All the Big Hits

I have three more TCDB trades to post and then I should be caught up on that front.  I was very happy with all three of these trades, so I scanned most of the cards I received. The last of the three trades was probably the biggest I have ever pulled off, in terms of hits and numbered cards.

First, let's start north of the border.  Canadian TCDB member karisal proposed a trade that brought me some baseball and football.

Some Update Cubs, including my first Cole Hamels and Brandon Morrow in Cubbie blue.  These were probably my most desired cards in Update this year, so I'm glad to have added them.

I'm also now two cards closer to the Wrigley Field insert set.  Jake Arrieta highlights his two no-hitters, making this one of my favorite cards in the set because it's one of my favorite memories as a fan.

 DeShone Kizer was as bad as advertised in relief for Aaron Rodgers this year.  A couple of new Jordy Nelsons here, and a Southern Utah T-Bird alert.  Miles Killebrew was part of SUU's Big Sky championship team that sent three players to the NFL a few years ago.

This lone card is a nice Orlando Pace for my All-2000s collection.  I just noticed that most of the cards on my Pace page feature him as a Buckeye.  As is the case with most linemen, he is easier to find as a rookie than later on in his career.

Kari helped me with a couple of set builds.  I'm getting awfully close to my 92 Ultra set.  The Score NFL Draft inserts from this year caught my eye from the very beginning, and I've been working on the set ever since.  I'm glad to have Mayfield out of the way, but I still need the likes of Saquon Barkley, Sam Darnold, and Josh Rosen.

My next trade comes from mrmike.

He also helped me with some set builds: 1991 Upper Deck Game Breakers (that's former Bronco Bobby Humphery, for those who can't tell), 1992 Ultra, 1993 Fleer, and 2012 Topps.  That's a nice Luke Kuechly rookie included here.

 Included among the Packers of the trade were two new Jordy rookies and a nifty art checklist from 1992 Upper Deck.

Some BYU players, including my first Ryan Denneys.  He carved out a pretty decent career from 2002-2010 after being drafted in the second round.  Former Outland Trophy winner Jason Buck is a local guy whom my dad once met in the grocery store.  My wife's cousin is also related to him through marriage.  Despite these convoluted connections, I have never met him myself.

Isn't Stadium Club beautiful?  1991 isn't my favorite year for Stadium Club, but I love these cards.  1994, however, is one of my favorite TSC sets.  I know the names are hard to read, but I've always liked this set.

2008 Upper Deck may not be Stadium Club, but it can certainly hold its own, photography-wise.

Mrmike also sent me some All-Decade team needs, including an Aeneas Williams rookie and a pretty cool looking Collector's Edge Excalibur.

The big trade came from wudu44.  There were autos, relics, and serial numbers going both ways, and we were able to work it out pretty well.

Oh lookie, more Draft inserts.  I don't even think I have this set on my wantlist here on the blog, but I'm more than halfway through it.

Another Game Breaker Hologram, this time from 1992.  Hall of Famer Will Shields makes a rookie appearance.  Rookie Roundtable is a pretty cool insert set from Collector's Edge.

More Jordy, but shiny!  I really love the Certified Comeback Player of the Year card.

And now for the big stuff.

A couple of BYU autos.  Both Ansah and Van Noy are having pretty good seasons.  A trio of Packers jerseys.  Davante Adams has really become a solid playmaker this year.  Ty Montgomery is numbered to 10.  And Bazooka!  It's a Pro Bowl jersey swatch from hard-to-find All-Decade player La'Roi Glover.  Very nice.

A big thanks to all of these TCDB members.  I hope you enjoyed the trades as much as I did.  As always, it was fun.

Secret Santa?

Just to be clear, I didn't enter this year's Secret Santa exchange on the blogsphere.  I forgot the cutoff date, and just missed it.  Yet I still received an anonymous package of cardboard last week.

