2012 Topps Chrome - First Look

I am completely swamped with baseball cards as a result of the great 2012 Summer Clearance Trade. So I said to myself that I wouldn't buy any new cards until I got what I have cataloged and put away. Then I made the mistake of stopping in Target and found 2012 Topps Chrome and 2012 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions. Since this stuff doesn't stay on the shelf long I bought one blaster of the Topps Chrome and 2 of the Goodwin. The Goodwin blasters had some weird stuff, enough for 2 posts. But first the Topps Chrome.

Typical blaster box with 7 packs and the 1 EXTRA PACK! to make you think you're getting something special, like they decided at the last minute to throw in an extra pack.

The 'extra' pack was in a plain silver wrapper saying "Contains 4 Purple Refractors". OK, that's cool. I started with one of the regular packs first.

Hey, look, a purple refractor. In fact, every card in the pack was a purple refractor. How strange. On to the second pack.

OK, what gives, another pack with four purple refractors.

By the time I'd opened all 8 packs I had 28 purple refractors, 2 regular refractors and 2 X-Fractors.

Was this some sort of colossal production error by Topps? Perhaps not. According to baseballcardpedia.com, one box in every 3 hobby cases contains all refractors.  Perhaps they are doing something similar with the blaster boxes as well. I wonder what the odds are of getting a blaster like this.

So I didn't get any base chrome cards and no Phillies either. I think I'll stop at Walmart and try my luck there.