A plug, and a small eBay purchase

It should come as no surprise that I'm going to start off today's post with another quick Secret Santa plug.

As of this typing, we're now up to 22 confirmed participants, and I sent out a couple of invitations this morning, so hopefully those will yield a few positive results as well (one already has, thanks AJ). If any interested parties still haven't signed up, you've got until Monday morning to do so.

It seems like it's been awhile since I've shown any cards here on the blog, so now that the plug is out of the way, let's get to the cardboard!

I recently (maybe semi-recently at this point) had a terrible experience with Kruk Cards on eBay. I don't want to bore anyone with all of the details, but it was a fairly large lot of cards that I bought, which I had been quite excited about getting... at least until they arrived.

One would think that a card shop would know how to ship cards, but apparently not, as the box they ended up sending me might have been the most poorly packed group of cards that I've ever received. They had been described as NM overall, but literally every single card showed up with a dinged corner. And if that wasn't bad enough, there was some sort of soda (I hope that's what it was) that been spilled on the cards at some point in time, which of course wasn't mentioned in the listing either. I don't know about the rest of you, but things that are sticky from an unknown substance, really gross me out.

Anyway, the cards ended up going back, but it was still a very disappointing experience.

As far as the cards that I'm gonna be showing today go (yes, I will be showing cards), well, normally I probably wouldn't even be showing them on here, but I think after that terrible experience with Kruk Cards, it might be good to occasionally highlight one of the good guys -- especially since they're becoming harder and harder to find on eBay.

Even though I haven't gotten too many cards from the set (yet), I have been a big fan of this year's Panini Classics, especially the Legends portion of the checklist. They've got some names in there that you don't see very often in modern sets (not necessarily these four though), and some of the photo selections are just amazing. Like any modern set, there are plenty of parallels (doesn't bother me at all), and Classics is no exception. The four cards above are from the Timeless Tributes gold parallel, which is numbered to /99.

There's also Optichrome cards, which is just a fancy way of saying chrome refractor. The Optichromes have parallels as well, this Eric Dickerson is of the gold variety, which are numbered to /65. My scanner doesn't do shiny very well, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that these look amazing in person. An I love this particular card so much, that I have two more copies of it currently sitting in my COMC account -- so by my count, there is only 62 more copies out there :)

Speaking of shiny! This card has so much going on, that I couldn't even get a decent photo of it. This one hails from a set that I was completely unfamiliar with called, Panini Unparalleled. It's a Hyper parallel from the Pioneers insert set, and the bad boys numbered to just 25 copies. This was definitely one of those cards that I didn't need, but I was big fan of Tim Brown's when I was young, and it was only 99 cents... so why not? The only minor complaint that I have about it, is the photo, apparently both Panini and Topps don't realize that there is more than one image of Tim Brown in existence, as this one has been used ad nauseam.

All of these cards came from the eBay seller, gopackers79. The cards were packaged extremely well, the combined shipping rates were excellent, and the cards arrived very quickly -- I don't really care about that last point, but some people do, so I figured I might as well mention it. I added this guy to my favorite sellers list, and wouldn't think twice about purchasing from him again.


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.