A first

COMC shipments have been a staple of this blog from the beginning, but today will be the very first time that I've been able to cover an entire shipment in one single post.

Normally my shipments are made up of hundreds of cards, which is a byproduct of often waiting a year or two to request shipping. However, today's shipment, built up for all of four months, is just 26 cards strong. 

I don't know how many people saw it, but back during the Black Friday sale, one of the perks for buyers was that people who requested shipments of 100 cards or more received a $4.99 shipping credit (basically free shipping when choosing the economy option) for that shipment, and would receive another one that was good until March 31st of this year. Having over two years worth of cards on the site as of the BF sale, it was not difficult for me to take advantage of this offer. I got my 200-ish cards shipped for free, and now had this other free shipping credit to play with.

I don't remember picking up 26 cards since the BF sale, but I guess it's easier to forget such things when your using earned credit, as opposed to cash, to pay for things. Had the shipping not been free, I would not have requested it, but it was, so I did. I waited until the 31st to request it, and was given a ship date of April 27th, which they met spot on.

I still have scan folders chock full of cards from the big two years worth of stuff shipment, but am bumping this one ahead, if only because it's the latest and greatest. I haven't gotten very many cards of late, so it was kind of fun fondle some cardboard again. Still wasn't fun to scan it though.

The post was led off by a really nifty Kellogg's Merlin Olsen. One of those scan folders that I mentioned has 4 or 5 more cards from this set in it, including a couple of HOF's for player collections; as was Merlin. There's a small part of me that would like to collect this set, but thankfully there's the much larger part of me that doesn't want to spend money on people that I don't care about. And it's a lot easier to listen to that larger part when money is tight, as it has been, and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Cards from this set are really only worth, at best, about a nickel apiece. I overpaid by 35¢ for each of these, but didn't have to go anywhere to get them, or pay for shipping, so it was worth it to me. Denver Pyle (on the left) was needed for the Perry Mason collection. I didn't want a card of him as Uncle Jesse, which doesn't leave a lot of options. Hal Smith is needed for two collections, Perry Mason, and a Brady Bunch guest stars themed page. I don't know which one I'll use this card for yet, but he has a few more cards in the set, so it'll be easy enough to get another one of him.

I haven't looked yet, but I think I now have all of the Carnage cards from this Golden Web insert set. 

With the ridiculous prices that people are putting on all things Marvel these days, I don't spend a great deal of time seeking them out anymore. These last three were all found just looking through people's sale listings, and were all below the current COMC/eBay going rate. Because of said high prices, most of my character collections have had to be put on hold. With that in mind, it was nice to be able to add a few cards to them with this shipment, especially the Sentinels gold chase card.

Hey, it's my first Kahn's! I decided a few months ago that I was gonna start chasing Griffey Sr.'s cards a little more actively. I don't think it would be too hard to put together an entire playing day run of Seniors, Junior not so much, that is unless you're fabulous wealthy. And even though it's a little outside my comfort zone, I've been thinking about doing a post comparing the careers of father and son, and arguing (if need be) that senior actually had the better career overall, which would apparently contradict just about everything else I've read online.

More player collection needs, although this is only my second card of Tom's, so I don't know if that can really be called a "collection" yet.

I think I mentioned it before, maybe not though, I don't know. Either way, while I'm still collecting J-Stew in general, he's got so many cards out there, that I decided a while back to just focus on his blue cards. They're a little less plentiful, and they got the pretty color matching action going on. So far, I've just been picking the low hanging fruit, like these two dirt cheap refractors, which were both less than fifty cents apiece.

I've been trying to replace some of my lesser conditioned Franz cards when I can. It's funny to see all the kooky online Franz prices, because when I was a kid, you couldn't give away Franz cards in Portland. Every single person pretty much had an entire run of them tucked away in a drawer somewhere, and most of those folks weren't even collectors in the traditional sense; that's just how plentiful the cards were at the time. Nowadays, there seems to be a slight bit more demand for them online, though Clyde is the only one that people are paying the higher prices for.

I already showed Paul here back in my post about starting to collect the Fran Tarkenton puzzle. Bruce has since joined the fun.

