Trading Packs for Cards

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I found cards in the store for the first time in forever. I took advantage and picked up a blaster of 2020 Contenders football that I already shared my spoils. I also picked up two packs of Topps Holiday. I have to admit, I didn't have too much interest in the annual holiday edition this year, but it's always fun to rip open some packs. The result is that almost everything I pulled ended up as trade bait on my TCDB list.

Each pack had ten cards, but only nine could be scanned at once. When I scanned them, I tried to choose the cards I thought bloggers would be most interested in seeing. Sorry, Marlins. From this pack, only Hosmer fits in my collection. The rest became trade bait. And extra points to Hosmer for having Wrigley ivy in the background, too.

Once again, only one of these cards goes in my collection. As I flipped through the cards in this pack, I came across a Carlos Correa that was backwards. I knew that meant something, and I was happy because I collect Correa. So I turned the card over, wondering if there was an auto or, more likely, an SP. I examined the front, searching for a candy cane or Christmas socks or something. I couldn't figure it out, so I just thought maybe the card was turned around. Then I realized I could check the code, so I went back to the back and found the card was, indeed, a variation. I still couldn't find it. So I looked online. Before I reveal the holiday-themed variation, take a closer look and see if you can find it.

 

Do you see the SP-ness of this card?

 

There's snow on the ground! I mean, I can see the snow, but it just doesn't look that out-of-place to me. It didn't even register in my mind. Maybe all of you saw it right away. Oh well, I won't complain too much because the one SP I pulled fills a collection need.

These cards weren't on my tradelist on TCDB for 2 hours before I received a transaction proposal. Somebody must be building this set because every 2020 Topps Holiday card I had for trade was claimed in one trade.

I quickly flipped these cards for a few cards that I wanted much more.

A green bordered parallel from Topps Gallery of ASG MVP Juan Marichal. This one is numbered to 250.

Two players representing my Alma Mater, Southern Utah University. SUU players on cards are a rarity, so I'm happy to pick up these two from 2016. Miles Killebrew is still with the Lions, who drafted him, but Ammon Olsen never played in the NFL.

And two cards from my other college fandom, the BYU Cougars. Jeremy Guthrie is an on-card auto here.

At the end of the day, I'm perfectly happy taking my 2 packs of Topps Holiday and turning them into these five cards. These certainly mean much more to me. I have to say, though--this was the first time I've ever traded all the contents of a pack rip at one time. It certainly made pulling the cards for the trade easier because they hadn't even been put away yet. But that is one reason I buy packs--so I can have something to trade for cards that I might want. This worked out perfectly.

Why Are There So Many Songs About Rainbows?

I've gotten in the habit of doing a yearly recap of my Brad Sorensen additions. As of now, I own at least one copy of 80 different Brad Sorensen cards, good for roughly 27% of the total number of cards he has, per Trading Card Database. This is where my collection ranks:

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm probably the only person in the world building a Brad Sorensen collection.

My most recent COMC order added to my collection.

The challenge with collecting someone like Brad Sorensen in this era is that only a couple of companies made base cards of him. His cardboard footprint is mostly autographs. I was able to pick up a couple of really nice auto cards this time around, with the Leaf Trinity Pure being awesome and one of my favorite cards. It's acetate and thick, about 1/8" thick. Plus, it's hand-numbered, which is cool. Where the ink looks smeared, it's not. That's the refraction through the thick plastic causing that effect.

The highlight of my new Brad Sorensen pick-ups was the Topps Chrome Red Refractor. With that card, I've just completed my first rainbow!*

*Well, as complete as it will probably get. I'm still missing the Superfractor and the Gold Refractor, numbered to 50. The Red has a lower print run (25) than the Gold, but I've never seen the Gold version anywhere. It has never been on COMC and eBay shows no current listings and no past sales. So I'll hold a spot in the binder for it, but I'm not holding my breath. The Red was hard enough to track down; this was the first copy I've seen in four years and I snatched it up.

