Two more rack packs of 2013-14 Prizm

Some of you might remember a post I had about seven months ago in which I opened three discounted rack packs of 2013-14 Panini Prizm basketball cards that had been found at the bottom of a Walmart bargain bin. If you are so inclined, you can see that post here. If you're not so inclined, the highlight from those packs was a Walmart blue Mark Jackson autograph that was #'d 3/5.

At the time I figured that that since I was so late to the party, that those would end up being my first and last of that particular year's rack packs that I would get to open, especially since they are basically non-existent online as far as purchasing goes. Well, fast forward to earlier this week when my mom was visiting Asheville, North Carolina on a mini vacation, and happened upon on two more packs, once again at the bottom of a Walmart bargain bin.

Each rack pack contains three retail packs and one pack of three red, white, and blue parallels.

Here are a few of the base card highlights:

I should also probably note that as usual these scan a lot darker than they actually are.

I am especially fond of the retired players part of the set.

Even though it's far from the most valuable card that came from these packs, I think the Wilt pictured above, is my favorite. I really like the way that the black and white photo on a mirrored finish looks. I think that there are two or three of those in each year's worth of Prizm.

My lone insert was this Wes Unseld Hall Monitors.

And the HRX Rookies that come one per pack. Thankfully they don't count as one of the four cards in the pack:

We are now entering shiny colors portion of the packs, AKA my favorite part:

My lone Walmart blue parallel and five of the six red, white, and blue's (you'll see the sixth in just a second).

Even though neither of these two is the biggest of names, I'm still glad to get two more of the green's that I didn't have.

Only two cards to go. First up, will be the second best card (monetarily speaking) in the packs:

Even though I have never been a fan of his, this Lebron was still a very welcome sight. If only, because this card has some value to it, enough in fact to have paid for the packs by itself. This card also proves that even an entitled jerk pictured on one, can't make these red, white, and blue parallels not look cool.

And finally, what could be called the "hit":

I must admit this kid is a bit of a mystery to me, in that I haven't seen him play and I don't really know much about him, other than the fact that his Prizm rookie (and it's parallels) sell really well. Oh, and he apparently just got a $100 million dollar contract from the Bucks. I actually hadn't even heard of him before, until a couple of months ago while searching through a sellers items eBay, when I saw the red version of this card (which would go on to sell for $50). I was slightly dismayed after seeing that, thinking that since I'm trying to work on this set (base and parallels), I was going to have an awfully hard time trying to find reasonably priced versions of his rookie from this set. So even though I know next to nothing about young Mr. Antetokounmpo, I was still pretty excited to see this card. And even though I have no intentions of selling it, out of curiosity I checked recent eBay sales, finding that the lowest priced one in the last three months...sold for $27. Which is about 27 times more than a number of the autographs that I could have pulled, hence my referring to it as a "hit". Whether or not, it will hold it's value over time is whole nother matter entirely, and honestly not something I will be paying a whole lot of attention to.

I sure hope I get to open more of these rack packs at some point, because I have had pretty darn good luck with them so far. Also, considering I don't collect a lot of current stuff, I have had a lot of fun opening these...and hopefully you the reader have gotten some enjoyment out of seeing them as well.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

P.S. Even though she won't likely ever see this post, I would still like to publicly thank my mom for getting these for me.

Cards from home...

...or if you prefer longer more convoluted titles...Cards from Cards on Cards from home!

 A while back Kerry, a fellow native Portlander and the operator of the aforementioned "Cards on Cards",  had a Summer cleaning post full of stuff up for trade.

I didn't want to appear to be too greedy, so I only laid claim to a couple of items. One of them being a complete 32 card set of 1991 Pro Set WLAF Inserts. I won't go through all of them here, but a couple of the highlights for me were:


A former WSU quarterback and owner of a lifetime college coaching record of 80-60. Also is the father of a fellow a few people might have heard of...John Elway.

NC State legend, 15 years in the NFL, 1969 MVP, and the only coach who didn't get a win in the WLAF's 1991 inaugural season.

Got a rare win over the Ducks this past weekend as the coach of Nebraska, something he didn't get to do very often as longtime coach of the Beavers.

It would be interesting to see if the much maligned Cowboys coach would still be so, if Dallas could ever get a decent quarterback.

Being from Portland, Kerry is naturally a Trail Blazers fan as well (if you're from Portland and not a Blazers fan, there is something really wrong with you), so it wasn't too surprising to see some of these pocket schedules available:

At one time I had quite a few of these, but for reasons that made sense only at the time, I got rid of them. I must say that was really nice to be able to get a few back.

