The kind of group break I like

I feel like "card Twitter" is always changing.

For a while, my feed turned into one giant classified ad. I went to work trying to turn off retweets and likes from certain followers, as that was usually the culprit of these showing up. I don't mind seeing these once in a while, but a constant barrage of sales, especially from people I don't know, got on my nerves a little.

My new challenge is now group breaks. I feel like every other Twitter post is from some sort of group breaker that I have no interest in following.

I like some forms of group breaking, but most of it isn't for me. I don't like the horror stories of getting zero cards shipped to you if there isn't a big hit. I don't like some of the shady business of cards getting swapped out for others, or something being opened off camera like that one dude did with the mini football helmet. I know the vast majority are good people, but I'm sure there are several who give them all a bad rap.

This is to not criticize those who participate in these sorts of breaks. It's the way many collect, and that is fine. If that's what makes you happy, then by all means.

I recently quote-tweeted one of these stories about group break shadiness saying that this is why I didn't like them, and Colbey from Cardboard Collections aptly pointed out "except my group breaks." Of course not! Here I am talking about what I don't like about these breaks, when I frequently have bought into group breaks hosted by Colbey or Nachos Grande. But to me, those are much, much different. I trust the people running them, and I trust they are running them as collectors and not big hit chasers. You always know what you're getting with these guys.

Colbey famously runs his "affordable group break" every month or so, and you always get every card of your claimed team. Recently, I had the Yankees + random second team in a 1995-ish product break. The second team I drew was the White Sox.

The highlight for me in this break was 1995 Zenith, and easily the best pull was this rookie (but not his true RC, which were in 1993) of Derek Jeter. The card looks amazing and I'm so glad it was pulled from the break.

1995 Summit was a fun part of the break. I've gotten some of these in trades over the years, but never would have found any growing up. I'm guessing they were in hobby shops mostly? They definitely weren't at CVS.

The third product was Sportflix, which was actually a pretty solid looking set in '95.

As I mentioned, my random second team was the White Sox, which I was pretty happy about because I figured Id'd get some decent Frank Thomas cards. Back in 1995, you wanted to pull cards of Thomas, Griffey, and Piazza. Those were the three. And luckily Thomas well represented in each product:

Pretty good!

And a good break. Colbey, I promise I'll stay in your breaks as long as your promise to keep shipping all the cards!

Dimwit Group Break hits - from July!

I received my group break loot from the The Daily Dimwit's July group break in...well, July. But I got it right before I moved, so I didn't post anything about it. I moved 31 days ago, and I'm still using my move to blame my lack of blogging. Impressive.

Out of the 15 promised hits, I snagged two of 'em. Not too bad at all! I scored a cool Posada relic, and a Frankie Cervelli on-card auto. I hadn't been able to get him TTM, so this will do.

I also included a 2009 Topps Unique Jeter. I hadn't heard of this set. The cards were pretty cool. I'm not usually a fan of so much black, but these look pretty striking.

Group Break Loot from The Dimwit

I hadn't joined a group break in a while, so I decided to jump in The Daily Dimwit's March Group Break. He was busting some nices boxes of mid-'00s cards, so I felt like I could pick up some good Yanks from years I didn't collect. I was hoping for a hit too, but I was shut out. No biggie, I still enjoyed my cards. I was also assigned the Expos/Nationals, so I got a few nice Vlads too. Does anyone collect him?

There were a lot of cards, but here are the highlighs:

These are each #'d to 250