2022 Trading Slash Line: 90/34/2/1246/37

We may not have reached the end of the year quite yet, but I think I have just about wrapped up the trading of 2022. Stat-wise, I've had probably my most solid year of trading--at least in a few years. Let me explain my numbers.

90=Number of trades made, either through TCDB or blogs.
34=Number of states involved in my trading
2=Canadian provinces traded with this year
1246=Number of cards brought in through trading
37=Net cards gained through trades

I'm pretty happy looking at those numbers, but there are two I feel are weaker. First, the net cards brought in. At the beginning of the year, I made a goal to have a negative net trade number. I had two reasons for this. One reason is that I wanted to clear space and I thought a negative trade net would help. The second is that I hoped that I could entice TCDBers to respond more quickly if I had extra cards going to them in my proposals. That was going well until summer hit and I got this wild notion to complete three junk wax sets through cracking boxes and trading. Suddenly my wantlist was filled with 1989 Score, 1990 Topps, and 1991 Fleer baseball. Trade proposals came rolling in with numbers decidedly in my favor because people were all too happy to offload their extras of these sets. 

The other number that I would like to see improve is the number of states involved. This year, I traded with 34 states and 2 Canadian provinces. This map is a nice visual representation of my trading partner locations this year. I'm happy with 90 trades (probably my most ever), but I think it would be pretty cool to get all 50 states in a year.

Now we're going to get heavy into the scans. I had a flurry of trades around Thanksgiving--15 completed trades in less than a month--and I need to get caught up. So allow me to share some of those 1246 cards I added to my collection from trading this year.

First, we have bigger trade with TigerFan22:

He sent some nice BYU cards. I like Bart Oates snapping the ball to Steve Young, just like he did in college!

A few more BYU, this time all Ty Detmer. I really love looking at late-90s variety.

He helped with a smattering of set needs. Jerry Rice is from 1993 Upper Deck. I'm not collecting that whole set, but this card finishes off the Berman's Best subset.

A Rookie of the Year Chris Sabo rookie, some All-Decade performers, and a lone Jordy Nelson addition finish off my trade with TigerFan22.

@CowboysFan1@ sent me all BYU players. Two of these players are having pretty good seasons in their roles. One is not having a great season. Jamaal leads the NFL in rushing touchdowns with 14. Taysom has five himself. Not only that, but  last Monday night, Taysom Hill just became the only player in the Super Bowl Era with at least nine touchdowns passing, rushing, and receiving. Not too bad.

 

 Capper14 sent another all-BYU trade return.

We'll keep the BYU run going with some of my cards from JBsSetCollection. Here we have some great cards, regardless of the player. A center with his hand on the ball is a mini-collection of mine. A nice Red Pulsar prizm and a rookie auto are great. Consider that all three of these guys are former Cougars, and these are great cards.

More from JBsSetCollection. I particularly like the Davante Adams Turkey Red rookie and the impressionist rendition of Jordy's Lambeau Leap.

Texas A&M fan amalum sent me a couple more BYU players in Jamaal Williams and Kurt Gouveia. Also Heisman winner Jameis Winston in a college uniform, a 1989 Score need, and a short-term stop uniform of ROY Vince Coleman round out this small PWE trade.

This is just a string of very small trades from CH34, deadhead11, jbostic, MichiganFan9, musclebeech, ravensray52, and thesouthpaw. I just want to give a huge shout-out to jbostic, who sent along three 1970s TCMA cards as extras! I'll also point out that I've been low-key building 2014 Topps Valor and a couple of those cards show up in these trades. It's a set that I've really liked since it came out, but I haven't ever put much effort into chasing it. However, it seems like lots of trade proposals lately have included needs for Valor. I typically replace those cards in the offer with more priority wants, but a few have still managed to sneak through. I doubt I care enough to ever finish the set, though.

Steelers fan Bob Warnell sent a couple of legends from the 1980s (the team card is sliding into my Lester Hayes page), a pair of needs from last year's awful Wild Card that I'm collecting for some reason, a handful of last year's Donruss (represented only by Stefon Diggs and A.J. Brown) and a trio of nice-looking Zach Wilson cards.