With the Steve Stonebreaker elbow piece (not shown here) that I already had, I've now completed Fran's right arm. And yeah, I know, it's terribly exciting.

How's this for a mix? Jackie Cooper goes into the Columbo collection (see the last post). I didn't want one of the many cards of Jackie as a child, but this one worked perfect. Richard Loo is another new entry for the Perry Mason collection. And I got the stupid idea last year to try and do a Sarah Connor Chronicles themed page, which is where Summer Glau destined. I say it was a stupid idea only because three of the people from the show that you would want to see on such a page (Richard T. Jones, Garret Dillahunt, and Dean Winters) don't appear anywhere in card form. Considering how long Dean Winters has now been doing those Progressive Allstate (thanks, Brett!) commercials, you'd think there'd at least be a promo of some kind out there, but no, there isn't. Oh, and how is that Shirley Manson only has one card in some Jack Daniels (or some other booze) playing card set? That doesn't even seem possible! First world problem, I know. At least Fuji will appreciate my struggle to make this page happen :)

I've been thinking about adding Stan Humphries to the list of player collections for a few years now, and had been setting aside his cards just in case I ever did start collecting him. The only thing that was keeping me from officially collecting him was that I already had so many other player collections going, and didn't really want to take on another. I solved my predicament a couple of months ago though when I dropped around a dozen basketball player collections (I'm about to drop a few more too). With those now out of the mix, I figured I could take on one more guy. And unless I find out something really interesting about somebody who's currently flying under my radar, this'll be the last new player collection that I start.

As for the card, I've had this one in my watchlist for almost two years, just waiting for it to drop to a more reasonable price, which it finally did after a succession of ever increasing sales. I think it was down to $1.49 when I got it. This is the first football PPI from this year that I've ever held, so I didn't realize that a lot of the bits were raised, sort of embossed like. Allegedly these are limited to /250 copies, which I have no way of confirming, but either way it's pretty neat card.

I grabbed these two from the same seller right before I had to put in the shipment request. Both were on sale, and I figured I might as well celebrate my newest collection with a couple of "good" cards. I know that everyone loves all things 90's now, but a Printers Proof parallel for a phone card was just silly, and I dare anyone to argue otherwise.

This was my first football Rave. Apparently they go for a lot less than their basketball counterparts. 

I'll probably shock a few people by saying that I've never been much of a fan of the Back to the Future franchise. I've seen the first one a couple of times, and each of the sequels once. I know that it's beloved franchise (or at least the first two films are), but they just don't do anything for me. I like time travel stuff, love the 80's, but just don't care for those pictures. As such, I've never spent any time looking through the card sets, so it was only by happenstance that I came across one of the cards from the first set that I thought would make a perfect center card for an 80's themed page. I still haven't gotten my center card, but have acquired a few others for the page, including this very spiffy Huey Lewis from that old AGI Rock Star Concert Cards set. Huey's got a few card in the set, but this is the one that I wanted for my 80's page. There has almost never been anything more 80's than this card, and I absolutely love it! I actually won this card from one of their auctions too. It's great going through your account to bid on things because you can add the card to your account after paying for it, and avoid those brutal eBay shipping charges. I think this was just over a buck, and was very much worth it.

Here's some more auction wins. These Monty Gum cards have been on quite the rollercoaster over the last few years. They went from worthless before the boom, to crazy prices went the boom first started, and now aside from a couple of the bigger names, have pretty much slipped completely back into worthless territory. I got the Sarge for a childhood themed binder that I've started (more on that some other time. I've got a page dedicated to OMG/Akeem, and Jesse will go into the Portland Wrestling collection.

Orson Welles doesn't have nearly as many cards out there as he should, and trying to find one that wasn't made by Panini has been quite the task. I guess all I had to do was wait a little bit, because this 1959 Maple Leaf playing card practically fell into my lap through yet another auction. This was $1.54 well spent, and would be my favorite card from this shipment if it weren't for this...

From what I've been able to gather, this 1962 Dutch Gum is Barbara Eden's first card, or as the profiteers would call it, her rookie card. To me it's just her first card, and now it's all mine! I love this card so damn much, and couldn't believe that was only priced somewhere around $3. In this condition, I would've easily paid upwards of ten for it. I like too that the Dutch Gum folks had to tell everyone that she was a fox, as if no one would've known otherwise. And yes, I'm joking, Fox is the studio that she was with at the time -- my scenario is better though.

