Stuff I Bought Chasing Around Looking for Free Trading Cards

OK, I'm still not ripping the free National Trading Card Day card packs (yet, at least) but here's some of the stuff I ended up buying looking for my 'free' baseball cards.

Here's the Hobby shop swag. They didn't have the cards, but I was going to go here anyway. The prize of the entire trip is right here:


The complete oversaturation of jersey cards in the marketplace alled me to pick up a Campy Jersey card for five bucks. Great for me, sad for the Hobby. Can you imagine what this card would go for in the late 90's?

I picked up a pack of this mess so I could get my Trading Card History card of the week. They gave me Josh Beckett, who I already had. D'oh! It wasn't a complete waste as I got maybe the last Andrew card in a Braves uni out of the otherwise awful pack. Compare it to his Topps base cards and see if you can spot the difference!

I also got a pile of cheep Braves. This is my favorite out of the bunch. I really like this '96 Bowman's Best insert set, and I didn't have the Chipper refractor. At least I don't think I do....

Other than that, just some supplies. Now off to Toys R Us.

They had the SuperStar Packs that Chris writes about, but I didn't know what was in them so I chickened out and got a couple of packs instead. The pack of Heritage only netted me a couple of base cards I needed, but the Upper Deck pack had this:

A StarQuest Ultra Rare goldish looking refractor card. Of course, it's retail Upper Deck so Ultra Rare is a misnomer, but hey, it's a nice card. There's a scratch off game on the back, but it's only for kids under 18. Unfortunately they insist in chronological age, not mental for eligability. Here's the impulse buy I talked about in my last post.

Ok, McFarlane figures are hard to scan. Trust me it looks great in person. You can see some decent pictures of it here and here to get the full effect until I get a decent camera.

I also got this scratch off thingy, which I'll probably scratch off sometime tonight. I'm wavering on not opening the packs, so you might get a post showing them off soon.

Well now I kinda feel like a dick

National Trading card Day has come and gone. Joe got screwed, so did Chris. Mark got his though (epic new banner, by the way) and so did Mario. Not sure about Jason though, who is the one who reminded me about the promo in the first place.

Reasons why I feel like a tool tonight: First I didn't know until way after the fact that there was a list of participating locations, at least among hobby shops. If I had known that the only hobby store in Georgia that had the packs was Northlake Stamp and Coin, I could have gone there and skipped the two trips I made to confused hobby shops and the local Toys R Us. They weren't too coordinated either from what I hear from my fellow bloggers, Joe was 0 for 4 with Utah locations and Chris found one who didn't know about it and one who knew about it and never got their shipment. The packs were supposedly given out at games today too, I don't have any confirmation on that though. While others looked everywhere for free cards that never came, the guy who complained about how screwed up the promotion was ended up getting the jackpot.

So I hit the hobby shop and they know nothing about it. No biggie, I got some cool stuff I'll show off tomorrow after I get some sleep. Afterwards I headed over to the Toys R Us to see if they had the packs. I get there and there's a big Opening Day display up front with baseball equipment, various baseball related paraphernalia (did you know they still sold the mini helmet standings board?) and yes, trading cards. I found the Superstar pack from Upper Deck that was listed in that ad I showed you yesterday and it was basically a little box with 75 cards in it and a three card star pack. There was no mention of inserts so I assume it's just base cards. Even with a Teixeira possible in the star pack I passed. There were a few blasters there but I opted for a pack of UD and Heritage instead. An employee told me about the free trading card day, so this store was prepared at least. On the way out of the store something cool caught my eye, so Toys R Us and McFarlane toys were able to get a 10 dollar impulse buy out of me thanks to Trading card day.

So here's the part where I really feel like a dick. I get up to the register and when I'm checking out, the cashier goes back to customer service and gets me not one, but three packs of the free cards. That's right, three. One of each rookie too, so I got a complete set out of the deal. Shaweet. Then I get home and see that my fellow card-addicted brethren ended up driving all over town for no cards. Even more dickishly of me is that I'm not going to open the packs to show them off. I've saved unopened promotional sets since the Wrapper Redemption sets from the mid nineties so these are staying unopened too. Sorry. I registered for a free pack online, so if one arrives rest assured it will be ripped and shared on this blog. That was my National Trading card day, I got a complete set, some cool stuff that I'll show off once I feel like scanning it tomorrow and I got to watch a couple of games to boot. Anyone else out there get (or not get) your free cards?