On their way back home they stopped at Viddler's, a well-known retro 5-and-dime store outside of the city.
My dearest likes to find me something on her trips without me and this time it actually involved cards, which doesn't happen much at all.
She brought back four of these packs, which I had never seen in my life. I didn't have any idea what was inside. My abilities of perception continue to decrease as I get older so I didn't even see the "modern & vintage" reference on the packs and my mind raced about what weirdness was inside -- Disney characters or odd knock-off dinosaur cards -- OK, I'm making that sound more interesting than what I actually thought. But my expectations were low.
It was only after I opened the first pack a couple days later that I knew what I half-expected: these were repack packs, along the lines of the Fairfield boxes and packs that used to be all over the big-box stores and drug stores and, man, I wish they would return.
So these were fun to open in that exact kind of way -- a bunch of mildly interesting cards, nothing valuable or really "vintage" and some I had, but still a nice rip. (I don't know what she paid for these, it couldn't have been a lot).
This is the first pack, A handful of junk wax central cards plus some mid-1990s cards that always have a chance of being "needs". Overall I didn't have 7 of the 10 cards, which is solid. Calderon is the top-of-the-blog card because these were purchased in Buffalo and Calderon spent a season in Buffalo.
Same sort of stuff in pack 2 and I needed 7 out of 10 here as well. Honestly, not the most exciting subjects, I think I did better with Fairfields.
Pack 3 featured the newest cards of the four packs, the 2020 Heritage J.T. Realmuto and the 2020 Donruss Eugenio Suarez. I have the Realmuto already as well as three others. 6 out of 10 as far as card needs.
Final pack and a mix of highs and lows. The same Cliff Floyd and Alex Gordon cards from Pack 2 show up again. Plus a 1987 Nate Snell with a weird card blemish on his mustache. But the 1987 Dusty Baker is a tiffany parallel that I didn't notice until flipping it on its back. So 5 out of 10 needed here.
The oldest card of this four-pack lot is from 1987, which I refuse to call "vintage".
Looking at the pack wrappers closer, they say "1st edition" and they were issued in 2021. I looked up the 3Bros website and it says that these packs and its inventory is for "the starting collector". So if you go in with that mind-set you'll have more fun with these I think,
It's kind of weird to be excited about adding these cards to my collection when I just had a giveaway involving similar cards. But there are a few here that line up with stuff I don't want to give away. The highlights for me are the 1987 Tiffany, 1993 Stadium Club, the 1994 Topps, and some Upper Deck I shockingly didn't own.
The biggest highlight though is the unexpected gift of cards.
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