I wish that this shipping credit would've been dated a little further out, as I did get three more cards during the recent spring sale, and would've loved to have been able to include them in with these. I'll probably get those at the end of the year, so it's not like I'll have to wait that long.

It felt kind of weird getting an entire shipment into one post. I think the last time I had such a small order shipped from them was back in 2010 or 2011 when I has just found the site; that feels like a lifetime ago.

On a completely different, and final, note, I sold a card on eBay last week to Mark Armour, you know the SABR guy/pretty well known writer (of actual books). I thought about sending him a message saying that he was the first celebrity that I've ever sold anything to, but figured that he probably gets that a lot, so I spared him the message. It was still kind of neat though.

Pink is the new orange

I'm not sure why October always ends up being so busy for me, but it does, and this year has been no exception. It seems like the days are just go, go, go, then come night time, I'm too tired to get anything done... especially blog posts!

I always have tons of ideas for Halloween related posts, but rarely get around to doing more than 2 or 3 of them, and this year has been no exception! Looking at my draft folders, I see that I've got 6 Halloween themed posts started, but at the rate I'm going, will probably only end up getting to 2 of them, 3 if I'm lucky.

One of the 3 posts that I've managed to finish this month was a 1-card pink themed post to try and help Brian spread the word about his annual Save Second Base event. It was nice to be able to try and spread the word (even though pretty much every one already knows about it), but it wasn't what you'd call a great post (1-card posts rarely are), a fact which I acknowledged in the post, and said that I'd try to do one more for him (and his cause), something with a little more eye candy if you will. Well, I had a spare hour earlier in the week, and found myself possessing the want to look through some cards, more specifically, to look for some 'pink' cards. 

I ended up finding enough for a top ten post, of sorts. It's probably more like "Here's ten pink cards that I own and am showing in no particular order, half of which have already been featured on the blog at some point". It should be noted too that I didn't even need to look through any of my baseball player collections (barely touched the football ones either) to reach my goal of ten cards, so hopefully since it's for a good cause, all of you 'baseball or bust' types will still stick around 'til the end (commenting wouldn't be a bad idea either, especially since each one equals a $1 donation from Brian).

So without further ado, here's ten 'pink' cards that I own, and very much like...

1971-72 Topps #48

The '71 basketball set has a number of notable pink cards in it, especially since it's the background color for both the Lakers and the Pacers (among other teams), so you've got all-time greats like Wilt, West, and Baylor representing pink for the Lakers; and rookies of guys like Roger Brown, Mel Daniels, and Billy Keller on the Pacers side. And yet, my favorite pink card from the set is this Em Bryant. Pink aside, it's one of my favorite cards from the set, period! I'll even take it a step further and say that it's one of the quintessential 1970's basketball cards, at least from an aesthetic standpoint. Disagree? Prove me wrong!

2012 Panini Black Friday - Panini Collection Progressions (magenta)

You had to know that there was going to be a Progressions in here, right? Biz is my favorite of the rainbows that I'm trying to build, I've got 3 of the 4, and no, I can remember which one that I need off the top of my head (it's not like your sitting on one of these anyway).

2018 BBM True Heart autograph

I hate the thought of ranking things that people have sent me over the years, and would never do so, but still, I sometimes find myself reminiscing about the package that RAZ sent me a few years ago, it truly was that good. This Mochi Miyagi (no relation to Mr.) auto was one of the many great items in there.

P.S. RAZ, if you see this post, please come back to us. I know that you're on Twitter, but it isn't the same.. not even close!

