Cracking Packs-2021 Topps Heritage

 It's a pretty well known fact that sealed product in the sports cards realm is damn near impossible to find when you go to Walmart and Target.  With the spike in sport card values over the last twelve months, there has been a bigger impetus on the Ebay flippers to go out and buy up all of the available product they find on shelves.  The methods they use to get all this product is an entire blog post on its own, but the main takeaway is that these giant retail chains have started to adapt and make new rules to prevent the jackholes from monopolizing the product and flipping it for three or four times the cost.  My local Target recently enforced a new process in which product is only available at 8am on Fridays on a first come, first served basis.  This week, I tried this out for myself.  My brother and law and I headed over and arrived at about 7:40.  There were already about 16-20 people in line.  Target was organized and had an employee come out and get everyone's name and phone number and put them in a queue, and when it was your turn you'd receive a text message to come in.  When it was our time, we walked up to the cart full of product.  There was a cashier, a manager, and another employee all standing there and enforcing a three products per customer rule.  The only baseball product left was four boxes of Topps Heritage and a bunch of loose Topps Series 1 packs.  There were three boxes of hockey left, and all the basketball and football was gone.  The manager informed us that the first people in line actually got there at 9am the day before, so they waited 23 hours, and wiped out the football and basketball product. 

I don't typically care much for Heritage, but since I spent the time doing this I bought some to rip anyway.  Immediately upon getting home, I started opening packs.  The boxes were blaster boxes, which come with 8 packs and 9 cards per pack.  On my third pack, I pulled a great card.

I'm not going to lie, this is a really cool looking card.  I'm biased because it's autographed, but I like the look of the 1972 set and the on card ink makes it stand out.  Plus, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has one of the highest upsides in all of baseball.  This card could very well be worth more than the $125 or so it's worth now.  At $20 per box, I'd already made the trip worth my while.  I pulled a couple of other interesting cards, including a Christian Yelich used bat memorabilia card and a Yadier Molina silver border chrome card numbered to 572. 

My brother in law bought the other blaster box remaining and ended up with a "hot box", which ended up having a purple chrome card in all eight packs. 

The interesting thing about Topps Heritage is they do have a bunch of quirky inserts with player nicknames, old school jersey variations, etc.  You can only pull most of those from hobby boxes so I think I might look into opening one of those and seeing if I can pull another autograph card.  Maybe a Mike Trout?

Thanks for reading.