A shiny surprise!

(Editor's note: I know this starts off a little long winded, but hopefully the payoff at the end is worth reading it for)

About two weeks ago on one of the usual twice a week trips to Walmart I wandered down the card aisle (which I always do) to see if there was anything new in the clearance bin, and to my surprise there was actually something other than the usual 2013 and 2014 Topps baseball. Before I continue though I just wanted to mention how weird it still is for me to say I was shopping at a Walmart, especially since before moving to Tennessee almost a year ago now I had never been in one before. Back home (Oregon/Washington) there are Walmart's but as much as I hate to say it, usually only a "certain sort" shopped there (I won't go into what "certain sort" means). Plus they don't have as much of a foothold as they do everywhere else. Here however, they are the lifeblood (along with any store that has the word "Dollar" in the title) for people of all walks. I'm just still getting used to going there so often, that's all.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled story: Actually before I even looked in the bin I noticed a rack pack (I just learned that's what they are called) of marked down 2013-14 Panini Prizm basketball sitting on a shelf all by it's lonesome. And after my card show purchase a few months ago of some of the parallels I have developed an interest in the set, so I thought it would be fun to actually open some packs from said set. So after searching the clearance bin I found two more packs buried under all the obligatory Topps packs. I felt fairly fortunate to find these, since I know for a fact they hadn't been out the week before.

So let us see what was gotten from three rack packs of 2013-14 Panini Prizm:

The lighting isn't very good on this picture due to the fact that I didn't think to take picture until the moment before opening. I also wanted to mention that these packs had a layer of dust/dirt on them, like they had been sitting in the back for quite some time.

Each rack pack is made up of three retail packs (4 cards in each pack) and one blue pack which contains three of the Red, White, and Blue parallels.

Here are a few of the highlights as far as the base set goes:

These cards really don't scan well. They are reduced from a mirrored silver to an almost gun metal gray.

Each pack also contains one of these HRX rookies, that don't count as one of the four cards in the pack:

They have a bar code on the back that I'm assuming you are supposed to use your phone to scan, and they talk to you or something.

Here is the three retail green parallels that I got:

And the three Walmart blue parallels:

Up next will be the nine total red, white, and blue parallels that come in the blue packs:

Saving the best for last and the reason for the post title. It was only about four packs in that I came across a card that was turned around. And of course being the dummy that I am, I just thought it was weird that the pack stuffing machine had made a mistake and put one of the base cards in backward. That was until I turned it over and saw this:

Needless to say I was quite surprised, but not as surprised as when I turned it back over and saw this:

That's right, serial numbered 3/5! Sorry for the bad pictures, the number was proving difficult to show. Apparently this is a Walmart blue parallel autograph, although I still haven't figured out why some are numbered to upwards of 99 and some are to just 5. And since there are no stated odds on the pack for getting one of these I can't throw out any numbers at you, but it seems like the odds would be something like 1:and quite a lot. In general I'm not a big fan of sticker autographs, but in this instance I don't mind one bit.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.