Here is my only clue.  Now, there is a well-known TCDB user who goes by the handle C2Cigars.  It seems likely that he is the "culprit."  He is currently doing some random gifting to celebrate his 50th collecting anniversary, so this fits right in.  The one hangup with that theory is that we have never traded, so I don't know where my address would have come from.  So was it him?  Or was it somebody else in this "C2Cigars Club?"  I really don't know.

The photo mailer contained a card saver with three cards inside.

Three BYU players that I needed!  The Gifford Nielsen on the left is extra cool.  It's a 1980 Stop-N-Go oddball.  I'm assuming that Stop-N-Go is a convenience store or something.  We don't have any in these parts, and since the card is almost 40 years old, I don't know if they would be still around.  The card is a lenticular type card, like an old Kellogg's.  It's about the same dimension as the Kellogg's cards from the same time period.  Pitta is a red Score parallel from last year.

So, Chuck, if this is your doing, I thank you for your generosity.  If it's somebody else, I give you the same thanks.  I appreciate the gift in the Spirit of the Season.  Merry Christmas to all!  May visions of bubble gum cards dance in your heads.

Yet Another TCDB Roundup

In keeping with the habit I've developed, I'll highlight several TCDB trades in one post here.

 First, here's a shout-out to TCDB user deegsteach.  Deegsteach helped me out with my 2016 Topps Archives set build.

He also sent some baseball greats my way.  I needed these for a project I'm working on, so they will probably make another appearance on this blog someday.  I'd never had any of these Legendary Cuts cards before, and I've got to say that they are pretty cool.  I'll take these over Panini Cooperstown any day.

Finally, he sent some throwback cards of modern players to fit various parts of my collection.  I'm loving the rookie El Mago here.

In another trade, AirPete sent me some older cards.  These 1983 Topps stars are all great.  I'm not sure that any of them can top Walter Payton, but John Hannah and Kellen Winslow are pretty high in my book.  The Packers cards are the old Fleer Team Action cards.

Also from AirPete came these also older, but not AS old, cards I needed for my All-Decades binders.

Resident TCDB Rams collector sent over some of my favorite football team.  Jordy Nelson may no longer be a Packer, but he's still my favorite PC player.  I haven't decided if I'll chase after his Raider cards, but there are still plenty of Green and Gold cards for me to worry about that.

A small trade with Budler brought in some former BYU stars.  This was a college-based trade, as Budler is a noted Nebraska fan and collector.

This trade, from nymarine914, took a long time to happen.  This was one of those packages that gets lost in the mail before finally finding its destination.  Nymarine and I stayed in contact the whole time, and we were almost ready to call it a lost cause when it arrived at last.  When it did, I got a couple of Heisman winners and a Rod Woodson rookie.

I also got a vintage Packer and two cards for my centers mini-collection.  I love that centers are the only player guaranteed to touch the ball on every play, so I love cards that picture centers with their hands on the ball.

There hasn't been a ton of baseball in this post, but I'll end it here with three from nymarine's package. 

I haven't been quite as busy in the past few months with my trading on TCDB, but I'm still a getting a couple each month.  I have a couple more to post, but they were both bigger trades and this post has included enough scans already.  Thanks to all the great traders out there.

I'm Ugly and I'm Proud!

I've had a hard time with my Ugly Sweater post for the Baseball Every Night contest.  I know I've come across plenty of cards in my time that were just downright ugly.  It's been hard, though, to recall them from the depths of my memory, where they have been banished.  There are a few that come to mind, but I'm still not sure that they qualify as the ugliest card I own or have seen.  Still, let's have a gander.

Interestingly, I have four cards to show in pairs.  The first two are both football and have a similar theme: the hair.

Both of these cards frightened me a little when I was a kid.  I remember having the James Wilder card in my collection as a youngster, and I always wondered why his hair looked green. There is a greenish tint that is not like a hair-dye hue.  This looks more like a patch of moss growing from his head.  Along the years, I lost the card somehow.  Then I started building the 1988 Topps set last year, and when Wilder returned to my collection, I noticed his hair still looked green.  So it wasn't just a printing error for the copy I owned.  I still can't explain it.  Mark Murphy, on the other hand, might welcome some hair.  Once again hearkening back to my younger years, I was a little scared by the wrinkly, veiny scalp on full display.  I hate to make fun of anyone's appearance on a card (Heaven forbid my likeness ever ends up printed on cardboard and distributed to the masses), but this one haunted my 9-year-old brain.

