Christmas from The Collector

I don't know how kids these days feel about them, and I don't know how kids from generations prior to mine felt about them, but I do know that when I was young, the vast majority of kids didn't give two rips about greeting cards. Oh sure, we'd anticipate receiving them on birthdays, and for Christmas, but that's only because we'd be hoping that they contain some cash or a check. The cards themselves were merely a vessel for our new-found, albeit temporary, wealth. The cards that appeased us with an offering were tolerated, those that didn't, were as good as trash; that is of course unless mom got to them first, then they'd be put up on the fridge, mantle, etc. where you'd have to look at them for at least a month before they were taken down, only to then be squirreled away in a drawer somewhere for safe keeping.

Greeting cards have always seemed like a waste of money, and time, but mostly money, to me. I could appreciate the sentiment that they conveyed, but more often than not, a phone call would've sufficed.

Something has changed for me in recent years though, for I now actually look forward to getting greeting cards, and don't need them to contain greenbacks for me to appreciate them. I don't know why this is, maybe I've entered the grandma stage of my life (that's normal, right?), and now appreciate just being thought of on special occasions. Such was the case a few weeks ago when I received an unexpected package from, Chris, or as he's known on the streets, The Collector. 

My initial thought was not of the goodies that undoubtedly lay inside, no, I was thinking of how nice it was that Chris had thought about me; and being so near Christmas was just that much more meaningful. 

The contents of the package were a small bundle of trading cards, and greeting card, which clearly felt like it contained something else; probably more trading cards. In years past, I can say with complete certainty that I would've started with the bundle first, but in 2022, I guess I now am the sort who starts with the greeting card, and not because of the mystery bounty that's obviously being held within it's confines -- those were set aside until I finished reading the card. After reading the card, I did a very grandma-ish thing, and went and put the card on the entertainment center, you know, so that I could look at it when I'm in the living room. Now I could look at the cards...

That's really nice looking card, isn't it? Even if I weren't collecting Luke Easter, I still would've wanted this offering from TCMA, it's just that good! This had been on my Cheap Wants list, which meant that Chris had also taken the time to peruse at least one of my lists; that's awfully thoughtful too.

I can guarantee that is the worst scan that you'll see on the blogs today!

Here was another one of my Cheap Wants. Some may recall that there was a copy of this card in my last post too, yep, two arrived on the same day from two different people. Funny how that works. Now if I decide to start collecting Carney, which I'm still thinking about, I'll have one for that collection and one for my random 80's pages. If I don't start collecting him, I'll have two for the random 80's pages, and will have to get a third to finish off the row. Although, I actually wouldn't mind having an entire page of this card :)

Terry was the point guard of youth, and John was the point guard that young me was supposed to hate, but was actually a super-secret fan of (because you couldn't be a fan of anything Jazz in Portland when I was a kid -- that might've warranted a stoning back then).

I should probably note too that in case things are looking off, none of these cards are mis-cut, I've just been getting really lazy with my scans. I don't mind wonky scans, so hopefully you all don't either.

If I were to ever start building a 90's base set again, this one would be a serious contender. It's one of those sets that's just loaded with nostalgia for me. It's also a set that I can still remember a lot of the details from it's initial announcement through it's actual release. It was kind of a big deal at the time.

Here's another Cheap Want that Chris was able to knock off of the list. With this Gold Stamp parallel in hand, I have officially completed my 1992-93 Topps Archives Jerome Kersey rainbow (it's only two cards - base and gold). It's funny too, I remember the golds being a one per pack parallel, but that's a false memory, because the golds were released altogether in a separate box set. I know that I had a bunch of the golds way back when, but I know for a fact that I never got one of the box sets, so I have no idea where all of mine would've come from. I got a box for my birthday in 1992, and I guess over the years the memory of opening it has been altered some to include a gold parallel in each pack. Brains are strange.

Of all the cards that came from this unexpected package, Fred Cox was probably the unexpectiest of the bunch. I already the Alzado, but this one was nicer than my other copy. And I didn't realize it until I opened this package, but I completely forgot to look for both of these guys during COMC's recent Black Friday sale. Which then led to the further realization that I forgot to look for a bunch of other guys too, siiiiiigh. Hopefully I didn't miss out on too many deals; though, thinking back to the lack of deals that I came across, and remembering how few cards I picked up during the sale, I can't help but assume that I didn't.

Many thanks to Chris for sending what turned out to be the only Christmas card that I received this year. The trading cards that accompanied it weren't too shabby either 😉.