Myrke helped me with a random assortment of baseball wants.

I used to do an annual post highlighting my Brad Sorensen pickups for the year. It's getting harder and harder to find any new ones, though. This auto from TCDB user briznuts is one of only two this year. The other Sorensen will get its own post in the near future.

 

Trader Maximus sent along a fun bunch of cards. Shiny Detmer, cartoony football-clad basketballer Charlie Ward, police issue John Anderson, and Rey Sanchez signing his 1993 Topps card on his 1994 Topps card all stand out to me. For a player who was good enough to make the 1980s All-Decade team, John Anderson certainly lacks representation on cardboard. I don't think there are even enough standard-sized to fill my Anderson page in the 1980s binder.

Finally, frequent trading partner jlcre2003 and I pulled off good-sized trade.

He helped knock off some set needs.

Some various baseball collection wants.

A few football wants, too.

And of course, a few from all of my favorite teams.

It has been a fun year of trading. A lot of the fun came from the ease of finding trade partners who had the cards I needed for three decidedly overproduced, common sets. I thoroughly enjoyed going from box breaking to trading to complete for three different large sets in a matter of months. Of course, that's not a process I'm going to complete. I don't have the space or desire to go build multiple sets from those years. 

But it wasn't just junk wax set building. You can see from the scans above that a great variety of cards came my way in trades. Thanks to anyone reading who helped me produce a solid trade season stat line!

A Trade Between Packmen

This hasn't been the best football season I've experienced as a fan. Both of my teams--on the college and pro level--started the year with high expectations and have fallen a bit flat in reaching them. 

My BYU Cougars were coming off back-to-back 10-win seasons and returned 20/22 starters from last year's team that rolled undefeated through the PAC-12 they faced, en route to a 6-1 overall record against P5 opponents. 

 

The scan did these cards no favor. The two Wild Cards are a silver and gold parallel. If you look closely at the Collector's Edge Millennium Collection parallel, you can just barely make out a faint outline of a photo.

 

When this year began, they opened hot, beating future conference rival (and defending Big XII champ) Baylor for a Top 10 win. Sitting at 2-0 and ranked #12 after two weeks, the future was bright for a team leaving independence to join a P5 conference next year. A loss at Oregon turned out not to be such a bad loss. But then came October. Oh man, October. The Cougs went 0-4 in the month and looked really bad doing it. They salvaged at least a bowl appearance with an undefeated November, including a solid win over Boise St. and another P5 win over not-so-great Stanford. So BYU finishes the season at 7-5. This was definitely not the expectation for an experienced team with an NFL prospect QB and an offensive line that is graded #1 by Pro Football Focus this season. So what went wrong? Well, the defense, for one. Contrasted with the #22 offense (per PFF), the defense sits at #113.

 

 

But the biggest difference between last year and this year could very well be the loss of current Atlanta Falcons running back, Tyler Allgeier. He was so good last year for BYU. I've started gathering a few cards of Allgeier, but many 2022 football products have only been recently released, or are still waiting. I did manage to snag my first auto off eBay, however.

So that's the disappointing season of the BYU Cougars. At least they managed to finish above .500. 

 

My Packers, though. Ouch. Last year, the Pack finished 13-4 and earned the #1 seed in the NFC. A heartbreaking playoff loss to San Francisco cut the season short prematurely, but expectations were high starting this year. In fact, about half of all expert prognostications I saw put Green Bay in the Super Bowl this year. But then they just kept losing. Sitting at 4-8 now, the playoffs look like a distant dream. It has been a long time since I've been so disappointed by the Pack's performance.

 

 

At least the cards are still great. Everything in this post (minus the eBay Allgeier purchase) came from a trade on TCDB with fellow cheesehead dmbramer. Donn hooked me up with a page of new Jordys and a bunch of cards from Shopko's Packer-centric set in 1997. I especially love my first cards of offensive coordinator Pat Shurmur and defensive coordinator Sherm Lewis (previous scan).

