Journey To The Upside Down

Even though I consumed thousands of hours of TV as a kid, the amount of TV I've watched since turning into a young adult has dwindled. A lot of that has to do with how I don't have cable anymore and I only bother watching Netflix. Even then I can go months without renewing my service and be just fine.

But every now and then a show I want to watch slips through the cracks. Enter Stranger Things.

Stranger Things is Netflix's most popular original show to date. The show itself is set in the 80's and is basically everything you loved about Spielberg movies and the overall style of the decade. In true 80's fashion, it even got a card set released by Topps.

Topps is a bit late as this set is about season one of Stranger Things. The season was released back in 2017. This set was released just last week on the first. Guess it took a while for them to work out a licensing agreement?

Granted when I say that this was released last week, I only meant the retail version. The hobby version of this won't be coming out until around Thanksgiving. Works for me. I don't necessarily care for the relics or autographs, and I was a bit intrigued by what the special patch cards could be. So I picked up two blaster boxes. Something I don't do too often for any product.

The blaster boxes for these are pretty unique. Right off the bat you can tell that they're meant to be opened different from other blaster boxes.

Once you open it you're greeted by the pack with the patch card, 10 retail packs, and some styrofoam to help fill up the box bloat. I don't know if it's because of the card stock, wrapper material, ink or the Styrofoam, but there's a strong odor that protrudes from these the minute you open these. The kind that makes me think "is this some old crummy 80's garbage from a swap meat?". Luckily it's not.

There are 100 base cards in the base set. I managed to get 88 of the 100 cards between my two blasters. They all commemorate notable moments of season one.

The cardstocks are reminiscent of older card stocks of the 80's. So much so that I'm kind of sad there's no gum or wax wrappers. The backs offer short blurbs about what was going on in the scene on the front of the card.

The inserts feature one regular subset printed on regular cardstock, and two subsets of stickers. The former being these "Character Cards". I only pulled six here and need 14 more to go.

The first sticker set is an assortment of character stickers. Most of the stickers I pulled in my two blasters were dupes so I only got nine out of the 20 total character stickers.

The second sticker set is a set of "Scene Stickers". I got four out of the 10 total scene stickers.

As far as the patches go I managed to get a Shepard - Hawkins National Laboratory patch.

As well as a Nancy Wheeler - Hawkins High School patch.

If you've been paying attention you can probably tell that this break was heavy on Nancy. That's because one of the blaster was basically a Nancy hot-box. No complaints, but I wanted more Steve and Eleven.

As far as I can tell the hobby version is going to have guaranteed hits like relics (of course) and autographs. Chances are you have better odds of pulling stuff like the "upside down parallel" or printing plates. Neither of which showed up in my break. Apparently you can also pull 1/1 sketch cards. A staple in the non-sport world.

Given how I'm THIS close to completing the base set I will complete it at some point. Maybe after the hobby version comes out and the singles can be had for far cheaper. The inserts might be a bit tougher though.

In the mean time I put up a page for my Stranger Things card wants, as well as some dupes I managed to get in case anyone wants to trade.

If you look at my sidebar you'll notice that I've put up a new section for pages called "Projects". These are all long term projects I'm working on. Right now only the ST set is there, but expect some other page to join it in the near future.

As for the set build, hopefully it goes a lot smoother and quicker than my Star Wars Rebels build did. As far as the "big hits" go, I don't see myself going after much beyond Natalia Dyer or Joe Keery autographs (assuming there are any). Nancy + Steve 4eva.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).