And if you haven't already done so, go check out the Young Guns series that Chris is currently doing. I know very little about hockey, and even less about hockey cards, so I've been learning a bunch about both thanks to this series. And of course, in typical Chris fashion, the series has been extremely well researched, and has been written in a manner that makes one think that he should probably be getting paid for doing this.

Merry Christmas everyone! 

Birthday splurge

Try as I might, I can't seem to hold off the coming of my least favorite day of each year; that being my birthday.

Some would, and did, refer to this years occurrence as a milestone, and I guess they were sort of right. After all, it's not everyday that someone other than Jack Benny celebrates their 39th birthday for the second year in a row 😉. 

Depending on when this is posted, I am now 10-14 days removed from this yearly abomination, and don't seem to be any worse for wear (I'm not counting the recent smashing of my thumb with the back of a hatchet, as that was unrelated). Everyone says that life begins at 39 😉, so who knows, maybe they're right and I'm just getting started.

With this whole "milestone" thing in mind, I decided that I'd wanted to do something to mark the occasion. I've known for months that the Nashville cards show was going to be on the weekend of my birthday, and that it wasn't going to be your average bi-monthly show. No, this was gonna be a 450-table affair that was spread over three days. I thought briefly about going, but I would've wanted to be there on the first day, which was a Friday. However, thinking of having to deal with Nashville traffic on a Friday was enough by itself to keep me away. Not to mention, I'm still not ready for the boom crowd (Boomers?). I've heard about their kind of crazy, and I don't want any part of it. I've also changed what I collect so much over the last few years, that I just don't think I'd find enough things there to justify the expenses (gas) for such a trip.

Having made up my mind a few weeks in advance not to go, I decided that I would instead make a couple of small purchases online. Not only did this save me from all of the terrors that were inevitably waiting for me in Nashville, but it also freed up the Friday before my birthday, which I ended up spending in Knoxville instead (if you're so inclined, I already wrote about that here). I have no doubt that I made the right choice.

I had been eyeing two cards from a seller, Jim and Steve's Sports Cards, on the Beckett Marketplace for about a year now, and decided to finally get them. Of course, I had to see if I could add a few more things to the order, it's kind of silly to pay $4-5 in shipping just for two dollars in cards, right? Right.

I knew nothing of 1990 Topps Heads Up! until I was looking through these peoples selection of Bo items. I probably should've looked into it a bit more before adding this to the cart. I thought from the picture that it was gonna be a card-sized head, but nope, turns out they're like 4"x 5", or thereabouts. It's a giant head! The only thing that I can think to do with it is to put on the inside front cover of the Bo binder. 

Just in case I wasn't the only one who had never seen these, here's the back. The suction cup prevented it from laying flat on the scan tray, which caused the blur, but you can still see most of what's going on here.

I was, and still am, unfamiliar with these as well. From what I can gather from COMC, these come from a sheet that was inserted into a 1991 book about... kids who grew up to play professional basketball? I don't know, and honestly I don't really care, they were just something different that I could add to these two player collections.

I don't know what the origins of this set of University of Kentucky playing cards are either, it just looked fun, so I grabbed the Bowie, even though I'm not really trying to collect any of his post-playing days stuff.

I probably had multiple duplicates of this sticker back in 1990-91, but all of my old Panini stickers were in with the cards that I donated to a charity auction back in the early 2000's (because I didn't think that I'd ever take up card collecting again).

A part of me has been thinking that I'd like to take an extended break from cards if I ever complete the Reggie Roby collection. Counting what you'll be seeing in this post, I'm about 40 cards (and other assorted items) away from finishing his catalog. Unfortunately for me, no copies of his Wild Card 1000 Stripe have shown up recently, and even if one did, it would probably be in an eBay store with a stupid high BIN, so I might have to be sticking around for a while longer.

Having grown up with Franz Blazers cards, I'm no stranger to cards coming with bread, but even so, it's still a little weird to think of a football card coming with your bread. That wouldn't have gone over very well in Portland. I like this one quite a bit though, it's now one of my favorite Reggie's. Oh, and this was the card that led me to this seller in the first place. I figured that if they hadn't sold it in the last year or so, that that might mean that I was suppose to buy it.

If I had anyone to play it with, I would've bought that old Franchise board game years ago. I could be wrong, but I always thought that it looked like a cross between Monopoly and fantasy football (fantasy football before it became the lame version that everyone likes so much now). And sure, the players are all from 1989, but those are the guys that I know. I think it would still be fun. Since I probably won't ever be buying the actual game, I might as well start picking up the game cards that I need for player collections. I think I still need 4 or 5 more, but I got the most important one crossed off the list.

In case anyone cares about the backs.

