Seeing double vision

Like a lot of folks, I got a COMC shipment this month. As per usual, my shipment was made up of cards that had been accumulating since last year, 228 cards to be exact, although now that they're not offering free shipping during the Black Friday sale, this'll be the last time that I have this many cards shipped, as I will now just do so when the count reaches 100 and get the $5 credit for shipping them.

The good news is that I actually got all of my cards this years -- the shipments from the previous two years were both missing cards, cards that I got refunded for, which is nice, but it still sucks knowing that those missing cards were one's that I will never be able to find for those prices again.

The bad news is that I have five damaged cards in the shipment -- not from shipping though, no, this was the kind of damage that can't be seen in the scans, and wasn't noted, so whoever buys them doesn't find out about it until they're in hand. From past experience, I can tell that these were damaged by their automated sorters, but they'll never admit that their machines damage cards though (just ask all of the people who have sent in undamaged cards that were rejected later, after being sorted, for being damaged). Since these five cards total about eight bucks in credit (gotten from doing the Challenges), you can bet your sweet bippy that I will be returning them. The worst part though was that one of those cards was going to be for someone else, and it's fairly rare, so it was nice that they could damage something like that without even noticing it. Oh, and I said that I got 228 cards, well, it was supposed to only be 227... they sent me an extra card! Some people might take advantage of this small oversight and keep it, but I'm not one of them, it'll be going back with the damaged cards.

It probably sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm really not, aside for the damaged cards, I still got 222 cards that I probably couldn't have gotten cheaper anywhere else -- and as mentioned, everything was paid for with credit that was earned from doing the Challenges, which I'm definitely not complaining about, because without that I wouldn't have been able to afford about half of these cards.

My accumulations in the past have usually been all over the place category wise, but this year everything pretty much falls into one of four categories: 90's inserts and parallels, player collections, non-sports, and... Billy Muffett! I'm joking, sort of. That fourth category is actually duplicates, although the more accurate description would be, "Multiple copies of cards that I really like".

I still don't know what brought on this want to own lots of copies of the same card, and honestly, after a year or so of collecting like this, I don't really care. It's fun for me, so I'm just gonna keep doing it until it no longer is.

As you might be able to tell from the first two scans, the '61 Topps Billy Muffett is one of my favorites, and is one of the few that I actually remember to look for on fairly regular basis. I haven't put them away yet, but I think that with these new additions, I've got a shade over thirty copies now.

The "golden shower" Ichiro is another one of my faves, although I'm sort of hoarding all of the cards that contain this image from that year's chrome and flagship sets.

I only vaguely remember when the Topps 75th Anniversary set came out, I saw that it was basically just made up of reprinted cards, and sort of wrote it off. Then a few years later I saw post about them from Billy, from it I learned that they had also done parallels, which made the set a little more appealing since it wasn't just straight-up reprints anymore. I had meant to look into those parallels a little sooner, but it must not of been meant to be, because I didn't actually do so until just a couple of months ago.

I ended up getting about half dozen of the foils, which are the most common parallels from the set, but the only one that I got in duplicate was this Incredible Hulk. This card was already the best image from the original set, and I gotta say, I think it looks even better with the shiny (sort of refractorish) green border.

I must've gotten these either late last year, or earlier this year, because I don't really remember buying all of these. It it is one of my favorite cards from the 2014 Prizm set though, so I'm not disputing the purchase (and I'm too lazy to go back and double check it), I'll just have to assume that there was a bunch of them for dirt cheap prices... which prompted me to buy them all.

I spent a little more time looking at the 2015 Topps Tek set this year, than I had in previous years. I like the look of the set, but there's an awful lot of players in there that are of absolutely no interest to me, so what's a boy to do? Well, buy lots of copies of the cards I do like, of course!

I haven't really looked into what the odds were with the various parallels, but I think that the purple one's might've been one of the more common, but even so, for less than a buck apiece, I considered these Barry's to be criminally undervalued.

I'm not actively looking to buy lots of copies of every card in this post, Mark Jackson here being one of those, but I do like the card, and since no one really cares about this particular MJ, his cards tend to be very cheap... too cheap for me to pass up!