The other two are baseball cards, and they're both drawn cards.

Peter mentioned in his post that Donruss often screwed up Diamond Kings, and I have to agree.  Just look what they did to Gracie!  He looks like a Picasso, and I don't mean that it's a masterpiece.  The most egregious part is probably the straight line running down his cheek.  I'm not sure what's going on with Matt Dominguez here.  It doesn't even look like they tried to make him look like a person.  I know that this set really didn't put forth too much of an effort to capture the likeness of the player portrayed, but this one looks insulting.  And it's not consistent with the rest of the set, either.  It's like the artist singled out Dominguez.  That half-bull, half-giraffe neck is crazy.  My kids love this card, by the way.  I don't.

There are probably other, uglier cards in my collection, but these are the ones that stayed in my mind as I thought about the topic.  Thanks for the contest, Peter.  I hope you are all enjoying the sight of ugly cardboard this holiday season.

Tis the Season for Goodwill

A lot of these "Cards on Cards sent me some stuff that he got from Goodwill" posts have been circulating lately.  I guess they are helping to identify the football collectors in cardsphere, as all of the cards Kerry picked up are of the pigskin variety.  Most of them came from the mid-90s, so I claimed some to bolster my All-1990s decade binder, some sets, and, of course, some Packers.  There was definitely a theme of inserts, oddballs, and parallels in the Goodwill collection.

Case in point: here are All-Pro inserts from 1991, 1992, and 1994 Fleer.  Everything 1991 Fleer is kind of blah, including these inserts.  But I really like the All-Pro inserts that followed over the years.

Here are more varied inserts.  This Gino Torretta is my first card of him, and the only reason I care is for the sake of my nascent Heisman binder.  I'm realizing just how little I bought in 1992 (I was only 10), because I had never seen any of the next few insert sets.  We have 1992 Pro Set Power Combos, 1992 Score Gridiron Stars, 1992 Upper Deck Coaches Report, 1992 Wild Card Field Force, and 1992 Wild Card Running Wild.  When I saw the pencil on Edgar Bennett's name, I thought I was looking at some kind of oddball or promo, but no.  These were pack issued inserts.  I find it very odd that Wild Card saw fit to honor Vince Workman-- a guy with all of 83 career carries in three seasons at the time the card was issued--in an insert set called "Running Wild."

Wild Card stripes, Topps Gold, and Collector's Choice silver stamps.  This is definitely the 90s.  I really like the Score Gold Zone LeRoy Butler.  And the double exposure Gary Anderson on a 1994 Special Effects card makes a really-good looking card.

I mentioned some oddballs, and here they are.  I've almost completed my Monsters of the Gridiron set now.  Skybox's 75 Seasons promo caught my eye, because I have lots of fond memories of that 75th Season celebration.  If I wasn't a football junkie at that time, I certainly was by the end of the year.  The two Cortez Kennedy cards are the Orowheat Seattle Seahawks team set.  I didn't even realize they were parallels when I asked for them.  I just needed some Kennedy for my All-Decade collection.

Apparently Topps did an Archives football set in 1994.  I know next to nothing about this set, but I got a legendary Pat Summerall and a gold Packer.

I really appreciated the Goodwill football, but Kerry didn't stop there.  He threw in some MLB Rookie of the Year winners, too.  I wasn't expecting this.  I'm glad to have the Bowman Jason Bay rookie, but it was awfully generous to throw in parallels, SPs, and inserts of popular players Aaron Judge,Corey Seager, and Derek Jeter.

I'll leave you with some shiny baseball players.  Longoria and Posey are both of the refractor type.

I asked for more football than I thought I should lay claim to, and then Kerry added more than I requested.  I appreciate the generosity, and yes, the Goodwill.