Night Owl Cards

  This is the first card I received from 2025 Topps Update. It's a foil parallel of the Miguel Rojas card. I grabbed it in a giveaway on Bluesky. We have to have our World Series heroes in our collection.   I haven't bothered to go looking for Update, I'm pretty much done with that dance. If I'm not thrilled with the design then there's no reason to collect a set with a bunch of filler. I'll just take my team set, thank you. And that arrived today.   Not the most exciting 14 cards, I saw that coming when I reviewed the checklist. There's both good and bad in that.       THE GOOD   Update went wild on relievers this year. I've seen a few mentions of that from other team collectors when they received their team sets. I know the set design make it difficult to read but that's Evan Phillips, Jack Dreyer, Anthony Banda, Blake Treinen, Alex Vesia and Roki Sasaki (not a reliever except in the postseason). No Tanner Scott though, which is kind of funny. ...

   Somehow, I've managed to land nearly 75 percent of the 2025 Topps flagship set. TCDB says I have 516 of the 700 cards.   This is despite making exactly one retail purchase of 2025 Topps the entire year. I bought a blaster back in February when it came out. Nothing since. I've done very well with cutting back on spending for new sets that are merely "meh" to me.   But thanks to a great send of almost the full Series 1 checklist and gifts of hanger boxes and random packs from loved ones, I still have accumulated enough that I'm battling the "go ahead and complete it" whispers in my brain.   But, no, right now I'm treating 2025 Topps like I do all flagship sets that don't inspire me enough -- just get that Dodger team set.   I finished that off with an online purchase that arrived recently. I needed only six Series 2 cards so I've got some dupes to repurpose. Here are those six:   I hate it when the Mookie Betts card is elusive, so that'...

I've mentioned the changes in the checklist and the philosophy of Allen & Ginter a couple of times recently.   People still insist on labeling A&G as "that quirky set where you never know what you're going to get," but those people really aren't paying attention. It's still "that quirky set" but all of the "quirk" is stashed in the inserts and hits now, and that's become more and more the case over the last five years and is especially the case this year.   You had a much better chance of coming across a card of a "bridge" or a "door" in 2008 or 2010 or 2014 than you do now. And the same goes for coming across inventors or Olympic heroes or former presidents. People are still operating off that A&G stereotype, but actually today's A&G, here in 2020, has more in common with other currently released baseball sets than it ever has. It is more of a baseball set than it's ever been.   I'm sure ...