Birthday Card Store Trip Part 1: Packs and Packs and Packs! (And Bowman Draft!)

How did I spend my birthday? After a nice shower, I headed out for a couple nice tacos in the Mission District, then BARTed across the bay to Alameda Cards & Comics.

The store should be called Alameda Comics & Cards, because clearly comics rule this place. There was a limited selection of singles, but a good variety of packs from recent and past releases in baseball, basketball, and football. Plus, they carry non-sport.

I picked up a new January Beckett - birthday surprise: I'm quoted in it again - and a few packs of cards, since I couldn't find any singles worth picking up.

 Hercules! Hercules! Hercules!
.... (and Xena, too!)
wait...

There we go.

 At 3/$1, I grabbed, well, three packs of these Merlin stickers. I believe this set is on my non-sport want list, but building a set from packs can't possibly be easy. The stickers are essentially the same as Panini stickers - about the same size and feel.

Each pack also had a card, somewhere around the '75 Topps Minis size. There are 24 cards in the checklist, and I somehow pulled two cards of Hercules (#1 and #2).  I didn't watch much of Hercules, but I followed Xena, mainly for Gabrielle. I blame my mother.

You can thank all the obsessive 40-something+ women out there who still make tribute videos of this show (seriously - search Xena Gabrielle on YouTube) for that one. But man, my ears hurt from that awful music. I don't think I've ever seen a good fan tribute video of any show. Granted, I don't exactly watch many of them.

Okay, let's get into something more baseball-ish. Not quite baseball, though:

 These were in a clear cello pack. They're not your average everyday Presidential Predictors, though - they have SAMPLE across the back. (Oh, and that ding in the right corner - I dropped the whole pack right before scanning, dangit.)

The three samples came with this checklist card. Note that the seventh card is missing, shown on the checklist on the back as Hilary Clinton, but it's crossed out with a single black line. The card slipped out in very limited quantities (and I don't have one).

But you're not here for Hercules or 3-year-old election spoofs. You want REAL baseball. CURRENT baseball. You want...

new hotness.

So here you go:

 Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects. The card numbers aren't DPP'd like prior years' issues (DPPP?!?!) so there's nothing to ID these from the DPP set (or all DPP non-prospects green?). I don't follow Bowman enough to really know what the heck is going on here. Only two of these in my pack.

 These are numbered BDPP. Three of these in my pack.

 One Chome greeny, Again, nothing to really say what set this is from.

Last, a refractor BDPP of Pratt Maynard. It's nice to pull something other than base cards from a pack! I'll be keeping four of the seven cards in the pack for the type collection (Maynard, Watson, Hope, and Judy). The rest are for trade!

Later today, I'll tell you about the other store.