In case you haven't heard, football's back!

This second to last recap from July's card show haul was delayed by a couple of days, the reason... sheer laziness!

It was supposed to be finished on Saturday, but I started reading a new book -- a book that I found to be quite engrossing -- so other than doing about five hours of work outside, I spent the entire weekend reading... which was really nice. So nice in fact, that I think I'm going to try and replicate the experience this upcoming weekend as well.

As exciting as hearing about me reading a book must be, I do have some cards to show off, so without anymore dilly-dallying, here's a rare all football edition for your viewing pleasure:

I was pretty excited to find my first card (Dan Fouts) from this All Time Great Quarterbacks set at the show in June, and then at the July show...

... I ended up finding eight more!

I didn't show the back of the Fouts last time, so here's a back for anyone who might care about such things.

Considering they're are just base cards, these Pacific Prism's have all kinds of shine. Not rare by any stretch of the imagination, but still, I never see these at shows -- in fact, before finding this quartet, I only owned one card from the set -- so this really was quite the treat!

Anybody familiar with 1994 Pro Tags? I certainly wasn't! I found all of these in a new seller's quarter boxes, and I couldn't resist taking them home with me. At first I just thought that they were some sort of novelty item, but upon further research, I saw that while they are a bit of a novelty item, they were part of an actual set that came in regular boxes -- with packs and everything. Their were even randomly inserted autographs in said packs, the signatures were on the back of the cards, ala Pro Line.

From the same seller that I got the Pro Tags, came another first, in the form of a Joe Montana card that was apparently given away as a freebie by Mervyn's back in 1995. By the time this card was released in 1995, Joe Montana was in his second season with Kansas City, so I thought it was kind of interesting to see that Mervyn's chose to use a photo of Joe from his San Francisco days (as evidenced by his wearing #16).

The back of this card is kind of funny too, what with it's mention of being limited, I mean mine's #233,684, so just how limited is it? Also, you can't get too much more 90's than to refer to something with such a high print run as a "prized collectible".

Here's some randomness from the dime boxes, two shiny, and two not so shiny.

And some 25 cent box randomness, all being of the shiny variety!

Normally I'm able to bring out more of the Archives Reserve rainbow via a cellular phone camera, but I failed pretty hard this time, since people these days always like to shift the blame, I will too... the sun really dropped (fumbled) the ball on this one! Bad photo aside, these are two very cool cards featuring two really great players.

With the football done, there's just the obligatory basketball post left, which will of course be comprised of mostly inserts from the 90's -- so if that's you're thing, I guess you know where you need to be in a few days.


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Bo knows trading

I recently completed a trade with Bo, of Baseball Cards Come to Life!, normally I'm not big on formal trading, but as I'm sure many of you already know, Bo is very easy to work with, so in this instance it worked out pretty well.

Bo had featured these two cards in a trade-bait post a couple of months back, I expressed interest in both of them, and after a short delay the trade was officially underway. I absolutely love the '67 Frank Robinson!

For anyone who might be interested, I will have a '72 want list up within the next few weeks.

Help with Fleer Greats and SP Cuts is always greatly appreciated.

I think I got a lot of Bo's duplicates, I'm not a big Yankees fan, but I am a fan of getting cards that help fill set gaps.

It's funny, I could swore that I had these three cards already, but after getting out their binder I found that I did indeed them. And I think I've passed these up at card shows on more than one occasion, because of thinking that I already had them, at least now I can pass 'em up knowing that I do in fact already have them.

This scan is atrocious, but the card itself is really quite wonderful, as all Archives Reserve's tend to be.

Closing out the package with...

... a bunch of... 

... Topps Lineage needs!

Thank you for all the set help, Bo! Hopefully we can trade again sometime.


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Time to shine

Welcome back to another batch of cards form last Saturday's card show. The first installment featured all things sparkly, today's post of cards that shine, will differ somewhat, but they do ultimately still fit in to the same category, that being... cards of the gaudy variety.

After removing all the cards that are destined to be sent out in care/trade packages, I was surprised by how little was left for me (at least as far as the shiny stuff goes), although looking at it in a glass half full sort of way, taking all those cards out made this post a lot shorter than it would have otherwise been... so that's always a good thing.

I'm sure a number of people are quite familiar with these Artist's Proof parallels from Score's 1997 Showcase series, but I had never seen them before, or at least I don't remember ever having seen them before. While it was cool to finally learn of them, I just wish I could have found more than just these three.

It seems like I'm always able to pick up a couple of needed cards from the Archives Reserve sets at just about every show I go to now, and as you can see, I found a few more from the 2001 edition on Saturday. At fifty cents apiece, these were the only cards in this post that cost more than a quarter. The seller had more that I needed, but a lot of them had some sort of gunk on them, a gunk that didn't seem like it was going to be removable. And if anyone's interested, the Fisk was a duplicate.

I was also able to find two from 2002 edition as well. It's a good thing that I always carry a couple of quarters, because even though this seller had a couple of 3200 ct boxes full of 25 cent stuff, these were the only two cards that I could come up with.

