Card Show Blaster

A couple of weekends ago, I attended our semi-annual local card show.  It was a smaller show this time around, with only about a dozen or vendors, but I still managed to find some cardboard to take home with me. Some of these cards are the result of trades with some friends that I saw there, but in all, I spent just around $20 to add these cards to my collection.

My ice-breaker table for the day had a lot of brand new cards, and was really the only table selling any semblance of modern common base cards.  All of these cards were either 2/$1 or 3/$1.  Cal, Pujols, deGrom and the Panini Harper are all serial-numbered.  Bellinger is a refractor, and the 2019 Donruss Kris Bryant is the nickname parallel.  Not bad for 50 cents or less apiece.

Sticking with the baseball, here is my favorite purchase of the day.  One guy had a ton of vintage cards on display with typical retail prices, but I noticed a binder behind him that said, "1975--Quarter Each."  So I rummaged through the binder and picked out 20 cards for a five spot.  The Foster and Fisk are obviously well-loved, but the rest are in pretty good shape.  Madlock and the Home Run Leaders card are minis.

Besides the stars seen above, I also picked up some great Cubs from the '75 set.  Kessinger and Hooton are my favorites, but I can't stop looking at that eye-blistering airbrush job on Billy Grabarkewitz's hat.  It's like when you lost a tooth and your tongue just wanted to hang out in the hole--my eyes just keep going there.

Moving on to the NFL, here are some All-Decade players in both base cards and inserts, original playing days and post-retirement cards.

I picked up some cards for my Heisman mini-collection.  My favorite thing about these cards are that most of them show the college uniform.  I didn't know until after I got home that the Mayfield is a photo variation SP, so that's an extra score.

Here are some cards just to help fill out a set or two.

And a couple that don't really have a place in  my collection, other than I like the players and I thought cards looked pretty slick.

Of course, I gotta come away with some Packers.  These are all current year cards, and include my first J'Mon Moore cards.  There's plenty of shine to go around here, that's for sure.

Legendary quarterbacks: leading the Packers since 1992.  The Brett Favre is from 1998, when they produced a mere 5000 cards for this serial-numbered set.  It also represents my 100th Favre.

No, I did not purposefully purchase a slabbed Clay Matthews rookie, even if it is Gem Mint.  Most of the Packers above came from trading with a friend of mine.  He really only collects graded vintage and Al Kaline cards, but he opens a ton just for fun.  Most card shows, you can find him sitting at his table and handing out cards for free, because he just likes to break boxes without needing the cards.  So I traded some Tigers to him, and he handed me a stack of Packers, including not one, but two, graded Clay Matthews rookies.  I'm still debating whether or not to set them free.

I picked up two autos.  One is of fellow SUU T-bird Miles Killebrew, a gorgeous cracked ice numbered to 24.  Garrett Gilbert is currently quarterbacking the Orlando Apollos of the AAF and is having an MVP caliber season.  I really hope the league sticks around.  I've been trying to support it.  I've even gone to games in weather that looks like this:

In fact, this particular game featured Gilbert and his Apollos defeating the Salt Lake Stallions.  This picture was taken during halftime, after the snow had slowed down.  It was hard to even see the field before this.  But I'm all-in with the AAF, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to pick up a Gilbert auto.

It wasn't a huge haul, but it wasn't huge show either, as it turns out.  For the price of a blaster, I'm happy to be come home with some cards that can stick around in my collection.