So I will end this by saying thank you, Kerry! And don't be too surprised if you find a package in your mailbox at some point loaded with Blazers and Cardinals.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

TTM Triumph #29: Steve Largent

Normally I try not to do two of these in a row, but this past Saturday, another request that I didn't think would come back successfully...did!

This one took seven months to come back, but was well worth the wait. So as always, I would like to send a big thank you out to Mr. Largent.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

TTM Triumph #28: Steve Kerr

A recent success from the reigning NBA Coach of the Year:

I sent this request back in December while he was still out trying to recuperate from the complications caused by the two back surgeries. Even with the high success rate that people have had with Mr. Kerr, I was starting to think this one wouldn't be coming back. I figured that between the success the team was having and probably an increase in autograph requests might cause a decline in successful returns. But nine months later, it came back, and as always I would like to send a big thank you out to Mr. Kerr.


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COMC hoard: 1910 Murad College Series

By 1910, Murad, who were still relatively new to the cigarette game, had already been adding cards to their products for a few years in an attempt to attract more sales. The College Series (or, if you want to sound like a card snob, the T51's) released in either 1909 or 1910 (some people seem to think it might even have been as early as 1908), would go on to be by far their most popular card line.

Measuring roughly 2'' x 3'', they were issued in six sets of 25 cards. Each card featured a depiction of a sporting activity (not always a sport that was associated with that school) and the school emblem. There are two variations that exist through the first 50 cards, one variation says "College Series" on the back, while the other says "2nd Series". There was also a premium mail-in series (referred to as T6's) that featured the first 25 cards in the regular set, measuring 5'' x 8'' these cards could be gotten by mailing in 15 cigarette pack coupons per card. Being part of a mail-away offer, the T6's are more scarce, and therefor command a higher price tag on the secondary market.

Brown University was founded in 1764 as The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, changing it's name to Brown University in 1804 in honor of a $5,000 donation made by Nicolas Brown, Jr.

Fun Fact: One of the schools three founding members, William Ellery, Jr., would later go on to be one of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Founded in 1886 as Chattanooga University, the school has gone through many name changes over the years (plus a few merges with other schools, finally settling on The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (or UTC) in 1969.

Lawrence University, named after Amos Adams Lawrence who donated $10,000 towards the school's creation,  was founded in 1847 by William Harkness Sampson and Henry R. Colman.

The Case School of Applied Science was founded in 1880 by Leonard Case, Jr. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, the school has changed name's a few times throughout it's history and has now been the Case School of Engineering since 1992.

Fun Fact: The Case family home served as the "school" during the first four years of it's existence.

As you can see by the back, there are no card numbers. But since you can see which numbers are featured in this series, you can tell by counting down from the top which would be #101- that this card for the Case School of Applied Science is card #103.


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An overdue card show post

Last Saturday saw me attending my first show in about five months now. Now I know that no one is wondering why I haven't been to show in so long, but I'm going to tell you anyway, the answer is rather simple...it has been crazy hot and Nashville is not a fun place to be when it's been this warm.

Summer started here (and I'm assuming in most other places in the South as well) in mid to late April, and by all accounts it has been on average at least ten degrees warmer than is normal, per day, during most of that time. Even where I am, which is at around the 1900 ft elevation mark, it has been averaging over 90 degrees with a real feel of over a 100 degrees since basically May.

And this past Saturday was no exception with the temperature at 95 degrees and the real feel of 105. I really wasn't in the mood to attend this particular show, but I have been in desperate need of supplies and there is a guy there that has just about the best prices on such things, that I have seen.

Also, since everyone seems to be gearing up for the end of September show, which is supposed to be the biggest one in their history (120 tables) I didn't know what to expect as far as dealer turn out goes. But it turned out to be sell out show, with what seemed to be even more people attending than normal, which made the room even hotter (and whiffier, but I won't go in to that).

The last thing I will mention before getting to some pictures, is this show was a bit unusual for me in that I didn't buy anything over 25 cents, with most of it being from the ten cent boxes. Not that I'm complaining, it's nice to go to a show and only spend a little over $20 on cards for a change, and the total cost of the supplies that I went there for was $22 (I wanted to make sure I didn't need anything for a while again).

So after all that, here is a small sampling of what I got:

This one through me off when I first saw it. I mean obviously it's a 1971 Kellogg's 3-D of Billy Williams, but it's a piece of hand cut cardboard and definitely not 3-D.

