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.

Baseball on Super Bowl Sunday

I've been on collection hiatus for a little while.  Some of that is self-imposed--I resolved not to buy any cards in the month of February and I've turned off trading on TCDB to save some postage money and to fix up my tradelists.  That doesn't explain my absence of blogging, however.  That's due to outside factors.  I've been focused on many other things that are pushing blogging aside.  It's not the lack of new cards that has me lacking for content; on the contrary, I'm backlogged for material.  Blogging just hasn't been a priority.

Before this hiatus, the last cards I received came on Super Bowl Sunday.  I came home from church to a big envelope on the front porch.  I knew in my bones that it contained cards for me, but I had no idea where a package that size was coming from.

As it turns out, the package was from Kerry at Cards on Cards and it contained my winnings for his annual college football bowl pick 'em.  Let me just take a moment and proudly proclaim that I am the Cards on Cards Pigskin Prognosticator Extraordinaire!  I swept the prizes this year by correctly predicting the Belk Bowl winner (Virginia) and being least awful in predicting the final score, and by scoring the most points in the pick 'em.  (Thank you Clemson, for justifying my faith in you.)  I'm not meaning to brag here, but you'll have to excuse me while I revel in this victory for a moment.  This kind of glory doesn't come my way often.

The prize for the Belk Bowl was a jumbo pack of 2019 Flagship and the prize for the pick 'em was a blaster of the same.  Kerry also threw in a stack of Cubs for me.  And so it was, on the biggest football-based holiday of the year in America, I opened up a package full of baseball cards.

I've never bought A&G.  I think I've only seen it in stores once.  That doesn't mean I don't like the base card designs, because I typically do.  I especially like the rolled parchment look from last year. 

In 2017, I completed the base set of Topps Heritage, but I didn't do anything with High Numbers.  The burlap you see here are all High Number Cubs that I didn't have yet.  Last year's Heritage has plenty of holes for me, and Brandon Morrow filled one here.

Some cool inserts here.  I really like the refractor look of the 1983 inserts in last year's Chrome

And speaking of refractors, here are some that Kerry threw in.  I really like the Derrek Lee and Willson Contreras cards.  I do have to say, though, that I think I preferred it when the pink refractors had only a pink border and not a pink everything.  Logoless Yu Darvish proves that to me here in Donruss Optic.

And now, for my first 2019 cards, starting with the jumbo pack.

Ronald Acuna became my first 2019 card.  That's a pretty good pull to kick off the year, and it slides right into my ROY binder.

There were a few more keepers in this pack.  Masked, flying superhero Albert Almora makes a great shot on his card.  Jacob deGrom is in my collection, but this is the first time I've seen him on a card without his billowy hair.

I pulled one insert and a parallel from the jumbo pack.  The Mikolas might go right back to Kerry, if he wants it.  I really am not a fan of the 150 years stamp on the cards, but here is one.

The blaster yielded some more Cubbies.  Javier Baez is my current favorite Cub, and this card is an early frontrunner for my favorite card of the year.

The picture turned out really blurry, but here are some more keeper cards from the blaster.  I like the idea of Spring Training themed inserts, but this particluar Grapefruit League Greats sets comes off kind of flat to me.  As for the other insert, I'm normally kind of lukewarm toward players sharing cards, but how great is the combination of Mike Trout and Ronald Acuna!  I don't know what kind of career Acuna will have when it's all said and done, but he will always have a spot in my collection, along with Trout.

Here are some other cards I liked for one reason or another.  I think my favorite here is Didi Gregrorius sliding through the border, right off the cardboard, and into your face.

More cards I like, this time in horizontal form.  I love that the photographer just caught the ball from Zack Godley's pitch right before it slipped out of the frame.

Here are the rest of the inserts.  Most of these are up for trade, although I think I'll hold on to the Clemente and play the Home Run Challenge with Matt Carpenter.  What date should I choose?  Definitely not one against the Cubs.  I could never root for that.  I already mentioned that I don't care for the 150 Year stamp, but I do like Jose Altuve.  I'll admit that the stamp does seem to add a little to the card in this case.

I know I'm way late to the game here, as everybody has already shown off their Flagship and is moving on to Heritage, but here is my thought.  I like the design.  I think it will one that I will be able to immediately recognize in the future.  I think I liked 2018 waterslide/tidal wave a little more, but this one is certainly good to me.

Thanks to Kerry for the contest and the generous prize.  In case you're wondering, these are still the last cards I have obtained, way back from the beginning of February.  I am hitting a card show next Saturday, though.  I haven't been to one in about a year, so I'm really looking forward to it.  Maybe someday I'll even get around to posting what I pick up there.