Blasting off with 2017 Leaf Draft football

This post combines two things that have been pretty uncommon for me recently:  posting more than once in a week and (going back even further) spending money on retail stuff.  But after I saw what these 2017 Leaf Draft cards looked like, I decided to snag myself a blaster at Meijer last weekend.  (It also didn't hurt that five Wolverines feature in the base set, with lots more on the autograph checklist.)  A couple days later I grabbed one more since I enjoyed the break and hoped to complete the set.  Here's a bit more about the product and then lots more about how I fared:

• I believe this is a retail-only product, and I also think that's been the case throughout its existence
• Blasters go for about $21.99 and include 20 packs of 5 cards
• As a bonus, you get two guaranteed autographs which are separately packed into toploaders (no sleeves!) and then a team bag
• The base set includes 69 cards of players in their college uniforms
• The photos are airbrushed in some cases, surely for licensing reasons
• Inserts include:
• Gold parallels
• All-Americans (and Gold Parallels of those)
• TD Machines (and Gold Parallels of those)

I pulled the following out of my pair of blasters:

• 1 base set (69 cards)
• 44 base doubles
• 27 gold parallels
• 1 set of  All-Americans (17 cards)
• 10 All-Americans doubles
• 8 gold All-Americans
• 1 set of TD Machines (14 cards)
• 6 TD Machines doubles
• 5 gold TD Machines
• 3 regular autographs
• 1 gold autograph

Since I managed to complete what I'll call a master set of the base set and non-Gold versions of the two inserts, I decided to show off all of those here.  Should you have interest in seeing the Michigan cards in more depth, please head over to TMM!

Base set:

A sample base set card back, Virginia Tech QB Jerod Evans (in honor of MCM's Spankee's Hokies):

All-Americans:

A sample back from the All-Americans:

TD Machines:

A sample TD Machines back:

Here are samples of the Gold parallels from the base set and inserts (backs look exactly the same):

And here's my four autographs:

• Rodney Adams (USF)
• Johnathan Ford (Auburn)
• Eddie Jackson (Alabama)
• I'Tavius Mathers Gold (Middle Tennessee)

Overall my impressions were fairly positive:  

• Cons:
• I would have preferred to be able to snag a complete set out of one blaster, but the crazy number of inserts (an average of about 44 per box!) made that unrealistic
• Airbrushed unis (though that's not Leaf's fault)
• I'm fine with the base parallels but think the insert versions were superfluous
• The TD Machines design doesn't do much for me
• Sticker autos don't bother me, I just don't really care for the plain white ones used here
• A good number of the autographs are SSPed
• Pros:
• College unis!
• Autographs of 153 different players
• Five Wolverines in the base set
• Early cards of some of the top players before the draft
• A pretty solid base design
• The colorful All-Americans insert looks great
• A decent price point (that could be even better with coupons/sales/discounts); if you consider two of these the equivalent of a hobby box, you're probably going to get what I did:  a master set, lots of other inserts, and four autographs, all for about $40
• Perfect collation:  neither blaster considered by itself contained any doubles whatsoever, and together they produced zero triples.  You can't beat that!

I'll note for those of you that are interested in these blasters but don't really want to get in at full price, I've seen card show sellers flipping them for something like 2 for $36, and I bet most of you could do better than that.

So if you're a college collector like me, you have my recommendation to check these out whether it's blasters or singles!