What’s Up in the DACW Live Lounge – August 31st

We’re back on track here in the lounge now that the National is firmly in the rear view mirror and all the packaging has been completed. I want to give a final thank you to all who participated again; your participation was phenomenal and goes to show that we’re the #1 breaking site available on the planet.

Going to play a bit of catch-up as I have not wrote about 2016 Topps Strata Baseball. It came out right after the National and from there we burned through 8 cases of it! I would have to say there is a noticeable improvement upon the design of the cards and I have noticed much better relic cards coming out at a more frequent pace. We were lucky enough to pull TWO 1/1 Majestic Authentic Logo relics of Noah Syndergaard and Jacoby Ellsbury respectively. I think those might be some of the sharpest looking cards in the entire set. The Chipper Jones shadowbox and Kyle Schwarber RPA shown further my point on the great relics that are featured. We unfortunately unable to pull the Babe Ruth cut auto but we’re going to keep trying as we will surely open more in the future!

We will keep the Baseball theme rolling as we opened a case of the brand new 2016 Topps The Mint Baseball. This stuff is absolutely amazing. It’s Topps’s newest ultra-high end release that reminds me of Five Star on steroids (no * is needed however). The design is sharp and simple and the checklist really covers the bases featuring Alex Rodriguez autos for the first time in years. But probably the best names were actually in our case and as you can see they’re quite monstrous. Sly Stallone has signed a limited number of Rocky autos for Topps over the years but this one might be the coolest as it feels like an actual part of the set rather than some impossible to hit parallel card. But the real prize is the Vin Scully auto. The iconic announcer for the Dodgers will be calling it a career after this season and him signing in this set makes the auto super cool, not to mention expensive! Some have sold for over 4 figures on the secondhand market. Really nice set can’t wait to crack more of this.

When Panini was announced as the exclusive producer of NFL Football cards it meant that one of my favorite products, Inception Football would cease to exist. However, Panini probably realized how popular of a product it was and made a near carbon copy of it with 2016 Origins Football. I have to admit it was quite satisfying as Panini really did right here as it pretty much got everything down to a tee on what Inception did (including my dreaded “00” cards). Overall, if you loved Inception football you will love Origins and hopefully you’ll pull a sick booklet auto like the Joey Bosa we pulled!

I will award my favorite hit to this spectacular Aaron Ekblad Cup RPA we pulled from what looks like our final 14/15 Cup case break. It took a monster effort from you guys to sell it out and it did not disappoint. It’s a nice way to send off a product that has been very good to us over the past year. The anticipation for 2015/16 Cup Hockey has been growing seemingly since we started the 15/16 season. While I have no information on a release date I can assure you we will be ripping a lot of it here in the Lounge.

The start of 2016 NFL season is just over a week a way, and Sean and I will be bringing some fun promotions to the lounge to commemorate the start of the best time of the year! Be sure to keep an eye out for those and make sure to check out our Instagram page to see all the best hits from our breaks!