I loved LJ when I was a kid, but this too is another one that I'm not actively seeking, says the person who owns like half a dozen of them now.

I've said it before, but I really like the contrast that's created when a b&w image is put in front of a colored background.

One of my favorites from the 2015-16 Prizm set.

Shareef is another guy that nobody really cares about, but I collect him, so I might as well buy up all of the cheap copies of this wonderful looking card.

Some of these purchases have been inspired by Chris' matching color collection. Karl doesn't quite fit that bill, but it's close enough to still look really good in this shade of blue.

Damian Lillard is one of the few active players that I'm collecting, and of all of his cards that I've seen, this 2015-16 ruby red is by far my favorite. I've probably got close to a page of these now too.

I've probably talked about this card more on the blog here, than anyone else has ever talked about any other card from the 2015-16 set. These are the only two colors that I'm actively looking for, mostly because I still can't decide which one looks better. By the by, have you noticed anything about the last five scans? There all made up of light blue and ruby red's. A lot of the singles in my stockpile were made up of those two colors too, something that I didn't realize until I started going through them. No matter how much I apparently like cards in these two shades, with the reds being numbered to /350, and the blues to /199, there is only a finite number of each for me to get, so some of these collections of duplicates will likely be capped off at some point, whether I want them to or not.

It'll probably be a while before I finish photographing and scanning the rest of my COMC order, so don't be looking to see much more of it any time soon. Other than those made at the two or three shows I will hopefully attend, I don't anticipate purchasing a lot of cards during the upcoming year, so much like this year, my COMC hoard will probably make up the bulk of the card content that you see here on the blog in 2020.

And finally, on completely unrelated note, Andy, from Stadium Fantasium, is running his second annual Rose Bowl contest. I think that he's offering something extra for promoting it, but I'm not gonna mention that I did so, as I don't care about getting something just for spreading the word. I do however care about him having a successful contest, so get yourself entered, not only will it be fun, but you'll also have a chance to win some really great (not hyperbole) prizes this year.


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Are you ready for some more football?

Like it or not, I've got another post here of more football cards from November's card show, on the plus side though, there's a lot more variety today than my previous Prizm only post.

The guy that I got all of the Prizm in the previous post from, had two 3200 ct football dime boxes, and while they weren't the best dime boxes that I've ever gone through, I was still able to find some gems (at least to me) amongst all of the early 90's base cards that made up the bulk of these boxes.

Ten cent refractors are always fun, doubly so when they're of player's that I'm actually familiar with. And the Witten is an Xfractor, so I guess I should say that ten cent Xfractors are always fun as well.

Between these two guys, there's almost too much handsome for one post! Even though I wasn't familiar with this set beforehand (2013 Topps '59 design minis), I couldn't pass up the opportunity at getting my first Tom Brady card.

The scan for 1000-Yard Club Dickerson does not do it justice at all. It is such a cool card in hand, I don't know how to describe it, but it's got a refractor-like quality, but the background, which moves, feels like there depth to it - kind of like a hologram, but not a hologram, if that makes any sense.

The Sayers did not scan well at all, and the Shuler is supposed to have a greenish tint to it... at least the Boz turned out alright though.

A couple of miscellaneous inserts and serial numbered cards here, my favorite being the Red Grange, which I initially thought (because of the shine and depth) was a Prizm insert of some sort, turns out it wasn't, it's from the 2016 Panini Rookies & Stars Great American Heroes insert set.

I was kind of surprised to find a pair of semi-vintage hall of famers, and an autographed semi-vintage hall of very gooder in these boxes. I am fond of autographs, so the Morton was pretty cool, but I really dig the '74 Larry Little - it's just a nice looking card.

It's not every day that you find such clean and sharp cornered 61's in a dime box, I'm not working on the set anymore, but I'll take them just the same. Not only are these in really great shape, but none of these guys were slouches either, both Mutschellar and Patton earned rings with their respective teams, and all three were selected to Pro Bowls.

This would be it as far as my dime box purchases went, but this guy did have a $1 box as well. Not a great box, but I did find the Carter and Tarkenton purple prizms from the previous post in there, as well as this beauty:

Other than being slightly crooked, this photo turned out really well, which is a good thing, because I really wanted everyone to see how neat this Frank Gore gold refractor was. One of my favorite cards from the day for sure, and in case anyone cares, it's also #'d to 50.