Some of the cards were for other sections of my collection. Four of these guys are all-decade picks, plus a college uni Heisman. Even though it has been a disappointing season for this fan, trades like this one with another surely disappointed Packer fan have been good.

Summer Trading Recap

I haven't been very busy on the blogs for a couple of months. As a reader, I've been having trouble with comments, so most bloggers haven't heard from me for a while. Jon outlined his problem with his comments going to spam, but I have a completely different problem: I can't even leave a comment. On my computer, on my phone, using Chrome, using Firefox, when I click to leave a comment, nothing happens. I can't even bring up the box to type in a comment. So I've been lurking in the shadows of other people's blogs and leaving comments infrequently, when I can.

But my own blog has been pretty silent, too. I haven't had time to do research for some of my series. I've been busy with my collection, but I explained a couple of weeks ago that I've been busy building some junk wax sets. I don't think people are too interested in my chronicling my 1989 Score set build as those cards come. So I have been neglecting my blog this summer. Let's catch up on the cards I added to my collection this year, aside from the bulk junk wax set building lots.

 

Lots of rapid-fire pics and little commentary ahead.

 

Two separate PWE trades from 49ants brought me some 1994 Finest set help and a couple of All-Decade players who do not yet have a full page in my binders. The world needs more Alan Faneca cards.

A trade with stdolan provided an All-Star project need in Hoot Evers, a set build need (Defensive Wizards), and a cool food issue of Billy Williams.

Users jfcard, robschaar, and sqc5193 offered up some more All-Decade players who are somewhat harder to find. The last two Steve Hutchinson cards I needed to fill my binder turned out to be his rookie card and a commemoration of his Hall of Fame induction. It's kind of a poetic pairing.

All of these cards came from OfficerZero, who came through with some more All-Decade players, a couple of Packers, some college uni Heisman winners, and some BYU alumni.

 

More college uni Heisman cards, plus BYU GOAT receiver Austin Collie, a throwback All-Star need, and a pair of ROY adds with Tommy Agee and Herb Score from kee1975. Thesouthpaw got into the fun with a handful of BYU players, another Heisman winner, and some Green and Gold.

Both cory79 (1st pic) and gregman1000 (bottom 2 pics) offered up some more BYU players, a few Cubs, some Rookies of the Year, and some 90s set help. 

 

The oddballs gregman1000 sent me are incredible. This is one of my favorite Ty Detmer cards. It's so unlicensed it even has a disclaimer on the back that says, "Not For Trading." The perforated TCMA Rookie of the Year cards were completely unknown to me.

We'll finish up the BYU-heavy portion with deadhead11's all-Saints trade, featuring three former Cougars (Taysom Hill and Colby Bockwoldt on the Total card) and a need from the Power House set that I'm chasing. Fellow Cougar fan twpjrk hit me up with a trade proposal, saying he needed to find a good home for this Max Hall auto. It's numbered to 25 and I was very happy to take it.

 

Users sfurukawa, andersonadams1, NR78, and nozzlemaster all sent a fun variety from my wantlists.

I traded with two fellow Packer collectors. The first four pictures show my return from bizzork, including stacks of wax needs and a bunch of Packers. The next three are from dmbramer, who traded me a pair of Jordy Nelsons, a rare Kevin Mawae with the Jets, and a handful of former Cougars, most of whom were drafted by the Pack. Also, the Topps Total card says it's Brady Poppinga, but that is actually Al Harris.

 

We'll end this with one of--if not the--biggest trades I've even made on TCDB. I swung a deal with tenlbpain that sent over 200 junk wax cards in either direction. It was glorious. Not one card was older than 1987 and only a couple newer than 1995 (and those were 1996).

I'm not even sure that includes all the TCDB trades I've made this summer. There were a lot. Those trades and the organization of all the incoming cards kept me busy with the hobby, even if I wasn't making any purchases or keeping up the old blog.