Total Blaster 4

4 NASCAR posts in a row, after a long string of mostly NBA posts. Not really planned it out that way, but that's the way it turned out. I've actually got a rare football post in the pipeline but I've been too busy to write it, even if it is going to be a one card post...

The 4th blaster was a bit of a letdown- 5 cards, 3 of which were duplicates...all of them duplicating a previous blaster. That's Press Pass for you.

The Almirola base, Vickers parallel and Baker insert are all exactly the same as blaster #1. The Danica insert was new, and shows a special paint scheme so that's cool at least. The highlight is the relic, again a tire but this time with some of the lettering from the sidewall. sorry for the crappy picture.

It's got what looks like standard Scotch tape on it, but it doesn't hide the fact that you are getting a large chunk of yellow and some blue border to go along with the standard black rubber from tire pieces. It's probably not tape- but I can't think of what it might be. Perhaps a piece of window tear off that he ran over and it stuck itself to the tire? Doesn't really feel like that so I am just speculating. Yes, I do have a piece of window tear off in my collection.

I'm happy with it, no matter what it is!

I'm also a big fan of both Dillon brothers, they have a lot of talent, which is not really being shown by the sub-par equipment they are getting- but they will never go elsewhere, most likely, as they race for the family team. This is, I believe, only my third or fourth tire relic from the Truck series, also. I also like the low serial number. 

Hopefully the next box will give me more new cards!

Total Blaster 3

Today was the day where I opened the third blaster from the 2014 Total Memorabilia 20-blaster lot I purchased. It was not that great of a blaster, to be honest, but at least it wasn't the last one! It can only get better from here, right?

The good thing is, all five cards were new. The bad thing is, my tire piece is Bowyer, one of my all-time least favorite drivers.

My favorite card here is the Truex. With Dale Jr. out and questions as to if he will ever return, Martin Truex Jr. has stepped into the role of my favorite active driver. The mirror foil aspect takes it down a little bit, but I'm still happy to have it. And even though I am not a Bowyer fan, it gets me closer to completing the set, so there's that. And it means I don't have to spend any actual money to buy a Bowyer card to complete my set. In case it wasn't obvious, that is a goal of mine now that I have these 20 blasters to work through. I thought at first the Kahne red parallel was a duplicate but I was wrong, I had the gold version of the card, which is SN175. I knew I had seen the photo but I didn't remember the foil color I had. Oops. The Elliott Sadler is one of the few non-Cup cards in the set. The Rusty Wallace Hall of Fame Placque is the holofoil parallel.

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.