The last item from these folks was a bit disappointing, as it's in much worse shape than the advertised NM (there's always gotta be one). McDonald's didn't do Dennis any favors with this tightly cropped photo. A wider shot would've been pretty cool, we would've been able to better gauge how this meeting between Dennis' and Bruce Hardy turned out.

With shipping, this order came out to just about $20. Were these worth $20? Probably not. Buyers remorse set in right after I placed this order, but that's pretty normal for me these days. I still feel it a few weeks later.

I can't remember what night I did the Beckett order, but the day after I did so, I made another small purchase on Sportlots, from a person calling themselves, vogs59xa. I feel like I might've bought from them before, but I'm not sure. Like the Beckett seller, I've had three cards from this person sitting in my cart for about a year. After seeing that the shipping price for three cards would be the same for up to 10, I started looking for a few more to pad out the order.

I'm not really sold on magnets as collectibles, even if their appearance, and distribution, were similar to that of trading cards. I also don't remember them in the least when they were new, so I have no connection to them or their concept, and therefor don't really like them all that much. That being said, they do add a little bit of spice to player collections, and at a quarter apiece, I didn't have to break the bank to add them to said collections.

For a magnet, this one actually looked pretty good (too bad you can't tell from the scan), but unfortunately the front of it is peeled down some up in the right hand corner. I'm not sure why this person would send something with this kind of damage when it was listed as NM. I certainly never would've done that. I guess they were hoping that I wouldn't notice (no honor among thieves?)

The first run of Gold Medallions never scan good. Oh, and this card was far from the stated NM as well.

I think that this sticker put me at about the halfway point with the Dennis Smith collection. I think I only need two more of his stickers now too.

Magnets? Dog Tags? Shit was crazy back in the 90's! I thought I was just ordering the regular version of this "card", but I got the Plus parallel instead. Normally I'd send them a message and let them know that they accidently sent a slightly rarer version, but I figure that this makes us even for the two damaged cards that they decided to send without saying anything.

This may look like just your average old 1990 Topps, but it's actually the Tiffany version. I'm pretty sure that this is the first Tiffany card that I've ever owned. I always kind of wondered how easy they would be to tell apart from the regular Topps version. If the 1990 set is anything to go by, it would be very easy to tell them apart. The glossy finish on here is very noticeable, and it could never be mistaken for one of the regular cards.

Both of these are kind of boring parallels, the Choice is a Silver (because of the big silver 'Redskins' across the bottom), and the UD is an Electric Gold (because of the gold 'Electric' up in the left hand corner), but they were both needed, and cheap. I do really like the image that they used for the Choice though; if I tried to do that I'd probably never walk again. Physically, I'm in pretty good shape, but I've never been very flexible.

With shipping, this group came to a little over $5. Was it worth $5? I guess it was. I probably couldn't have found all of them at a show for less than what I paid here.

So there's my $25 birthday splurge. I do feel like I could've gotten something else more enjoyable for that amount (or less), but what's done is done. At least I got a few more Reggie's out of the deal... and a giant Bo head!

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Before you go, I mentioned in the last post that I thought that I was forgetting another blog that I thought everyone (who doesn't already know about it) should go check out, and I was right; If You Build It, They Will Come was the odd-man out. This guy's collection is quite varied, and includes all sports, some non-sports, old stuff, new stuff, etc. Given the variety that he posts about, one would think that there would be the occasional something for just about everyone's tastes. So, if you have a few minutes, maybe you could use them to go say hi.

A Baseball Card Store Top 12

Like a number of other bloggers, I received a shipment from the Baseball Card Store back in early January. However, unlike all of those other bloggers, it's taken me until March to finally get around to posting about said shipment.

I wanna say that there were around 200 cards in the shipment, half of which were probably gotten on Black Friday when everything was a nickel and there was special free shipping promotion going on. The other half were just regular old dime cards that had been sitting in my account.

Since there is no way that I was gonna spend however many hours it would've took to scan all 200 cards, or even a significant portion of them, I took the lazy approach and pulled out a few that I thought were of note, scanned them, and am now doing one of my least favorite kind of posts; a top 10 list, or in this case, a top 12 list. Oh, and since my feelings on lists have already been established in previous posts, let's not dwell on that again, shall we? I get it, you all like lists, and I'm not overly fond of them. It's crazy, I know, but it's been covered, time to move on...

#12: 1993 Ted Williams Card Company #119

Full disclosure, I originally started this post over a month ago, got bored, left, and hadn't come back to it until today (Sunday). Generally, I don't like to leave drafts laying around too long, if only because I can always remember why I did something months after the fact. Case in point, I no longer have any idea why I pulled this card out. I had a few of the Ted Williams lady baseballers in this shipment, but don't know why Marge is here. It is a nice looking card though.

