Back in 2021, I opened a blaster of Donruss Optic which I liked a fair bit. That blaster was for a group break and I guess it lived in my head subconsciously as I recently picked up a hobby box of 2021 Donruss Optic for my current group break!
The question is: Does the hobby box still hold up years later or is this a product best left in the dark recesses of my memory? Let's find out together.
The box promises two autographs spread somewhere across the 20 packs (each pack only holds 4 cards). All things told, not a ton of cards for the price but at least the cards are shiny! Speaking of shiny, the Optic box ended up yielding a whopping TWENTY different serially-numbered cards. I didn't know it at the time but apparently our box was one of the advertised hot boxes (other hot boxes contain five autographs instead of the usual two). I have to say, if every box of Optic could be a hot box like ours, I think this product would fly off of store shelves.
So yes, our box was very good. We pulled a serially-numbered parallel in every single pack. The serial numbering ranged from #/249 all the way to #/10. I'll start the highlights going from the most common serial numbers to the rarest.
We pulled four Pink Velocity parallels #/249 to go with four Red, White, and Blue parallels #/199.
The Dodgers spot did well with this batch of parallels (Mookie plus Bellinger) but we also pulled a nice Pete Alonso for the Mets and a Yadi Molina for the Cardinals.
Next, we pulled a pair of Black Stars parallels #/149 and a trio of Orange parallels #/125.
Kind of a bummer to get two Orange parallels of the same guy (our numbers were 082/125 and 087/125 for Daniel Johnson). The Black Stars parallels look great in hand but the Orange cards appear more Gold than Orange to me...at least, they did until I later pulled a proper Gold parallel (more on that in a moment).
The remaining serially-numbered parallels were all numbered out of 100 (or fewer) copies. We'll start with a Blue Velocity of Kyle Tucker #/99 and a pair of Spirit of '76 cards each numbered out of (not surprisingly) 76 copies (Yelich & Cronenworth). We also found a lone Blue parallel of Matt Chapman #/75 and a lone Red parallel of J.T. Realmuto #/60. Finally, our rarest two parallels in the box consisted of a Teal Velocity card of Bryce Harper #/35 and a Gold parallel of Hyun-Jin Ryu #/10!
That's a lot of serially numbered goodies and it definitely made for a fun box break! In addition to the above parallels, we also pulled a ton (24!) of assorted inserts plus some regular prism parallels that I didn't bother to scan. Finally, we also did get our two promised autographs:
The Ian Anderson isn't serially numbered but the Spencer Howard auto is a Rated Rookies Signature Black #/50 (at least, I think I have the name of that correct)!
All told, we pulled 20 serially-numbered base parallels to go along with a serially-numbered autograph. You can't ask for much more than that for group break purposes - definitely a fun box rip and one I'd be happy to open again (especially if I could be guaranteed that the next box is another hot box)!
As for my group breaks, if you'd like to be part of them (or at least know what I'm going to break next, please join my Discord where I post all of my group break details and sign-ups).