Traveling for the Holiday

No, the title doesn't mean that I spent all day on he road heading out of town for Thanksgiving. Fortunately, we are staying close to home and won't have to fight the ridiculous holiday traffic. Instead, the post title refers to the miles I had to travel to find a card shop that was participating in the Topps Holiday Promo this past weekend. Nether of the shops that I consider to be my actual LCS were participating so I figured I wouldn't be able to grab a promo pack. I figured I'd just pick up a few select singles. However, I found myself with a few hours free on Saturday morning so I decided to pack up my youngest daughter and drive about 90 minutes to a shop in Greensboro, NC. I arrived and it turns out the shop shared a building with indoor batting cages. The shop was up front and the cages were down a long hallway. Pretty cool concept!

When I got to the main showcase, I was happy to see the promo poster hanging. I asked and they still had packs so I was in business. The selection of wax was small, hardly anything open for packs and heavy on football, but they did have a few packs of Heritage High Numbers for $5/pack so I grabbed two to meet my $10 purchase requirement. There were several 5000 count boxes stacked on some shelves. Most were labeled 'NFL 2 for $1' but there was one that had baseball in it so I decided to take a look. There wasn't much organization to the box and I wouldn't consider paying $0.50 for most of the contents, but I found a few singles to add to my stack and rounded out my purchase by picking a few out of one of the football boxes(mostly for trading purposes). I made my purchase, got my promo pack and went back to the car for the long drive back home.

There's my underwhelming return on spending three hours in the car. Sadly, the HHN packs didn't have anything worth showing off. No, that's not an excuse to be lazy. There was really nothing good in them. The stack of singles will mostly find their way into trade packages eventually so the Snell on top is all I'll share at this time. The focus of the post is really the promo pack anyway. It contained three cards(chances for SN parallels and/or autos) and an advertisement card.

Apparently, the silver pack promo will make its return when Series One releases. I'm not sure how I feel about the flagship design, but I am looking forward to finding a copy of that Clint Frazier RC.

The back of the ad card actually teases something that interests me. Depending on the specific details of this Home Run Challenge, it could be a real bright spot in the product. I'm envisioning something along the lines of the Predictor card contests in Upper Deck products from back in the day. I really enjoyed those. I hope this ends up being similar.

There are my three base cards. No ugly sweater or turkey parallels to be found in my pack. I suppose the pack was saved by the presence of the Vlad Jr. I was really hoping to find at least one of the actual holiday themed cards in pack since Topps created a Rudolph, a snowman, and a new Santa Claus card for the set, but no such luck. I'll definitely be hitting eBay to try to add those singles. Thanks for reading.