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Friday, April 26, 2019

Spring Samplings: 2019 Diamond Kings & 2019 Gypsy Queen

This is an odd time in the card-collecting year for me, because products are definitely being released, but I...really don't want to collect most of them. Diamond Kings I usually collect a little bit of and wait til the hobby box reaches an affordable price. Gypsy Queen...since they did away with all their great insert sets, I can't really get into.

Anyway, I had a spare moment, so here's a blaster of '19 DK, and a 'VALUE PACK' of Gypsy Queen. In that order. And I will try and enthuse some character into this, though don't hold me to it.

DK:

Bonus Pack;
HOF Heroes of Mel Ott, a worthy get
Blue-Bordered Parallel of Larry Doby. Photos and filtering look nice this year. Very colorful.
Blue-Bordered parallel of Cionel Perez. Neither of these are numbered, btw.
16- Lou Gehrig Artist's Proof. And neither is this.
Babe Ruth Collection insert of his pitching days in Boston. Nice.

Pack 1-
73- Matt Carpenter. Of course we start with a Cardinal. Of course
109- Steven Duggar. I believe this is a short print.
Team Heroes insert of Christian Yelich. These are very quaint and 80s'-esque.
80 Ichiro. A nice throwback uniform on his DK sunset card.
37- Tony Gwynn

Pack 2-
30- Charlie Keller
205 insert of Max Scherzer...blue foil. NUMBERED TO 25 COPIES. Holy crap. Low-numbered parallel of a future Hall of Famer. Fantastic. Not sure about the odds of pulling one of these, but I am impressed.
HOF Heroes of Ty Cobb
94- Jonathan Davis RC. Not especially the Toronto rookie I was looking for.
52- Garrett Hampson RC

Pack 3-
87- AARON NOLA. Nice
45- Kevin Kramer RC
Masters of the Game of Jacob De Grom. I really like these. These are similarly retro, and they're closer to what DK should be
76- Kyle Wright RC
33- Nolan Ryan

Pack 4-
3- Babe Ruth. Because of course.
112- Yusei Kikuchi IMAGE VARIATION SHORT PRINT. This is my second good pull of the box, and this one's also pretty impressive.
Team Heroes of Shohei Ohtani. I sincerely hope he wasn't the sole Angel in this insert set. You wanna talk about an Angels team hero? It's not Ohtani, that's for sure.
90- David Fletcher RC. It's not him either
48- Johnny Bench. Beautiful shot here.

Pack 5-
61- Kolby Allard RC
19- Joe DiMaggio. Nice
205 insert of Mookie Betts. I do like these.
6- Mel Ott
64- Ryan O'Hearn

Pack 6-
42- Max Scherzer
99- Christin Stewart RC
Squires insert of Jack Flaherty. These are so damn cool that I'm not even bothered that this is a Cardinal.
22- Ted Williams
79- Jacob Nix

Not a bad product. Very retro-oriented, which is a step in the right direction, I think.

Now for the Gypsy Queen:

Pack 1-
170- Lou Trivino. Design isn't bad, but I feel like every year this set gets further and further away from what the original Gypsy Queen sets were
158- Luis Urias RC
26- Dee Gordon
110- Salvador Perez. A lot of the good photos in this set are just of catchers.
239- James McCann. Case in point
43- Josh Rogers RC

Pack 2-
196- Tucker Barnhart. Another really good catcher shot
164- Jake Odorizzi
88- Tyler Mahle
156- Jake Cave
204- Josh Hader MISSING NAMEPLATE VARIATION. Man, the short prints just keep coming.
276- Rowdy Tellez RC

Pack 3-
94- Francisco Lindor
44- Jeimer Candelario
267- Alex Bregman
Fortune Teller insert of Javier Baez
59- Zack Wheeler
156- Javier Baez again!

Green Pack-
22- Ryan Borucki
36- Starling Marte
268- Willy Adames

Very blah set in my opinion. Base set isn't terribly interesting, nor are the inserts. Even the guaranteed green parallels are just border and not a framed parallel or anything.

DK wins here. More likely to get more of that than more of GQ.

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