Like a Unicorn

 As many of you are no doubt aware, the retail scene for baseball cards has gone nuts during the bubble. So much so that Target has (for now) banned baseball, football and basketball cards from their shelves.

I took this picture back in May but recently the store brought back Pokemon cards. This still applies to the three major sports though.

It wasn't like I was having the best of luck finding baseball cards before COVID-19 really warped reality but this pretty much meant whatever was in the aisle here was going to be limited to gaming cards like Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh!, with the occasional NHL stickers.

But what caught my eye ended up being my first retail purchase of a pack of cards in nearly a year.  A hanger pack of 2021 Parkside National Women's Soccer League trading cards. I'll be the first to admit that I don't really follow the sport of soccer but I do admire women's soccer since it's something the USA and Japanese teams are actually good at and have a solid shot at winning it all. I also thought that this would be a fun opportunity to get to know a whole new sport (to me) and its players.

Here are some of the base cards I pulled. Some of these you might have already seen in my most recent TTM round-up post. I like the design for this set a lot. Very clean and simple, and there's enough real estate for a good clear picture as well as the team's logo and who's on the card. These four in particular represent what I usually expect from soccer cards (based on WCCF cards and others that I've had over the years), shots of players running or in motion with the ball close by.

But I found that there was a lot more variety. There are a smattering of cards that use poses like the Taylor Otto card but you can also find some interview cards like the Lynn Williams card there. Also much like hockey, the goalie cards offer some nice variety too as the Kailen Sheridan shows.

These are the backs. I do think it's clean and neat. I'm not sure what to think about scanning a QR code for statistics, seems a bit like a cop-out. I appreciate it and also think less of it at the same time.

There were also a few parallels and inserts. The two on the top left are foil parallels and my scanner reacted poorly to them, as the inability to read Havana Solaun and Gab(b)y Seiler shows. There was also a black and white parallel of Gina Lewandowski, a "vintage" insert which had different cardstock of Christine Sinclair, a Luminescent insert of Julie Ertz and a Promising Prospects insert of Schuyler (pronounced Skylar) Debree. The Promising Prospects insert is also the red parallel since this was purchased at Target. The retail exclusives still live on folks.

The backs of the special cards above for those who were curious. The parallels at the top don't look any different on the back.

All in all I found this break to be very enlightening and fun. It's always good to see how other sports are doing in general and in the niche world of sports cards. You can find the full checklist if you're curious enough here. It looks as though I missed out on a photo variation short-print and autograph (looks like these are present in other sports cards too now lol), but I'll take what I can get. I've since sent out many of the cards I did happen to pull as TTM requests and a few have come back. Giving me an even bigger opportunity to get into researching the players and this sport.

So that was my first retail break in a long time. With no Topps Utz cards this year I had figured I wouldn't be getting any sports cards via packs this year, but life has a funny way of working out.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care.