2014 Topps Series 2: a Blaster, A Hanger, and Eight Packs...er

I went to Target to buy shoelaces (Target does not carry shoelaces, btw), and I came across a slough of Series 2 flagship.  I grabbed a little bit of everything they had.

Let's start with a Hit-ish:

This is the manupatch card that came out of the blaster.  You can't argue with a great photo, over-used as it may be.  There is a Griffey like this floating around out there somewhere, but I'm pretty happy with the other Kid.

Now for what really matters: base cards:

The vast majority of what came out of those packs was close-cropped action shots with a handful of unique poses mixed in.  The printing and photography are both high-quality as usual, but I'd like to see more cards like that one of Parra chunkin' the deuce.  How many rookie cards is Evan Gattis going to get?

That Pujols is gorgeous, no doubt about it; but the real star here is Pence's freaky focus face.

Remember the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? when Christopher Lloyd shed his eyeballs and freaked everybody out with his devilish cartoon-eyes?  And how crazy and pulsing they were as Eddie Valiant (rest in peace) ran over his ass with the steamroller thus securing the fate of Toontown?  He looks like that.  Spoiler alert, by the way.

Cano in his classic Seattle grays, a super fun Justin Maxwell card, and Lorenzo at the wall.  The baserunning action shots average out pretty solid.

The Span and the Harper are real gems.  Check out the blue guy on the Nava card.  Sad catcher is sad. :-(

I rarely pull wacky parallels, but here are some of the gold that popped up.

Super into that orange Wandy.

And the sparkle pinks, of course.  I could take or leave these.  I miss the sparkle blue from 2013 Opening Day.  That was how you do a sparkly insert.  This puce color is just confusing.

Okay, inserts:

These were by far the most prolific.  I ended up with seven (dupes of the Wacha).  They look exactly as you would expect.

These are new and freaking love the fun new design.  That Randy Johnson is one of my favorite pulls of the night.  The backs describe each player's breakout moment in rookie-dom.  Thumbs up.

You've probably heard about these.  The backs are simple, just giving a short description of where each guy was in the standings of that stat.  The design is a bit dry, but so are statistics.  I'd like to see more of them. 

I covered up my code with the back of another code card.  A buddy of mine plays these games, so I'm going to give them to him to spend on in-game Griffey stuff.  Is that even how it works?  Am I close?

Speaking of Griffey.....

Score!  Same old pictures over and over, yeah, but I love the '89 design enough to not care.

So that's it.  I still plan on picking up a hobby box at some point and building the second half of the flagship set, but these have held me over well.

Now, go read the six dozen more of these posts that are probably popping up at this very moment.