Delivery Time! An EPIC Box from Alaska! (Part IV)

Welcome to the fourth post dedicated to a trade package that recently arrived for me courtesy of David up in Alaska.

For today's post, we begin with a pair of Topps Chipz.

I wasn't wild about the Chipz concept at first but now I have to admit that I kind of like them.  In fact, I could see a fun poker night with the buddies using the Chipz if only there were more border color variations.

I did get two different colors from David - the black chip is actually of Brandon Phillips but there is the Reds' sticker on top of Phillips' face.  I don't think I'll be peeling the sticker for now...but if I were to ever use these Chipz in a real poker game I'd be sure to remove all stickers!

Next, let's take a look at some super shiny Panini cards.  I'm not a huge fan of Panini (actually, I'm not a huge fan of Panini pretending to be a licensed company when they really aren't)...I say embrace the fact that you don't have the ability to show logos much like the old Post Cereal cards.  Why bother faking it, we all know...

Anyhow, I digress.

David sent me a pair of Panini Prizm base cards - or at least I am assuming these are base cards.

I think these win the award for the shiniest patriotic cards of the year 2014.  On the other hand, cutting off Holmberg's hat (in an effort to pretend that Panini could have shown the Reds' logo had they wanted to) only makes it look like the card designer couldn't center an image to save his or her life.  At least the Bruce card shows action without chopping off Bruce's noggin.

David also sent along a Brandon Phillips silver Prizm card.

Since I know nothing about Prizm (I didn't even know the set existed to be honest until David's package arrived), I can't tell you much about this card.  It's quite possible that the silver card is the base card and those patriotic cards above are some sort of parallel.  It's possible they are all parallels and that we are living in a parallel world.

I wonder how many blog hits I'll get now for mentioning parallel world?

The next card is a stark reality check...camouflaged cards.  There's not much more to remind us of the current affairs of the world than a military design.

Despite the war-like connotations, I actually like the look of the shiny camouflaged card a lot!  It's unique (at least in my collection) - and the border seems to add rather than subtract from the overall aesthetic of the card.  I may bash Panini a lot but I'll give them credit for this one...warlike thoughts or not.

While I definitely liked all of the above cards (especially the camo Phillips), it was the next card that is my favorite for this post:

Wow.  What a terrible scan.  Here, let me try taking a photo of the card instead.

Ah, yes.  Much better.  I had to use the Chipz to prop up the card on my laptop...at least this way you also get to see what the back of a Chipz chip looks like!

This particular Barry Larkin card is brand new to my collection (yay!) and it's really nice (and shiny)!  The card is actually the same basic card as this one - but the card number is different.  I'm going to have to do some research into Panini 2012 before writing up a post about this particular Larkin.

David ended up sending me two different Barry Larkin cards for my collection - and both were brand new.  The first one is scanned (and photographed) in this post.

The second one?

Well, you are going to have to wait for at least one more post...  Stay tuned!