Why doesn't mine look like that?!?

 Last month my brother and I made a trip down to North Carolina to visit the Winston Cup Museum, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, and do some shopping at the Lionel store. Although we did do it in one day last year, we decided it was better to break it up in two days and stop overnight in Virginia. (it's a 12 hour trip one way) While we did that this year, we had some time so we visited the Wal-Mart in Woodstock, Virginia. 

Their Wal-Mart was fully stocked! It went off to the right more that I couldn't get in the photo because of the people checking out whose shopping cart you can see in the right side of the photo. 

I have not seen a retail store this well stocked since...maybe ever? Certainly the 1990s glory days. 

My local Wal-Mart usually has on average 3 blasters. Not three different sets...3 total. No space for hanging packs. it's a disgrace compared to this! The rest of the store was fully stocked and clean, too. Not only that, they restocked between Wednesday on the way down and Sunday morning on the way home. My local Wal-Mart has restocked the NASCAR diecast twice...since the pandemic began. That's not an exaggeration unfortunately. 

Walking through this Wal-Mart was actually fun. I wish it wasn't six hours away. 

Of course, I bought some cards. I was saving money on the way down and nearly broke on the way back after the shopping in Carolina, but I still did OK. 

Unfortunately the current state of cards means the pickings were pretty slim, while there were a lot of sets most of them were not sets I particularly like. 

I got my hands on 2023-24 Upper Deck for the first time..

They upped the price and lowered the total number of cards you get in a blaster, which is a disappointment, but the card design is nice. The bottom border is team specific, which I always like. 

I got a blaster of 2021-22 Ice on the way down and liked it so much I got another on the way back. While the base card above isn't all that spectacular, the parallels really make up for it. 

Orange is nice...

gold is nicer...

but Green is spectacular! Unfortunately the green ones are not the most common, that is Gold, but I still pulled 5 of them, with one pack left to open. (I scan an example of each pack before I open them all, and I have not gotten to that yet even though the trip was now two weeks ago)

I do believe I'll be chasing these parallels on COMC. There are other colors that I didn't get, too. (at least not yet)

Both of the above sets I really like. 

Less liked are Metal Universe...

While it is an improvement over the previous two years which were just mirror foil. Upper Deck really doesn't get the concept of Metal Universe. The 1990s Metal sets were some of my all time favorites, which makes the new version even more disappointing. With that said, I WOULD still buy more from this, the 2022-23 set. I KNOW you can't tell from the scan, but this is Marcus Foligno by the way. These look OK in hand and scan better than I expected. There is also a blue parallel I pulled two of but I have not tried scanning yet. 

Then there's Allure, which is Upper Deck's take on Finest/Prizm. I am not really a fan, these cards are chrome, but they are super slippery, even more so than Prizm, which is hard to believe. You can't stack them, you can't sort them with other cards, you can't store them with other cards, and they are completely made up backgrounds, not real photo, which I don't care for. One blaster is enough for me to spend money on. If I got them as gifts I'd be ok with that, but I won't spend my own money on any more of them. 

My favorite part of the set is the Rainbow insert. A 100 card insert, it's available in 9 different color combination, some of which are extremely rare (two different 1 of 1s). I got three different colors and I'm going to show them all here:

Green and Blue, which is Serially numbered. It's on the back, and I somehow managed to miss that it was numbered both the time I got it, when I wrote it into my paper listing, and again when I wrote it into my Excel listing! I only discovered it when I scanned it. 

Yellow and Green, which is my favorite. My two favorite colors, although I prefer green over yellow. 

and finally red and orange. As an added bonus this is my first card of Phillips, I believe. I can definitely see myself chasing these on COMC as well. 

Because I got these at Wal-Mart, there was a NHL Sheild 2005 parallel in every pack. Different places have different parallels, you could only pull this parallel from blasters sold in Wal-Mart. 

Finally, we have WNBA Prizm. 

shown are a base card and the Prizm parallel. 

I really dislike Prizm. I dislike the fact that this is the ONLY set Panini bothers to produce for the WNBA even more. I think that fact actually prevents me from enjoying these cards.  I actually remember seeing these at my local Wal-Mart, but not buying a blaster because I was waiting for the real set. Not knowing that Panini wouldn't bother to produce a real set. I ended up saving myself three dollars, because this blaster was marked down to $17. Like Allure, I wouldn't turn them down as a gift, but I will not spend any more money on Prizm. I did not yet scan the very generic inserts that are pretty much the same in every Prizm set in every sport every year.

I actually skipped over NBA prizm which they had for sale in the Wal-Mart. It is the first time ever, since I began collecting the NBA, that I skipped getting a set on purpose. Now, I'm not saying I would skip it forever, but money was limited and I had to make choices. I don't like Prizm enough to choose that over a second blaster of Ice.

I DID get a couple hanging packs of Chronicles, which has also been dragged down with Panini's obsession with Prizm technology, but I have not scanned the packs yet so I cannot show what I pulled yet. 

Although I have not scanned them yet, I did get a box of the Star Rookie box set as seen in the bottom of the photo leading off the post. It was down low and I was in too much pain to bend down and pick it out, so my brother grabbed one for me. I ended up pulling an autograph, which is one per case! That hopefully will be shared in an upcoming post...

Maybe it's better this Wal-Mart is 6 hours away from me. Because if I lived closer I would certainly end up spending a lot more money on cards than I do currently...