2014 Cryptozoic Adventure Time Holiday Foil #HE-01

Did you watch Adventure Time? No? You should, it was a great show. It's not too late either, it still holds up, and will continue to do so for quite some time. These Holiday Foils were exclusive to the retail blister packs a bunch of years back. I couldn't find any of them in stores, so I bought a big lot of packs on eBay, maybe 10-15 packs, and since each blister pack (which contained two retail packs btw) had one of these foils on top of the packs, I ended up with a huge stack of them. For those that don't know, the show was set in a post apocalyptic world, where many traditions have been lost (big surprise, right), including Christmas. This card is from their two-part Christmas episode (Holly Jolly Secrets), in which the back story of one of the main characters is finally revealed, and Christmas is "re-created" (rediscovered ?), albeit in a slightly different manner than most of us are accustomed to. The episode had all kinds of heart, and is still very popular amongst the shows fans. The card has all kinds of heart too, even though it's foil-y goodness has been rendered null-and-void by the scanner.

1969 Topps #34

Other than Shawn Kemp's 1990-91 Fleer RC, I don't think that any other card has been shown on the blog more times than Merlin's Topps RC (not his true RC, but the 'geniuses' over at Beckett don't acknowledge that), so who am I to get in the way of a good cause, and not show it again :)

1957 Topps Hit Stars #80

Cyd Charisse has very few trading cards, don't ask me why though. If I was in charge, she'd have many. I freely admit to having a long standing crush on her, so I may be a bit biased.

See, I couldn't help it! Although, this photo does fit the theme that Brian's October posts tend to follow, so I'm just playing along, nothing else. It would make no sense for me to do so, but I've thought of doing a top 10 most attractive actresses/entertainers post before. If I ever did (I won't), Cyd Charisse would easily make that list.

1972-73 Topps #32

Is this a stretch as far as pink cards go? I probably wouldn't have used this one had I not seen an eBay listing for a copy the other day (during an unrelated search). Rookie cards seem to have gotten big again, and this one appears to have gone up in price a bit since I bought mine 5-6 years ago. Unrelated, can we refer to those as the 'good old days' yet?

2013 Panini Golden Age #DDG

This ones a bit of stretch, as it's more of a red card, but Ellie Mae is wearing a pink shirt, and does have pink ribbons in her hair, so? This is one of my favorite autographs from the Golden Age sets, so anytime I can find an excuse to show it, I'm going to. I watched a couple of episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies this past week, and while it's not my favorite program ever, I do enjoy a few episodes here and there.

1985 Topps WWF Stickers #3

Watch out ladies, Brother Bruti is on the prowl!

I haven't been a wrestling fan for quite some time now, and don't collect anything wrestling related anymore either, but the '85 Topps set, as well as the subsequent '85 O-Pee-Chee series 2 set, were amongst the few things that I held out back when I sold my wrestling collection. As far as wrestling cards go, those were the tops for me, it's been downhill ever since.

1984 Topps MOTU Stickers #20

Masters of the Universe has gotten big again too, and I'm thinking that it's like the tenth time that it's done so now? It's cool that so many people are into the various re-hashings, but I only care about the original. The new stuff just doesn't appeal to me, but of course I could say the same thing about everything from my childhood that's been reimagined in recent years, it all feels second rate, and I choose to have no part of it.

If by chance you haven't seen what Brian has been doing, I would highly encourage you to do so. He's doing lots of  good things, raising lots of money, and bringing awareness to a terrible disease. His dedication to the cause is very admirable, and he deserves all of the accolades that he has been getting.

Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

Tackling some player collections

I've talked a lot about breaking up set builds to start player collections in recent months, or at least it feels like I have been -- either way, it's a thing that I've been doing.

I don't know if I'm completely sold on player collecting yet, I just know that due to circumstances that arose early last year, circumstances that aren't likely to change anytime soon, I can no longer afford to work on all of the various vintage sets that I had been building, at least not with the hopes of completing any of them in a semi-decent amount of time. I suppose it would be possible to work on just one or two sets, but after spending some time trying to do so, I couldn't narrow down the list to just one or two. So while targeting specific players is still a fairly new concept for me, and is less than ideal, I figure that it'll allow me to still own, and see, a number of cards from the various vintage sets that I love so much, without having to go into debt trying to collect the entire thing. Another thing that I've realized is that if a bad month rolls around, and I only have say $10 to spend on cards, I'd much rather go get myself someone with name recognition and/or someone who's in the HOF, versus some no name who never did anything of note, but who's card still commands top dollar simply because it happens to be one of those mythical "high numbers".