Between these, the Prizms, and some of the baseball from the first post, I did pretty well with this new seller, hopefully I'll see him there again some time.

Now, if that wasn't enough football for you, I also got a few things from Jim's 6/$1 boxes:

You can never go wrong with lenticular, unless you're scanning it, then apparently you can wrong with the Collector's Edge Quantum Motion cards.

People seem to either love or hate Colin Kaepernick, me, I'm indifferent towards him (as I am with most athletes), I do however love acetate inserts, so Colin wasn't about to be left behind. And it's hard to tell, but the Dez is a mini sepia refractor, who knew that there even was such things?

Some cool miscellaneous 90's (and 2000) inserts/parallels, please forgive the wonky scan.

Here's something that was new to me, 1993 Pro Set Power Combos Prizms. I will fight anyone that says that these aren't the coolest thing you've seen all day!

As interesting as these are, they're also a bit confusing. The backs are being shown with both cards being right side up, but you can tell that the Chargers isn't oriented properly, also the numbering is different. At first I thought it was an error of some sort, turns out it isn't, as they're from two different insert sets - Power Combos Prizms, and Power Combos Prizms PC. From the front, they look the same to me, so other than the numbering, I have no idea what the difference is.

How about a 1970 Kellogg's for just 15 cents? I don't ever see any Kellogg's at shows, so to find this one, which is in absolutely mint condition, was a real treat. This is actually my first ever card from that set as well, now if I could just find a few more at this price...

I did pick up a few basketball cards at this show as well (not nearly as many as usual though), and had intended to show them in the next post, but after looking at the scan again - which didn't turn out too well - I think I'll just wait and dump them in an odds and ends post somewhere down the road, I don't have much to say about them either, so they'll be better suited for that kind of setting.

If all goes well, I'll be attending one of the twice a year mega shows this weekend, so I just might have another series of card show posts in three months time :)


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Backlogged baseball

I used to be so good about showing off my card show spoils in a timely manner. When I first started the blog a couple of years ago I would have everything photographed and/or scanned within a day or two, the recap post(s) would then be up within another day or two - fast forward a few years, and now I feel like I've accomplished something if I'm able to get all of that done within the following 30 days.

No sense of accomplishment this time though, as I'm just now getting around to the goodies that were gotten at the last show that I went to, which only took place at the end of this past November! Yep, only 2 1/2 months ago, that might be a new record for me?

I hadn't originally planned on going to this particular show, but I had plenty of Secret Santa shopping to do, and this was going to be my best opportunity to find some stuff for Billy and Mark, stuff that hopefully wouldn't suck.

Since it's been a couple of months now, some of the details are a little fuzzy, but I do remember that the weather was supposed to be nice that day, so I was trying to get there and back as quick as I could, I hate wasting nice days away from home. Because of this, I ended up getting there about half an hour earlier than normal. Usually things are jumping at that these shows around the crack of the dawn, not this time though, in fact, there was only about half a dozen dealers set up when I got there, but things did get going pretty quick.

Everybody's favorite seller, Jim, wasn't even there yet, so I had to bide my time by going to one of the few guys who was set up, a guy I've never seen before, who had pretty expansive spread. Much of his offerings were of the football variety, which worked for me, since that's what I've been most interested in lately, at least cardwise. After going through all of his football cards (those will be in a separate post), I noticed that he had two 3200 ct baseball dime boxes, so I went to work on those.

The first row I started in on had around 100 Griffey's grouped together, a lot of it was stuff that I already had at one time in my original Junior collection, stuff I don't really want again (early 90's base), but there were a few things of interest. The Gallery PPI up in the right hand corner is one of those auction points cards:

I remember these from the 1999-00 basketball set, but I never knew that they did them on the baseball side too. The basketball points were literally just points cards, these are actual baseball cards, which are apparently collected as such. I already showed this card to somebody via the interwebs, who didn't hesitate to make me an offer for it, supposedly a 100 points Junior is somewhat desirable, who knew? I think this is pretty nifty card, so I didn't take the offer, tempting as it was.