It's not the most exciting photo to make up a rainbow. Essentially, it's a balding guy throwing a pass at the Combine. But he's my T-Birds' quarterback, a Walter Payton Award finalist in 2012. Now that I've finished my Rainbow Connection, I can say what's on the other side. Mostly, it's serial-numbers! In this case, ranging from 499 down to 25.

Trying a Sportlots Box

Not too long ago, I placed my first order through Sportlots with their new box shipping method.  In case Sportlots isn't your thing, or you just haven't been up on it, Sportlots has enabled sellers to offer box shipping.  This means sellers can ship all of their orders to a central Sportlots location, where all of your (the customer's) orders can be grouped together in one package and shipped to you all at once.  The idea is that sellers can offer shipping discounts if they can ship to one location, and the customer saves some money.  In practice, I'm not entirely sure that it saved me all that much money in the end.  I can attest that the per seller shipping cost was far less than it has been in the past.  However, the cost to get my box from Sportlots to me was over $10, and that may have negated the savings from the individual sellers.  Truthfully, I don't know.  I didn't pay enough attention to the numbers to say that for sure.  Next time I'll make that comparison.

The impetus for this purchase came from the temptation to pick up a box of 2013 Crown Royale football for cheap, in hopes of finding some Brad Sorensen parallels I needed.  In the end, my better judgment ruled as I realized that I wasn't interested in the rest of the set, so I would be better off just buying the singles I wanted.  The rest of the purchase was the result of me spending the money that I would have spent on the boxes I didn't really want on cards that I selected myself.

This is what the box looked like when it arrived.  The Sportlots people just took all of the individual packages from the sellers and put them in one medium flat rate box.  I was somewhat surprised, not expecting to see everything in its original packaging from the seller.  It's not a bad thing at all, just different from what I expected.

All of you baseball-only people will probably lose interest after this. This is the extent of the baseball buying I did in this order.  All of these are set needs.

Set needs on the football side came in this form.  You know, for a lower-end product like 2016 Panini was meant to be, I've really had a hard time tracking down some of the no-name rookies in the set at a price I am readily willing to pay.  Kenyan Drake was one of the better rookies of the class, and was cheaper than some of the other guys people had for sale.  The Unsung Heroes insert set from Absolute of the same year is one of my favorites and is now almost done.

Yes, I found some Packers I needed.  All of these are from a special Shopko set issued in 1997 following the Pack's Super Bowl victory.  I had heard of the set, but had never owned any of it.  Now I do.  I still always forget that Andre Rison was a part of that team.  I will never grow tired of Desmond Howard cards on the Packers.

As great as Brett Favre was for that team, my favorite Packer of the era was LeRoy Butler.  I'm not sure there has ever been a better blitzing defensive back.  One of these cards is evidence--Butler is sacking Trent Dilfer on his 1997 Stadium Club card.

Butler was a somewhat under-recognized member of the 1990s All-Decade Team.  Mostly because of their positions, these guys were too.  These cards are very 90s.  Skybox Thunder and Topps Gilt Edge (modeled here by Larry Allen and Mark Stepnoski) in particularare uniquely 90s.  I have to say, I don't understand why a set called "Gilt Edge" has some kind of tribal islander theme.  It makes no sense.  And what would the 90s be without an early Bowman's Best and some Pacific (Tony Boselli and Bryant Young)?

 A parallel universe!  Or at least some cards that are parallels.  Check out that mid-oughts Kansas City offensive line.  Priest Holmes and Larry Johnson may have been great running backs in their own right, but having these guys in front of them didn't hurt matters.

Inserts ranging from the mid-90s Stadium Club to last years Panini Unparalleled.  All of these players, with the exception of the Boz, go into my All-Decades collection.  Poor Bosworth.

The order wasn't all 90s love, though.  Here are some stars of the 80s on cards from the late 70s and early 80s.  Gotta love two HOF DBs on one leaders card here.