#11: 1992 Score #344

The concentration that can be seen in Mongo's eyes is what makes this card. It's like watching a lion stalk a zebra.

Speaking of eyes...

#10: 1993 Leaf #316

I found out, after scanning it, that I already had one of these in the Bo collection. I don't mind at all though, as this is one of those cards that makes a page pop; even more so when there's multiple copies of it on a page.

#9: 1996-97 Fleer Ultra #73

This shot is from LJ's "Welcome to the Knicks" presser. I may not like lists, but I absolutely love "What If's?". I don't think about it much these days, but I used to often wonder what if LJ and Alonzo Mourning could've co-existed? And what if he didn't have the back problems? And then of course, what if he hadn't left Charlotte? It would've been very interesting to see Charlotte continue to build around Zo and a healthy LJ. Depending on the pieces, they might've been a real contender during mid to late 90's.

#8: 2009 Rittenhouse The Complete Twilight Zone #19

This Twilight Zone set is great for those that collect certain celebrity's, or for those like myself who are working on themed collections/pages. The cards feature an episode on each side, so there's twice as many opportunities to get that certain someone that you're looking for. There's also a few people featured in this set who had never been on a card before, or since (despite all of the TZ sets in recent years). I picked up about half of this set (for a nickel apiece) for various collections. You'll be seeing more of these in the future, but for the moment I just chose to highlight the great Keenan Wynn, who was needed for my Kolchak collection.

#7: 1992 Fleer Ultra #54

I don't collect Jim Thome, but after coming across this card, I decided I had to have it nonetheless. I like that you can tell exactly what's happened just by looking at him. The non-rookie Rookie banner is kind of annoying, but it's small enough that I can look past it and still enjoy the card.

#6: 2016 MTG: Oath of the Gatewatch #017

I know nothing about MTG, and until just the last few years, never really cared about it. It's too late for me to learn about the game itself, but I have come to appreciate some of the artwork, and have quietly been picking up a few cards (cheap cards) here and there just for said artwork. In this case, a lion sporting a pair of ethereal antlers was just too cool for me not to get.

#5: 1992-93 Topps Archives #80

I had this complete set at one time, but that was a long, long, time ago. Despite it's being one of my personal favorites, I'm not looking to build it again. I do however still need a few cards for player collections, though not as many as I did before this shipment. Now if the BCS would just put up some of the gold stamp versions...

#4: 1991 Starline Hollywood Walk of Fame #'s 103,16, 176, and 54

Yeah, I know, I'm kind of cheating here. This set is really great for person/themed collections too. Unfortunately, I think with the dozen or so cards that I had in this order, I now have everybody that I need from it (insert sad faced emoji here). Ann B. Davis is for a Brady Bunch themed page. Chuck is for, well, I don't really know yet. Maybe I'll do a themed page for him, at least then I'd have an excuse to get a Jill Ireland card 😉. Scatman is for the Kolchak collection. And Jane is for the smokeshow small collection of hers that I've got going.

#3: 1990 Pacific Andy Griffith Show #279

This card has proven rather difficult to find cheap. I had been looking for one for the last few years, but never thought to check the BCS for it before that fateful Black Friday evening when I spent multiple hours scouring the site. I was starting to think that I was gonna have to buy the whole set just to get this one, as well as few others that I still need. In another timeline, Elinor Donahue and Andy Griffith clicked better, and she became a much more permanent fixture on the show. As it is though, they didn't, and she only appeared on part of the first season. As much as I enjoy The Andy Griffith Show, her appearance on the program isn't why I wanted this card, no, I needed her for yet another themed page, one that'll be revealed at a later date (if it ever gets completed, that is).

#2: 1993 Upper Deck #175

I am of the opinion that this is about as close to a perfect baseball card as you can get, at least as far as modern cards go... maybe even vintage too!

#1: 1991 Impel Terminator 2 #10

Robert Patrick RoOkIe CaRd! For those of you that actually take such things seriously, Robert Patrick has multiple "rookie" cards in this set, and the much inferior Topps T2 set from the same year. This is the best looking one. This was another set that I had never thought to look for on the site prior to Black Friday, I'm glad I did though, as I was able to get a few more "kEy" cards (Arnold, Linda Hamilton, and James Cameron) for other themed pages as well.

After going through this list again, I can't say that these cards are in the exact order that they should be, but I guess it's close enough. Although Mongo probably should've been higher than #11, just sayin'.