Time for more WWE NXT Topps unboxings. Don’t worry, there’s only two left.

This one pretty much encapsulates the highs and lows of NXT. The NXT Champion, and someone who was only sparely used in squash matches and battle royales.

As for inserts, this was one of the better runs, even if one was only in 6 matches that year before injury, but she was great as Daniel Bryan’s therapist that one time.

Last week was stylized as the 1989 Topps baseball card series. For some reason it took three years to move on to a set based on the 1990 series. I’m sure people were clamoring for more baseball card stylized wrestling cards. Somehow I don’t think they had a subset based on 1880 tobacco cards in mind, but here we are.

This is mainly an excuse to go down memory lane and remember just how awesome the graphic design was for the Topps 1989 baseball cards. The cognitive dissonance of seeing current wrestlers in the old school baseball design is just fun.

And in keeping with the old school vibe, the box even came with a slammer in it, even though POGs really didn’t become a thing until 1993.

I managed to find another box of Star Trek CCG cards on eBay that wasn’t a kerbillion dollars (but still way more than it should be, but not so expensive I wouldn’t buy it just to glue it to my wall), so here we are. This was the absolute last official expansion set Decipher put out for Second Edition, and it’s kinda all over the place, pulling from every corner of Star Trek.

Oh, and I finally remembered. It was “Pure Imagination” was the song Chase Masterson always sings at every convention appearance I ever saw her at.

Even though this box is only two years old, neither insert card I got still works there. One of them is more. . . problematic than the other one. He certainly didn’t seem that problematic those three times I saw him and Lio Rush at Dojo Wars or when he was on Tough Enough, but time is a cruel mistress.

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.