Thursday, December 4, 2025

2018 Topps Opening Day Baseball

No falso advertising here, today we start in on a 2018 Topps Opening Day baseball blaster...


11 packs with 7 cards each, and heading into opening this one, I have 142 of 200 base cards. It may be optimistic, but I'd love to close that missing card gap in half if I could. Knowing my luck, I'll only get a couple new to me base cards, but there are always the Jays and the inserts to help make the opening work, even if the base cards fail me.

I already have one of these in my unopened pack collection, so we do get to open the whole box - so let's knock one pack off today.


A design that has grown on me over the years, "the wave" as it were. Not a great start as these were all dupes, no Jays, no error cards, so me hope for a good pack lies on the insert...

I can get behind that. I must say, the Opening Day insert sets are usually pretty solid affairs, and the team traditions and celebrations theme is a good one. Here documenting the opening day parade for the Reds which has a history stretching over 100 years now - very cool.

Only going to head yp from here - right?

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Better Ending

 Let's wrap these Magic cards up, and not too shabby an ending...


The rare isn't anything special - again, bulk rare and not in my collection, but we do get a few sweet keepers today including the token.

Myr Kinsmith works well in a Myr deck - not sure if those remain a real playable deck to construct, but there are plenty of available cards that you can make one - just don't know how successful a deck it would be.

Dune Mover is...fine. Nothing too great, and the mana cost with ability doesn't make it a very strong card, but it is an artifact and has a home with me now.

That wraps it for these packs, so let's see how we did...


Not too bad - middle of the pack, good number of artifacts with one being a great mythic hit. I'm happy with this one, but glad I got the packs for relatively cheap.

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

A Little SHort

 The second to last pack shows I may have worn out my luck on these Phyrexian packs already.


The token card is a keeper, but Red Sun's Twilight is a bulk rare, so nothing special for it, and nary another artifact card that fits my collection, is to be seen.

There are some good common cards to be had though - Blazing Crascendo is a really good ability card that works with ramping up red and would be a card I would definitely play with. Duress shows up in another print - I know it's been in other sets and seems to keep cycling into recent sets to remain playable in most formats.

Still, not a great collecting pack, but one more tomorrow to maybe end on a high note.

Monday, December 1, 2025

Breakdwon By Colour

Figure we can look at the next pack and see what the breakdown is by colour and which would win from the group. Why? Because I felt like it!


A very black and white pack, but with the rare being from black, and overall solid creatures, I'd give black the win on this pack. If I was playing the colour, definitely a win with this booster.

The artifact showing is alright with the Prism and another token. I like that "back when I played Magic", you just had to make up your own tokens, and there wasn't really a lot of them, so you could just use scraps of papers or coins, and knew what they represented. Now, you could end up with so many different tokens out in a game, you kind of need real representations to know what is what.

May not have won the pack, but I'll take two keepers for the collection. Two more packs to go, and the showing has been really solid so far, definitely a winning purchase regardless of what comes in the last two packs.