Mutant Blasters

I picked up a couple of blasters this week, one Goudey, one A&G. Both were weird in their own special way. One frightening, one just odd. I'll add two more data points onto the Dinged Corners Front Loaded Blaster Theory and post some quick recaps with oddities here.

2008 Allen & Ginter blaster:

Base cards - 36/300
Short Prints 4/50
State cards - 4/50
Minis - 6
Mini A&G - 4 (including Schmidt SP)
World Leaders - 1 (The Gambia)

Nothing too special about this box. I got ten cards I needed for the set, I needed all four state cards pulled (yaaay) and I already had all four short prints (boooo). The weirdness came in with the mini cards. Three packs had two minis each in them. Nothing overly special about the mini cards, I just got three bonus minis and beat the odds on pulling A&G backed cards. Since I was gypped out of a mini card in my last box it's just evening things out a bit. I also learned that Gambia it known as THE Gambia, as opposed to a bootleg knockoff Gambia. Accept no substitutes...

2008 Goudey Blaster:

Base cards - 54
Short print base - 1 (Cal Ripken Jr.)
President SP - 1 (George Washington)
'36 Goudey SP - 1 (Matt Holliday)
Sport Royalty SP - (Derek Jeter black back, Tony Gwynn green back)
Mini red - 2 (Tom Seaver, Albert Pujols)
Mini blue - 1 (Clayton Kershaw)
Yankee Stadium Tedium - 2 (Maas & Leyritz, blech)

Another fairly pedestian box with the exception of pulling both Sports Royalty cards in the same pack. That was a nice feeling, as I not only got an extra SP, but they were both real live baseball players to boot. When I looked at them though, I noticed something odd. The back of the Gwynn card was in green ink instead of black and the card stock was darker than the Jeter card. I thought "that's odd" moved on to the next pack and then noticed they were all like that.

Half of each pack in the box was printed on slightly darker card stock than the rest. And I mean very sightly, but just enough to be noticeable. The first 4 cards the pack were light, the rest with the exception of a couple of short prints were dark. This is how red and green back variations were inserted into last year's packs. I thought, oh hell naw, not another goofy parallel. However, I checked my other Goudeys and the only dark back cards I found were a couple of short prints, such as this '36 card of Prince:

I don't know if I managed to catch a box that was packed up right when UD changed the roll of cardboard on the printing press or what, but the thought of another stupid parallel makes me queasy. Topps actually did have a light/dark back variation in their '56 Heritage set but they were mimicing the original set and were nice enough to advertise the fact. The silver lining in all this is if there does happen to be a variation, it's hard enough to tell between the two so that you can just ignore it.