This will be less painful than the previous Season 1 unboxing, mostly because Season 2 isn’t as bad as Season 1 was, and I don’t remember most of it, so I don’t have as much running commentary this time. But I love all it setup for Strange New Worlds. For inserts I’d say I go a solid 2/3, with an apparel relic, one background extra autograph, and one autograph of someone who I’m not all excited for her autograph here but moreso when she was in one my favorite movies and got a dump taken on her chest. That makes sense in context. And as Season 1 taught us, “Context is For Kings”.

While All Elite Wrestling really tries to be very stylistically different from WWE when it comes to their presentation of Sports Entertainment, the way they handle their card sets is pretty much the same. It plays just like the WWE boxes from Topps, but shinier and with more foil embossing, like comic covers in the 90’s.

This box was cuckoo bananas. One box that guaranteed at least 10 autographs. I managed to do “better” than that with 11, including my first autographed apparel card. However I also got two sets of duplicates, the only difference being the background color. Whoever at Topps had the bright idea of these different colored parallels needs to be shot.

If you only watch one of my unboxing videos, I highly recommend it being this one. I finally get a truly rare insert, and I do not handle it well. At all.

Still bummed I didn’t get the Ultra Rare this time, which commemorated probably the most insane instance of vertical integration ever: That time Dwayne The Rock Johnson showed up on an episode of Star Trek: Voyager to cross promote WWE SmackDown on UPN by delivering a Rock Bottom to Seven of Nine. I swear that all makes sense in context.

Now I don’t know if you follow me over on the Facebook, but a while ago I did a bit of a thing. I made a post about getting some transphobe so upset on a comment in a Star Trek group about Jesse James Kietel that he flew off the handle and deleted his entire post then got banned from the group. Keitel was the guest Trans actress on an episode of Strange New Worlds a few weeks ago, and someone in the group uploaded a photo of her and asked if they should post more content about her, and someone else just responded with “Ummm. . . No thank you”. I responded simply with “This is Star Trek. Do Better.” and he took it as a personal attack. He went all Proud Boys about how I didn’t have all the facts about him or his opinions, and he was allowed to be contrarian because that’s what Star Trek is all about, and everyone is allowed to have whatever opinion they want, and that his daughter’s friend was trans so how can he hate them. You know, standard boomer incel shit and missing the point of my comment, and Star Trek in general, entirely. He didn’t want to hear anything about him being a transphobe, he just kept retorting “I was nothing but polite. I only said four words!” but I was like “Yeah, but the implication behind those four words is ‘Ew, no. Trans people are gross and weird me out’. It’s really the ‘Um’ part that makes it so much worse”.

As we were discussing that, someone mentioned that it’s a shame people still think like that, to which I replied “All the dinosaurs will die out eventually”. That got responded to with the image above, of Littlefoot and his friends from The Land Before Time. It reminded me about how sad and fucked up that scene of his mom just dying and leaving him alone after fighting that T-Rex was, that I couldn’t believe it was targeted at kids. And that’s the very long winded story of how I got to thinking about things that make me cry.

So, we’re gonna revisit this again, as it’s been over nine years since the last time, and I’ve thought of some new ones (enough for two lists even!), and there are some glaring omissions from last time. There’s still the same ground rules of The Iron Giant and “Jurassic Bark” are always assumed unless you are some sort of inhuman robot. As you can see, I still cry like a bitch whenever a soundtrack swells, or pretty much when the protagonist does his thing, whatever, shut up! So here we go, in no particular order.

Would anyone like to get together and play a twenty year old card game based entirely on one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine? Anyone? Bueller? I didn’t think there would be any takers.

Grab your felt goatees and jump into the darkest timeline, as our next Star Trek CCG unboxing is all about the Mirror Universe, but back in the days of DS9, so it hadn’t run off the rails yet after that Enterprise two-parter or that whole dumb half season of Discovery.