More often than not, when I've mentioned pulling apart sets, it's almost always been baseball related, but I've been doing the same thing to my vintage football set builds as well, albeit very slowly. Much like on the baseball side, I've been surprised at how many cards of certain players that I've had, of course I've also been surprised by how few cards I have of certain players too.

I had a rare stretch of actually wanting to sort cards for about two weeks back in November, which worked out well what with COMC's Black Friday sale approaching and all. I used that time to work on some of the old football sets, to try and figure out who was being kept, and who wasn't. Despite the couple of weeks worth of effort, I only ended up getting through about half of my vintage football cards, but enough was done to still start making some lists, and to know somewhat who to focus on once the sale started.

Thanks to the Challenges being open quite a bit that month, I was able to build up a fairly decent amount of credit heading into the sale, and with some new found focus, as well as some surprisingly decent sales, I think I ended up getting more cards during the actual sale than I had in previous years. Looking back, most of my purchases during the sale ended up being of the vintage variety (baseball, football, and non-sport), all of which will be shown in due time, but in honor of tomorrow's "big game", I'll just be concentrating on the pigskinner's for today.

Being a native Portlander, George Shaw has been on my radar for a long time, but as a set collector, I didn't ever pursue his cards more than anyone else's -- but now that things have changed, I am! George had tremendous success during his amateur career, he led Grant high school to two state championships, before moving on to Oregon, where he would become an All-American in both football and baseball. Unfortunately this success didn't carry over to the pro's, some of that was his fault, and some of it was just bad timing. You see, George has the dubious distinction of being replaced by two rookie quarterbacks, both of whom go on to the Hall of Fame, during his career. He suffered a broken leg during his second season with the Colts, and was replaced by some kid called Johnny Unitas. Not surprisingly, George never got his starting gig back. Three years later he was traded to the Giants where he spent two unproductive seasons, before moving on to Minnesota. After a slow start, he would find himself being replace halfway through the season by another fresh-faced rookie, Fran Tarkenton. He'd go on to play one more season in the AFL with Denver before retiring.

If memory serves, Fred passed away a few days before the Black Friday sale started. His name hadn't been familiar to me, but after reading an obit online, and seeing that he invented the NERF football, well, I knew right then and there that he was gonna have to be added to my list of player collections. I picked up this '65 Philadelphia, his true rookie card, that day. Since his cards are considered to be commons, I didn't feel the need to go crazy with them during the sale, when most can probably be had for fifty cents or less at shows.

I don't pay a lot of attention to the yearly Hall of Fame classes for any sport, and am often surprised by who is, and isn't, already in the Hall of Fame -- as such, I was surprised to see a headline a few weeks ago announcing that Alex Karras was a member of this year's class, which is funny because I had been under the impression that he was already in the HOF, and had been for many years. As great as the front of this card is, the back might be even better:

Cartoons don't get too much better than that.

There aren't a lot of Ducks in the HOF, I can think of five off of the top of my head, so for the purposes of this post, and not wanting to go double check, I'm just gonna go ahead and say that there's five (feel free to Google it and correct me if I'm wrong). Now that I'm focusing on players, it feels only right that I start collecting a few, if not all, of those guys. I found this '66 Philadelphia during the sale, it's a bit off-center, but that's what made it affordable. More gradable copies sell on eBay for at least double the price of what I got mine for... thankfully I don't care about getting cards graded!

I'm not going to consider blank backs as an essential part of my player collections, but if one comes along cheap enough, I'll probably end up buying it anyway. Given it's condition, I don't think that this Bethea ever made it into circulation, making it a lot less interesting to me than a pack pulled blank, but for just a little over a buck I couldn't resist.

Unlike the Bethea, I strongly believe that this card may have come from a pack, as such I was willing to pay a little more for it. This also happens to be my first card featuring the Secretary of Defense.

Before the Black Friday sale I had never owned a card of Roman's before -- after the sale I found...

... myself owning...

... three!

When looking through all of the '77 Csonka's on the site, I noticed a great variety of different shades in sky color... I will not be collecting all of those variations!

Given it's obscenely low price, and despite the lack of any condition notes, I was thoroughly convince that there was going to be something wrong with this card, but to my great surprise, there wasn't (well, other than the crooked scan)! Although COMC did make up for it by having six other cards arrive damaged, but they weren't as important to me as this one was, so I guess it's a decent trade off.

