Total Blaster 1 & 2

A few days ago I came across the pre-Black Friday sales Blowout Cards was doing, and while there was a lot of nice stuff at good prices, what caught my eye was a deal on 20 Total Memorabilia Blasters from 2014. The normal price on this was $400...and they were on sale for $99.11. That's more than I like to spend at one time, but I couldn't pass that up. Each one sold for $20 when new so that's some major savings. And I had very little of the set, too, which meant that in theory most of the cards would not be duplicates. I had only two blasters worth of the set, plus a couple of multi-piece relics I purchased on the secondary market. (Retail finds are usually single piece).

Well, they arrived yesterday and I determined that I was not going to open them up all at once, and spread out the fun, with my target date to finish opening them on January 1st. That came out to 1 box every three days after I did two the first day.

Just for fun, I decided I was going to blog about each box. I have not been posting too much NASCAR stuff lately but this will give me 19 posts between now and January. If I follow through with my plans...I don't always.

I also came up with a way to take better pictures of the cards too. Press Pass was making every insert mirror foil and the depth of the relic pieces make 3 out of 5 cards per pack tough to scan...so photos it is!

Box #1:

 Each pack contains one base card, one parallel and 3 inserts, one of which is guaranteed to be either a relic or an autograph. Most of them are from this insert set, single relic pieces, most of which are tire chunks but there are also cards with firesuit pieces and maybe some other stuff. I only had three base cards going in and the Almirola was one of them.

They go up to 4 relic pieces per card and each version has a different color foil. The silver foil single relic pieces are the most common. this Biffle piece shows quite a bit of cording in the tire as well, something I like to see even if it does mean that it's from well inside the tire instead of the surface that touched the track or the sidewall.
The Acceleration and Hall of Fame placques are mirror foil.

Box #2:

 Oof, a duplicate already, pulling the same Acceleration Brad Keselowski from both boxes. With only one base card per box, I don't think I'll complete the set, even though it's typical Press Pass microscopic 50 cards. I needed the Kurt Busch card shown here.

Now that's a great tire piece! This looks like it's got burn damage from the burnout shown on the card. I love race dated relics, too. I wasn't expecting this card, I forgot this insert was in the set.

And that's box #1 and 2. Future posts in the series will have only one box per, in theory. I'm not really known for my follow through, after all. I'm hoping I pull more of the truck tires from the first Eldora dirt race. I pulled Austin Dillon's from a blaster my brother got for me when the set was new. It's a fairly small insert, I think six or 8 cards, so maybe I will be lucky enough to complete it...or, barring that, I will get closer to it and be able to pick up the missing cards on ebay or COMC or something.