Spousal Pack Attack

My special lady and I have been a couple for over a decade. About halfway through that time, I got hooked on the cardboard mistress again. My wife's basically been a neutral observer since.. not exactly encouraging my card-collecting habit, but not discouraging it either (apart from, you know, not wanting me to spend obscene amounts of money on cards or accumulate Hoarders-levels of cards upon cards.)

But she has never bought me cards before.  Until today.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad she doesn't come home with unwanted packs of Series One and blasters of stuff I have little interest in like year-old Opening Day and Donruss, making me feign a smile and force out an insincere "Thanks, Baby!" She's not into card collecting, and that's totally cool.

Last night, we went out to a fancy family dinner to celebrate he brother's birthday. I figured the World Series game would be over by the time we got home, but lo and behold it was tied in the 10th, so I turned it on. It ended up being the longest postseason game of all time. I watched the second half of that monster and was exhausted by the time it finally ended. I couldn't imagine being on the East Coast and watching the whole thing from first pitch. My wife watched a couple innings and was asleep on the couch for a couple more before going to bed.

Anyways, she was going to hit the grocery store this morning.. like, early, before I'm up. We got a store coupon for $10 off when you spend $40. So I was thinking cards are a good way to quickly jack up the checkout total. So I gave her a list and some pics of blasters she could grab for me if she needed help getting into the threshold. My top choice was a blaster of 2018 Update, just because I haven't opened any of that yet and wanted to take a look. But she surprised me with hanger packs of Heritage High Numbers and Topps Chrome, both of which were on my list, figuring they'd be likely to have them in stock.

I had this pair of packs waiting for me when I woke up. So after all that unnecessary backstory, let's rip these packs and see if my wife has a magic touch for picking cards, or if it'll just end up being a stack of cards added to my "for trade" boxes.

Here's pack 1 of Chrome.

Pack 2.

Pack 3 gets interesting with a Jose Abreu blue refractor /150 plus a base refractor of Chris Taylor.

The pink refractor pack had another Taylor, plus Tim Beckham and Wil Myers.

So yeah, not an incredible bunch of cards, but a few I could use. Glad to pull a numbered parallel of a guy I kinda collect in the blue Abreu.

Now let's check out the HHN...

I'm not going to show all the base cards, but here are some dudes I collect. Cool. But the what saved the purchase was the inserts...

I dig those Transogram "Collector's Cards" or whatever they call them, and was happy to pull Ichiro. But take a look at that Willie McCovey! I had never even seen any of these before, and was a bit perplexed when I came to it. Turns out it's a 1969 Bazooka All-Time Greats insert, apparently an "SP"-type pull. The cheapest of this one on COMC right now is $38.99, though from looking on eBay, they typically sell for around $15. McCovey is a PC guy for me, it's a pretty sweet pull.

So there you have it. Big thanks to my lovely wife for the cards. A few solid additions for my collection, with the rare McCovey mini being the clear highlight.