The Topps Season's Best inserts are usually not held in too high of regards by basketball insert collector's, but I've always enjoyed them, and I always enjoy finding stuff that I didn't have, as was the case with this Shareef Abdur-Rahim from the 1998-99 release.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again anyway, the 1998 Upper Deck UD3 Die-Cuts are one of my favorite parallels of all-time. This was the only one of these that I saw at the show, so while I would've liked to have come across more, I am happy to at least be able to knock Pudge off the wantlist.

I've been thinking about starting a frankenset of Topps Chrome colored refractors, if I do, these 2012 purple's would certainly be a nice addition.

Attack of the random photo! This image was apparently captured while taking the pictures for this post. It was kind of funny to see it among the uploaded photos, especially since I don't remember taking it.

Of all the photos/scans in this post, I think this one of the 2011 Topps Diamond Anniversary's turned out best. I mean just look at those colors!

The orange Cutch refractor would be a nice addition to the possible frankenset as well. I've also toyed with the idea of starting one for sepia refractors too, even though that one would be a pretty slow build, as I wouldn't want to pay more than 25 cents each for the cards that went in to the set. I only found one of the sepia's on Saturday, that being the Cashner above, which is numbered to /99.

One of my card show objectives was to try and help Chris out with his 2015-16 Donruss basketball set build, which by the way, I failed miserably in my attempt to do so. I did find two non-base cards from the set though, an Inspirations Die-Cut (#'d to /80) and an Elite Dominators, both of which are inserts/parallels that I'm working on. And don't worry about Chris, because I did end up finding a few other cards for him :)

I came across my first 2017 Topps Chrome Negative Refractor on Saturday as well. I don't anything about young Mr. Marquez, but it sure is an attractive card... scanned pretty well too!

I couldn't get a good picture of these 2015 Topps High Tek's either, but they seemed to have scanned pretty good. I know the background patterns have different names and are of different scarcities, but I couldn't tell you what's what, I just bought them because they were different. I'm always amazed that cards numbered to /50, can be had for just a quarter.

Tim Brown comes from that 2015 Topps High Tek set as well, but he's probably considered to be less special, what with him being numbered to /99 and all.

If I had pick favorites, I'd probably say these 1999 Pacific Prism parallels were my favorite cards from this post, mostly just because I can count on one hand the number of times that I have come across these at a card show. This was back when parallels that were serial numbered and had names like holographic gold, or holographic purple, seemed to be really cutting edge... and in many ways they were, in retrospect, Pacific really was ushering in a new era for trading cards.


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Are you ready for some football?

Even though I haven't paid much attention to football in the last couple of years, that doesn't mean that I am no longer a fan of the sport, I'm just not a fan of the sport in it's current form. With that being said, one would to have to be living under a proverbial rock to not know that, following Sunday's "Big Game", another season will officially be in the books. So, since I did have a few (not nearly as many as usual) football cards in with last year's COMC stash, I figured this would be as good of a time as any to show them.

I picked up this '59 Y.A. just a couple days before his passing last October for around $4. 1959 was the first year of Y.A.'s supposed decline, which was followed by an even worse year in 1960. And as most people know by now, that is when the 49'ers decided to trade their "washed up" quarterback to the Giants, to which he responded by leading the New York to three straight championship games.

Sometime before last summer I came across a seller who was in the process of liquidating their store. I don't know if they didn't have very much to begin with, or if I was just late to the sale, but either way, by the time I saw it there wasn't a whole heckuva a lot left that was of interest to me, except for... eight cards in the 1960's football category, all of which were in really good shape, and all just happened to be Boston Patriots. Needless to say, I bought all eight of them, I mean how was I supposed to turn down the above trio of '61 Topps for less than 50 cents each?

And a solid trio it was, all three guys were members of the original AFL Boston Patriots, and Jim Colclough and Bob Dee were both named to the Patriots All-1960's Team. Chuck Leo never got the chance to earn too many accolades, as just four games into the 1962 season he suffered a severely torn hamstring in a non-football related accident, which effectively ended his career.

In today's NFL, it would be basically impossible to imagine a flanker/kicker being the most important/popular player on a team, but were you to travel back in time some fifty years, you'd find Gino Cappelletti being just that (although it was in the AFL, but you know what I mean)... so much so, that he even earned the nickname of "Mr. Patriot". He is the AFL's all-time leading scorer (1,130 points). It was until 2005, that his Patriots all-time leading scorer record was broken (Adam Vinatieri), a few of his other records have also since been surpassed, but considering that he was playing 14 game seasons, it's amazing to think that so many of his numbers took so long to eclipse.

The above '68 Topps was bought from the same seller as the three 61's, which for some reason, I decided to scan, hence all the pixilation. Everything else in this post that isn't from that seller was photographed on a different day, I thought I'd point that out, just in case anyone wonders about the varying image quality. Now that I got that out of the way, how about seeing a few more needed 68's (different sellers though):

Dave entered the '68 campaign coming off of the best season of his, at that point, ten-year pro career. Taken by the Saints in the 1967 expansion draft, Dave led the league in interceptions (10) and was selected to his first Pro Bowl, which also made him the first Saints player to ever do so. A few years prior, Dave was also a member of the 1963 Chicago Bears championship team.