Of the dozen or so Griffey's that I got, this 1999 Tek is probably the coolest. Looks like these tend to sell for a bit on COMC, so that's always fun to find something like that for just a dime.

Found a run of Ichiro cards as well. I already had a copy of both the Lineage refractor, and the green Bowman, but they're both pretty, so I certainly didn't mind getting another of each. Even at a dime, the gold Bowman probably should've been left behind... it's not a very interesting card.

Here's just some random shiny.

And here we have some random... random? The Thome Clippings card is kind of neat, I don't recall ever having seen one of those before. I have quite a few Triumvirate's on the basketball side, but this was my first baseball one.

I have wanted one of Dan(ny) Ainge's baseball rookies for a long time, I say that, but I've never actually took the time to look for one, so I guess you can say that I wanted one in spirit. This one's got a punky corner, but it'll do until I can find a better one.

I had just finished getting through the first row of this dime box when Jim finally got there, so with the prospect of being able to get in on his stuff right away (that never happens for me), I quickly settled up with this guy - with every intention of coming back and seeing what else his boxes had to offer (spoiler: I didn't) - and made my way over to Jim... just as he was putting out mucho stacks of vintage!

I got there just in time to secure a spot before the feeding frenzy officially began, because of this, I was even able to go through three whole stacks before anybody else, plucking out four cards along the way. The first of said four cards was this really fantastic '62 Al Kaline, numbers two and three were...

... these guys! As far as vintage all-star subsets go, '68 is probably my least favorite, too much wasted space for my liking - that being said, it's not very often that I come across an affordable vintage Aaron or Clemente, in this kind of condition.

At $5 apiece, these last three cards were my "big ticket" items from the show, although the fourth card I had picked up, a creased '64 Mantle, would've been a little more, but Jim and I were a bit off with what we thought it was worth (I was most certainly being too cheap in my assessment of the card's value), so I didn't end up getting that one, which is fine, as there's plenty more of them out there.

While making my way through what was left of the "good" stacks (HOFer's, high numbers, etc.), I overheard someone asking about a couple of unpriced stacks, as it turns out, those were the 25 cent piles, which were made up of mostly "commons". There wasn't much left for me to look through by the time I got to them, but I did find one biggie...

... ANOTHER 1961 BILLY MUFFETT! This pretty much made up for not being able to get the Mantle (I'm only half being facetious btw).

Jim didn't have any dime boxes this time, but he did have some 6/$1 boxes, and those rarely disappoint, so after the vintage had been gone through, I hit the bargain boxes:

Jim had an awful lot of these 2018 sepia refractors, had I known that I would be owing a couple of people return packages, I would've bought more than just these three.

I've been buying any, and all, cheap copies of the 2011 legends variants (in parallel form) that I happen to come across, the Koufax Cognac for 15 cents might just be the best deal that I've found on one so far.

Tim must've just hit a homer, good for him! Normally I'm not a big rookie guy, but even so, I'm not gonna pass up a cheap Freddie Freeman. The McGwire is a sample, so that's something?

The last of my baseball purchases from Jim's bargain boxes is kind of interesting, and I have no clue as to what it is. The front is done up to look like a '58 Hires Root Beer (even though Mantle didn't have a card in that set), and the back...

... well, I don't what the back is supposed to look like, but it's certainly not a Hires back. I don't think it's a Broder, feels much different than those usually do, so I guess if anybody know what's going on here, please let me know.

By this time, it was getting kind of late, but since I hadn't found anything for one of the two people that I had to find Secret Santa gifts for, I decided to hit up one more table, and I'm glad I did, because not only did I find enough SS stuff, but I also found...

... a couple of much needed Golden Age inserts in a dime box! Unfortunately, that's all I found in these particular dime boxes, but just finding these four cards alone made the dig worth it.

I was now done for the day, there was still plenty of tables that I didn't even walk by, but I didn't care, it was time to go... so I went!

There was plenty of basketball and football cards gotten as well, especially football, so you can expect to see those coming soon to a computer (or phone) screen near you.


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A rainbow of (Kin)dness

As mentioned in the previous post, I was fortunate enough to receive a number of very generous packages during the month of December, and I am very overdue in giving public thanks. Now that I'm caught up with a few things, blog and life related, I can now start getting everything shown.

