Payday Pack - A Good First Impression

I knew the Astros were going to be a tough opponent, but I still believed the Red Sox could win a short 5 game series against them. A big factor in that belief was the idea of Chris Sale stepping up and pitching like the Cy Young contender he is for 2 of those 5 games - shows what I know, huh?

Hopefully Game 2 will be better, but I'm less confident in their ability to take 3 of the next 4. There are good reasons I don't bet on games...

*****

The card choices locally have started getting scarce. There's still plenty of base set, but a lot of other sets are gone. No Archives, Stadium Club, etc. If I want to mix things up, I need to buy cards I normally wouldn't buy. Optic is one such brand. I'm lukewarm to "chrome" sets in general. Slap some foil on the base set and charge more? No thanks. Granted, some cards look a lot better from this upgrade, but in general I'm usually not impressed. I decided to splurge and give Optic a one pack tryout nonetheless.

I had low expectations going in, but the "Gods of Sports Card Randomness" decided to make this pack interesting. Here's my 3 favorites:

3rd Place

2017 Donruss Optic #79 Xander Bogaerts

I honestly don't mind the lack of a license on Donruss cards. It reminds me of the old unlicensed oddballs from my youth. This Bogaerts is a nice card, and the red border stripping works well with Xander's red high sock look.

2nd Place

2017 Donruss Optic - Dominator #D11 Robinson Cano

When I entered this card in the TCDB, my first inclination was to put this under the green parallel of the insert. It's not (no serial number), but that green sure does stand out.

1st Place

2017 Donruss Optic - All-Star Blue (SN149) #AS-11 Mookie Betts

Yeah, if the "Gods of Sports Card Randomness" want me to buy more Donruss Optic, they made a very convincing opening argument. Getting a truly beautiful low count SN parallel of my favorite team's star outfielder is about as good a pull as I could have hoped for. It's easily one of the best cards I've pulled this year!

OK, so maybe I'll buy another pack...

Hey, I got other cards too!
#106 Albert Pujols
#163 Ryne Sandberg
#121 Yoenis Cespedes
#136 Felix Hernandez
#150 Josh Donaldson (Prism parallel)
#3 Mark Trumbo Diamond King (Purple parallel)
#48 Reynaldo Lopez Rated Rookie (Purple parallel)
#146 Nomar Mazara (Purple parallel)
#103 Eric Hosmer (Purple parallel)
#21 Maikel Franco Diamond King
#5 Anthony Rizzo Diamond King
#62 Teoscar Hernandez Rated Rookie
#43 Alex Bregman Rated Rookie