Progressing through the 80s here.  I may be biased here, but I love the 1989 Score John Anderson.  Anderson is a Packer great who is way underrepresented on cardboard.  The action shot on this card, of Anderson and Tim Harris swallowing up a Bills runner is awesome.

 

This lone 1980 card may seem important because it includes a picture of Walter Payton.  However, I wanted it for a different reason.  This happens to be the rookie card of one Len Walterscheid, the first Southern Utah State College player to go on to the NFL.  This makes this the first card of any one of my fellow alumni.  Walterscheid wasn't drafted, though.  The first draft pick didn't come until 2013.  Walterscheid's son, Justin, also played for SUU during the time I attended school.  Justin is currently the offensive coordinator at SUU, since 2015.

And, finally, stickers!  I don't actively pursue many stickers, but when I'm trying to round out my collection of 80s era safeties and linemen, they do a great job of filling slots on a page.  From top left: Dave Butz, Kenny Easley, Nolan Cromwell, Brian Hansen, Kenny Easley, Carl Banks, Dwight Stephenson, Dwight Stephenson, and Eric Dickerson.

Speaking of Eric Dickerson, I'll end with three inserts.  I'm pretty Jon will like the first one.  In fact, he may have already shown it on his blog recently.  Maybe?  It's a nice-looking set that I've enjoyed from his COMC purchases, and this is one of a few that I own as well.

In all, the Sportlots box turned out to be a better purchase for me than 2 boxes of Crown Royale.  And what about the Brad Sorensen cards that sparked the purchase?

Yeah, I found a few.

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.

Brad Sorensen Additions: 2018

Anybody who reads this blog knows that I collect BYU players.  It has become a bigger and bigger focus for me over the past couple of years.  However, I don't claim BYU as my alma mater.  Yes, I do hold a degree from BYU, but it's a graduate degree and I took all of my courses off-campus.  If anybody asks where I went to school, the answer is Southern Utah University.  During my time there, SUU had no football program to speak of.  Well, there was a program.  What they lacked was wins.  A small school with a team that can't beat anybody even at its own level doesn't generate much gridiron excitement.  It wasn't until after I graduated that things started to pick up.  Just six years ago, the school had its first NFL draft pick: QB Brad Sorensen.  So even though everybody sees the BYU accumulations on here, its easy to forget that one of my greatest hobby prides is that I'm probably the only Brad Sorensen collector out there.  No COMC order is complete without a Brad Sorensen included and his name is the only saved search I have on ebay.  The problem is that he doesn't have too many cards.  If I wanted, I could keep buying the same cards over and over, but that's not my style.  As it stands, I currently own 59 unique Sorensens, of 305 cards listed on the Trading Card Database.  I have a ways to go, certainly, before I can call my collection complete.

Here are all of the unique Brad Sorensens I added this year.

I picked up some parallels.  With the pink refractor addition, I'm only two away from the rainbow.  I need the gold refractor, numbered to 50, and the red numbered to 25.  I guess there are three remaining if you count the superfractor, but I have no hope of ever seeing that one.

And more parallels.  The Fleer Retro Showcase Legacy Collection card on the right is a mouthful to say, but a beautiful piece of cardboard.

Obviously, autos are easier to come by than other cards at this point.  Actually, I've found that to be the case with many smaller name players in recent sets.  Those players typically get rookie cards with tons of parallels and autos, and then are never seen on cardboard again.  There autographs and parallels of autographs galore.  Meanwhile, he has eight non-auto base cards.

This one might be my favorite Sorensen card.  It's shiny and metallic in-hand, and the auto is on-card.  It really is beautiful.

I used my ebay bucks at some point in 2018 to pick up the first printing plate in my collection.  This one is the yellow plate from Panini Black.

I'm pretty sure most of you don't have Brad Sorensen cards lying around, but if you do, I'll take them on if we can work out a trade.

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.