Some of these packages that will be shown over the next couple of posts will probably be out of order, as far as when they were received, but I scanned everything in a certain order, so that's the order in which they will be shown -- I say "certain order", but that really just translates to "completely random", I mention this because I don't want anyone to think I'm doing a worst to best, or vice-versa, I could never do such a thing when it comes to items that multiple people took the time (and money) to send to me.

Okay, so first up is, Kin, of many things fame! Seriously though, you can find Kin all over the place, on Twitter, on YouTube, and of course, there's always Bean's Ballcard Blog.

You often hear people on the blogs, and on Twitter, mention that this person, and that person, are great ambassadors for the card collecting community, or "The Hobby". Well, in my mind, there are few people who are more influential in this community than Kin. He rarely gets the accolades for all that he does, and has done, which is a real shame, because he has done an awful lot -- and being the humble person that he is, he isn't one to go around telling people of all the things he's done, heck, he won't even admit to being as important as he is on the rare occasion that someone does acknowledge him (I know, I've tried).

I won't go into everything that I've seen him do, or heard other people mention him doing, but I will say that one of the most important things that he does, is to tweet (and retweet) out links to people's blog posts. Now I realize that this might not seem like a big deal to some, but trust me, it is! Kin's got incredible pull, so when he tweets out a link to a post, he puts eyes on that post, I've experienced this many times, so I know what I'm talking about here. And for any blogger who is not on Twitter that might be wondering how this applies to them, well, it doesn't matter if you're on Twitter or not, if you have a blog, Kin is probably tweeting out links to your posts and you don't even know it... and those tweets are most certainly increasing the number of views on those posts!

Now that I've paid proper respects to the house of Kin, let's take a look at what he sent me :)

Kin sent most of these Topps parallels not knowing whether I would like them or not, even mentioning that he hoped I could find good homes for any of the one's that I didn't want. A few of them I don't about yet, but I can tell you (and Kin) that I absolutely love the Todd Helton, he has two cards in the 2014 set, but I think this one would technically be his sunset card. I have two copies of this Red Foil now, and if I ever come across any more cheap copies, I'll probably get those too!

As far as the cards at the top of the page go, that Zimmerman is now my first card of him, and the Braun is like the second or third of his that I now own, not a fan of his, but he is a name, so he was added to a binder. While looking at the Braun card, I couldn't help but wonder if he would ever be able to play anywhere other than Milwaukee? I've made it no secret that I don't follow a lot of modern sports anymore, for the most part I just read Rotoworld in the morning to see who did what the day before. It seems like his numbers are still pretty good, but I haven't heard anything about where he currently stands with baseball fans in general, is he still loathed? Would fans in another city accept him, especially if they thought he could help their team win? Anyone?

I know I've said it on multiple occasions, but I just can't seem to get over how different, and how awesome, these cognac's look when scanned -- as for Tony Sipp, I had never heard of him before, but according to the back of this card, he was born 360 days after me... interesting?

Will you look at that? My first 2013 Topps blue sparkle, or as COMC refers to it, my first 2013 Topps Wrapper Redemption Blue Slate. I've seen these on the blogs before, but have never seen one in person, and let me tell you, no matter what you call them, they are pretty! Having never opened any 2013 Topps, I don't really know what the wrapper redemption thing is all about, but at this point I don't really care either, I just know that it looks great amongst the couple of pages of Indians cards that I have in my newly created team binders.

A couple of months ago, Kin was selling a bunch of stuff on Twitter, I saw this 2016 Donruss Elite green parallel amongst said stuff, and knew that I had to have it (just look at those contrasting colors!). I asked kin if he would be interested in trading it if no one else ended up buying it, he responded by saying that I could have it, and a trade wouldn't be necessary! When I first the picture of this card, I thought that part of it was acetate, but it isn't, you can really tell that from the scan. I'm a big fan of acetate, but this was one instance where I was kind of glad to learn that it was just solid piece of cardboard, a very shiny piece of cardboard.

Thank you again for the cards, Kin! And thank you again for all that you do for everyone else, especially when it comes to your fellow bloggers.


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