Randy was drafted in 1966 by the Atlanta Falcons, making him the newly formed franchise's, first quarterback. Randy never quite lived up to his former All-American status, although playing for such bad team, certainly didn't help. He played with four teams during his ten-year NFL career, and spent one season ('74) with the Hawaiians in the World Football League. After football his life completely fell apart, should anyone be so inclined to read about the sad details, you can do so by clicking here  and here.

As a result of their respective Super Bowl appearances earlier in the year, Topps decided to do something a little different by giving all the players from the Packers and Raiders a specially designed horizontal card, each of which featured a different comic style background. I really wish Topps had done this for the whole 1968 set, as I absolutely love the look of these cards. Not surprisingly, there are a number of hall of famers amongst these horizontal cards, including this Doctor Zhivago.

This group of '69 Topps was the other four cards that I was able to get from the Patriots seller. I should have scanned these individually, but I didn't, and it's too late to go back and redo it now.

Cappelletti and Colclough are making their second appearance here today, this time joined by
Mike Taliaferro, who played for the Patriots from 1968-70, making the all-star team in 1969. The other new face to be featured in this quartet is Jim Whalen, who was yet another member of the Patriots All-1960's Team.

I don't if I will ever collect all of the 1970 Topps Super Glossy inserts or not, but Jack Snow here, was just too cheap for me not to buy.

The football section of my hoard wasn't made up entirely of vintage, there were also a few newer and shiny things as well, namely this quartet of cheaply acquired 2001 Topps Archives Reserve:

One of the nice things about the Archives Reserve set, is that the checklist is comprised of pretty much all hall of famers, as well as a few guys who haven't quite made it yet. One could make a very easy case that, John Brodie, who has yet to be enshrined, is much more hall worthy than Joe Namath... but of course, Joe has the name recognition, which unfortunately, is sometimes more important than statistics.

I put in an order with a seller on the Beckett Marketplace just the other day, which was made up of nothing but football cards, so for anyone out there who enjoys the pigskin posts, I should have another one ready to go within the next couple of weeks.


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Card show summary part 2: The non oldies

Hopefully everyone likes pictures, because this will be another image laden post. The only things I'm not showing are the many cards that I was fortunate enough to find for other people (probably some of you reading this).

Since I covered the who, what, and where in the last installment, I'm just going to jump right in.


Seller #5: I didn't know which post this would belong in since there seems to be some debate whether buybacks should be considered old or new. I only saw two at the show and both were overpriced, in my opinion. But I had to have this one for the set, even at the hefty price tag of $2:

For some reason I just don't think they stamped a lot of '62 checklists, so I just couldn't pass it up.


Seller #6: The most expensive thing from this point on is 33 cents (3/$1 box). This seller is at every show and is set up with mostly dime boxes, although this time he had a few more than normal, along with the aforementioned three for a dollar box.

I don't why I bothered scanning this first group of 1994 Action Packed cards. Even though they are in mint condition, because of the gold borders the scans make them look anything but. On the plus side, I now only need a few more cards to complete this set:

I didn't realize there were two of Chuck Daly until after they were scanned.
 

How about some 90's refractors:

I think a few of the baseball one's are doubles (I haven't checked yet), but at 10 cents each I'm not about to leave any behind.

Here are some misc. 90's basketball inserts, which contain a few more bad scans:

You can't tell from the image, but the 1999-00 Skybox Metal card of Scottie Pippen is one of the emerald parallels.

Now is where we get to some stuff that has probably been shown a million times on the blogs, but most of it is new to me, so you'll just have to endure (or skip ahead a little):



These are some really great inserts from the 2012 Cooperstown set.

Some more players of yore sets:

Here are a couple of more contemporary cards from the 3/$1 box:

And finally from the same box, a card from a set I had never seen before:

I now have yet another new-ish set to work on.


Seller #7: This is the only guy at these shows who ever has 20/$1 boxes, along with other various priced boxes.

I will start with a trio of 1996 Leaf Preferred Steel, that were had for 25 cents each:

A few more misc. inserts, parallels, minis, refractors, etc. that ranged in price from 10 to 25 cents each:

Now for something I somehow didn't know even existed until a couple of months ago, when one was featured on Billy's Cardboard History:

These are the xplosion parallels from the 1998-99 Molten Metal set. Considering they came out during my heyday of collecting I don't know how I missed them. I don't recall ever buying any packs, but I should have at least seen them at a card shop or in a Beckett article. The Larry Johnson and Toni Kukoc were a 25 cents each, while the rest were 5 cents apiece.

Rounding out this post is a whole mess of 2001 Archives Reserve, that came courtesy of the 20/$1 box. I had seen these online many times, but never in person. I guess since I was able to get almost 1/4 of the 100 card set I might as well add this to my set building list. For those that don't know these are refractors, so that's why they look a little weird in the scans:

 

That's it for this round of card show acquisitions. At least the next three posts will be very scan heavy with trade recaps, so don't say you weren't warned (if you're the sort who doesn't like lots of pictures).


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