Checking The Newsreel

 When making a large base set, one of the things to take into account is the type of subsets that you are going to have put within that base set. With football, you can have a big base set just simply from the size of the teams compared to other sports, but beyond that - still can be some interesting itesm to focus on.

As far as those large teams go here you have another of my faves with the 49ers - Joe Montana and Jerry RIce. Doesn't get much better than that. I was too young to really enjoy the Super Bowls of the 80s for the 49ers, but they were still dominant through Montana's run, and he was just fun to watch, even as a kid.

Here we start seeing one of those subsets in this set - the NFL Newsreel cards. I think these are a great idea for a subset. Any time you can add a truly historic aspect to the set, that's a great thing.

It's a great way to provide some of the important high (and low if you want to) points of the year for the sport in general. Be it large games, changes to the league with expansion decisions, or I guess honouring the number of Hall of Fame attendees, great things to put to cardboard for documenting purposes.

I do like the London American Bowl card much better than the Triple Play-esque Berlin version!

This summary looks a lot worse than I think it will end up being - should change once I get out of the Pro Set football stuffs.

If you are still here....I picked up a deck builder box for Magic The Gathering over the holidays which I'll share here too. As my son has gotten into playing and learning, I made him 5 decks (one of each colour to make it simple), and we have played some games. I figured, I might as well build 5 decks of my own to give plenty of options. 

The decks are not specifically meant to be super powerful or anything, more for a variety of cards and gameplay so he can understand the game, but to do this, I needed the basic lands, so why not spend $21 + tax and get a bunch of cards too.

Here is the packaging and contents. For $21, since packs are about $4 each best case, that's $16 for the packs anyway, so you pay $5 for the lands, some extra cards and the box (which is a nice little cardboard box, and one I will use here for sure).

The packs...

Nice that there is 4 different sets in the packs, and two were artwork I didn't have, so those were nice adds. As for opening the two (Core Set 2020 and Ravnica Allegiance)...

Three artifacts in a pack is a great win, even if I already had a copy of each. A decent rare, though not an expensive one.

A similarly unimpressive second pack, but no artifacts either unfortunately.

As for the rest of the cards....the lands (20 of each, though a number of different artworks)...

The other cards, in not particular order...

I will say, they do a decent job of providing a variety, and including a solid rare card for each colour. I am not a fan generally of gold cards, and wouldn't mind them being excluded here - for new players, I don't recommend multi-colour decks, just because it can make the game play and learning a bit more difficult to start.

I used the cards for each colour here as the basis, then pull cards from my traders to round each colour.

These cards do have a couple items which, though not expensive, are nice to me. One being, the first planeswalker card I ever had (even though it isn't a great one), in Chandra, and the second being the Shivan Dragon.

My best friend growing up played red and his deck, if I can remember most of it included 4 Shivan Dragons, 4 Dragon Whelps, 4 Mana Flares, 4 Lightning Bolts, 4 Chain Lightnings, 4 Fire Elementals and I don't remember the rest, but it was a solid deck and a fun one to watch.

If you want to get into Magic on the cheap, these boxes are a good way to go. Even if you have no extra cards to top them up, there is enough here to put together 2-3 solid multi-colour decks. Enough to figure out how much you want to put into it or not, financially.

Oh - and at least I did pick up 3 new artifact cards from the box in addition to the few in the pack...

One of my favourite named newer cards too - Scuttlemutt....hehehe.