Sunday, May 5, 2019

Diamond Kings 16 years apart

The same day this brand new Tino Martinez card came in the mail, I picked up a fat pack of 2019 Panini Donruss Diamond Kings.
First off, the Tino is a framed black parallel #'d to 100. I'm a little "meh" on the card, likely because it's him as a Cardinal, but at the end of the day it's a low-numbered Tino that I needed. It's also #875 in my collection.

Onto the 2019 stuff, I was at Target, hoping to find some Bowman. There wasn't any, but I did see some blasters and packs of 2019 Diamond Kings. The fat pack was hanging under a 4.99 price tag.

Except it didn't ring up that way.

It came up as $9.99. Yuck! I did not want to pay that much for 20 Diamond King cards. But I was too lazy to get out of line and go put it back, so I sucked it up and paid for it. I guess the $5 was worth not having to return to the card aisle and start the checkout process over again.
Outside of the price tag, I think the set looks great. Team color designs, and outside of the whole no-logo thing, one of the sharpest sets this year.
I even pulled a Mantle, and felt good about it. It's nice not having Topps shove Mantle down our throats, and it's starting to feel special once again to pull a card of him. Yay, Mantle estate!
I don't care too much about manager cards in general, but it's cool to see some of the old times ones featured in this set.
The framed cards also look really nice.
Here are a couple of the non-base design cards I pulled. All look pretty good, although the Squires card seems out of place with the classic-looking design of the rest of the cards. Still, Jimenez cards are solid pulls these days and he'll go into my box of guys like Soto and Acuna. You know, the ones who are going to pay for my kids' college educations some day.

Outside of the price tag, a really nice set that probably won't get the love it deserves, but it does kick the crap out of 2019 Donruss.


8 comments:

  1. They do look good. Can't wait for them to show up locally. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I give this set kudos for often including the more obscure HoFers that Topps doesn't print dozens of copies of every year.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I love both of these DK sets and have been happy to pick up at least a few Tigers from this year's

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm not big on the DK sets of the last couple of years, but that old Tino sure looks good though, had I been collecting in '03, I probably would have been buying many packs of those.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Even though I like the designs for the most part for recent DK sets I am tired of the exclusive licensing that keeps other brands from using team logos, or at least the dang team names.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh, if something I buy rings up at more than the shelf says, you can bet I'm going to be complaining about it. You didn't need to go back--you could have asked the cashier to change it or complained to customer service. Either way you'll probably have to wait while they check it out, but to me it's worth it.

    Dig that Piazza.

    ReplyDelete
  7. $10 for 20 cards? That's steep. At least you pulled a nice Stanky. The Martinez framed parallel is nice too.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I normally love Diamond Kings for the older players, but this year I am not a huge fan of the design or player selection. Even the inserts have me kind of meh this year.

    ReplyDelete