Not until right before going to google for help did I realize that it must of been the card pictured on the cereal box advertising the card inside. After getting no help from google (as usual), I went to eBay and found four or five more cut out cards from the 1971 series, but I still don't know how many different cards were featured on the boxes.

This '66 Gonzalez and '72 Buford were the only two vintage set needs that I was able to get. Both are in pretty good shape considering they were only a dime apiece. There wasn't much vintage to be had this time, except for the couple of sellers that are always there with crazy Beckett prices attached to their stuff. There was also a new seller there with a 3200 ct box full of really great stuff that wasn't priced, but since he couldn't even look away from his phone to acknowledge me, I just walked away.

Buybacks for a dime are always a welcome sight.

A whole bunch of set needs!

I almost always buy any of the Topps parallels that I find in the dimes boxes, but I still find it a bit surprising that something like this 2011 Update Blue David Ortiz can be found for such a low price. And I recently decided to start working on the Chasing History insert set, as it doesn't seem like it will be to hard to complete. This Gary Sheffield brings me to a total of 7 or 8 now, only around 140 to go!

I feel like I could do an entire post on what I like and don't like about this 1986 Louisville Redbirds Mascot card, maybe sometime in the future I will, but for now the image alone will have to suffice.

Even though I don't really have any interest in keeping it, I still couldn't pass on this Broder Pete Rose for a dime.

It's kind of nice being so late to the A&G party, because I can find cards like these three from the 2010 set, and still get a great deal of enjoyment from them.

I'm not actively pursuing these 2003-04 Fleer Ultra Roundball inserts, but since moving here, I have acquired about 3/4 of the set through dime boxes.

How about a 1998-99 Molten Metal Xplosion Joe Smith for 10 cents? That's what I call a good deal. This parallel set is very high on my priority list right now, easily in the top five, as far as sets I'm pursuing goes.

Eight 1994-95 SP Premium Collection inserts, which is eight more than I have seen in quite a few years.

I have been working on the 2013-14 Prizm set and any of the parallels that I can find cheap, but I don't really know if I will be actively looking for cards from any of the other years worth of Prizm. That being said I still picked up a few of these 2012-13 Prizm Prizms...

...and about dozen Prizm Prizms from the 2014-15 set...

...and three blue Prizms, which are numbered to /99 (these shouldn't be able to be gotten for only 10 cents each), also from the 2014-15 set...

...and from the same year these two blue mojo prizms...

 ...and these wicked cool die-cuts, both colors are numbered to /139 (and as a side note, I would like to applaud Panini for including Louie Dampier in a modern set)...

...and finally from the 2014 set, around 25 yellow and red mosaic prizms. Even if I'm not looking for them, it's hard to pass them by when there priced that low.

Even though I'm not a big fan of the retro insert craze, I was compelled to pick up this 2013-14 Fleer Retro Fleer Metal Precious Metal Gems Red numbered to /150 for a quarter.

I'm still on the fence when it comes to the various Panini Crusade sets, much like Prizm, there seem to be an awful lot of parallels to chase and I don't really know if it's worth the effort. These came from the same vendor as the above Prizm, I grabbed about 20 base cards from the 2013-14 set, which are the blue and yellow, and 5 of the red parallels which are #'d to /349.

 And also this 2014-15 Panini Excalibur Crusade Camouflage.

I have been slowly picking up parallels and inserts from both the 2014 and 2015 donruss sets. Here are a couple of the swirlorama parallels from the 2014 set.

Some Scoring Kings from the 2014 donruss set...

...and some Kings cards from the 2015 edition. I really like the canvas like texture on these cards.

This was my first time seeing cards from the 2013-14 Panini Timeless Treasures set. With base cards as thick as these are, and numbered to /299, I'm guessing the hobby boxes weren't cheap.

Another first for me was this 1997-98 Upper Deck Diamond Vision card of Jason Kidd. I must admit I'm slightly disappointed in the motion feature of this card, I thought they would bi similar to the 1997 Topps Screen Plays, but there not even close to being as fluid as those are.

Since I was done with the show relatively early, just a little after 10am (the inside of the card had to be at least 150 degrees already), I decided to eat my lunch (I always bring my own) early and stop at a thrift store before heading home. Even though this particular thrift store isn't one of my favorites, I hadn't been there for at least six months, plus it's easier to get back to the highway by heading in that direction. I didn't end up finding much (as expected), but I was able to walk away with a couple of videos that were new to me:

So far I have only watched The Deadliest Art, which was really good, it had clips from quite a few movies that I hadn't seen-a few of which I am now on the lookout for.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.