This is my favorite of the bunch right here! Ernie Ladd cards can be had for a lot less than I would've thought, although it's probably just one of those deals where there just isn't a lot of people left who still care about his cards, which is then reflected in the prices. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled to pick up my second card of his, which also happened to be my first 1964 Topps -- I don't know how it is for anyone else, but this is one of those sets that I absolutely never see any of at shows.

Being a wrestling fan growing up, I always knew of him as "The Big Cat", but apparently that wasn't always the case. Although, after doing a quick search, I can no find reference to him as "The Giant Cat", so this might be one of those instances where someone at Topps didn't have all of their facts straight.

I don't know about anyone else, but I have no plans to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow, mostly because I'm not familiar with any of the guys playing, well that and the fact that I don't like how the sport is played these days. Now if the rules weren't so pillowy, and a few of the guys in today's post were still in their prime and playing in tomorrow's big game...


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.

COMC Shuffle #19

Another week, another ten randomly selected cards from last year's COMC hoard!

1969 Topps #34

Even though Merlin's actual rookie card was in the 1964 Philadelphia set, this one from five years later also gets labeled as a rookie, why? Because it's his first Topps card, so therefor it's considered to be his Topps "rookie"... card collecting can be really dumb sometimes! Despite it's faux rookie status, I absolutely love this card, so much so, that I wouldn't mind completing an entire page of it. I think I have three or four now, so I'm pretty sure that attempting to fill a page would be very doable.

2015-16 Panini Prizm Light Blue Prizms #274

Such a classic photo! This ones in my top 3 from the 2015-16 set, partly because of the image, and partly because it looks good in any color, although I am of the opinion that the light blue and red are the two best looking parallels for this particular card.

1999-00 Skybox E-X E-Xceptional #7XC

This is a set that I really wanted to complete at one time, but I waited too long to try and do so, and with the amount of fake Kobe's that are out there now, I'm just not comfortable trying to buy one and hope that it's real -- and buying a graded one doesn't necessarily insure it's authenticity either, especially now that we know a little bit more about how the grading companies have been operating, and who knows what other revelations will come out further down the line. Thank goodness the Asian counterfeiters don't bother with guys like Pippen (at least not in this set), so I can at least buy a few of these (I've got three of Scottie) when they're cheap, and not have to worry about their authenticity.

2011 Topps Cognac Diamond Anniversary #490.2

I feel like I used to know what particular moment was being celebrated in this photo, but for the life of me I can no longer recall the specifics behind it, anyone?

1971-72 Topps #67

I'm less than 20 cards away from completing this set, but I'm not so sure that I'll be trying to finish it anymore. I still need Jerry West, as well as the rookies of Barry and Cowens, all of three of which have proven to be quite difficult to find in relatively good condition, at an affordable price. Plus I continue to move further and further away from sets, anymore I just don't see the appeal of spending a bunch of money to complete something, only to then put it away in a binder, or a box, and then never look at it again (that is what most people do). I do wish though that I hadn't gotten so far a long on some of these sets before coming to this realization.

1962 Post #58

As of 1962, Nick was the Lions all-time leading rusher. As of 2019, he's #5, and we all know who's number one on that list!

2014-15 Panini Prizm Yellow and Red Mosaic Prizms #205

It's always interesting to see how two of the same Prizm cards will scan together, there's always one that ends up looking better than the other, I don't know a lot about such things, but I'm assuming that it has something to do with the direction of the light that is scanning across them.

2012 Panini Black Friday Panini Collection - Cracked Ice #BM

Much like the Jim Brown Progressions rainbow that I'm hoping to complete at some point (as well as the Chris Kreider rainbow that I did complete), I went ahead and bought the base and cracked ice versions for the Biz Markie rainbow that is also 3/4 of the way towards being completed.

2014 Panini Prizm Red, White, & Blue Prizms #89

Roses are red, violets are blue, something something... J-Stew :)

2013 Panini Father's Day Progressions - Cyan #13

I don't always buy Kobe's, but when I do...

Stay thirsty my friends!


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.