Some Collective Minds Work Faster Than Mine

There are card bloggers out there who get involved in trading wars with the likes of Jay Barker Fan.  These battles are epic.  They involve huge trade packages and result in a lot of good blog reading.  I'm not on that scale.  Some people out there have piles of high-quality trade bait that are probably bigger than my entire collection.  My trade boxes are filled with a lot of commons that I just don't see on many people's wantlists.  Some bloggers are sending out extras from the year that dwarf my total accumulations for the same time period.  And that's okay; I love the hobby and I collect what I can and I try to send some good stuff to others and it's fun.

There is one particular blogger out there, though, who I can't seem to keep up with.  I wouldn't say I'm in a "trading war" with him, per se, but he does send me a package usually right after every time I send a return one to him, and I can never call myself even with him.  Greg at The Collective Mind is the trader who just happens to have a lot of cards from my wantlist and who keeps sending them to me faster than I can return the favor.  In December, I finally sent him a package in return for a trade that he sent me probably 3 or 4 months earlier.  It didn't take him long to strike again, and I received another package from Greg last week.  So here I am again--owing a debt of cards to Greg.  Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining.  And I would hope that neither of us would classify this as a trading war.  He just works faster than I do.

So without further ado, let's check out the goodies I got from a Collective Mind.

Greg prefaced this package with an email saying that he had a card from my 2017 Update needs and that he checked out my TCDB wantlist for some other set needs.  Here are the cards that fill set needs.  The statue is of James Fenimore Cooper, author of Last of the Mohicans.  The card comes from the Village insert set, from 2012 Panini Cooperstown.  Apparently Cooper's father was a founder of Cooperstown.  I did not know that.

Here we have a trio of All-Star MVPs, two of them gone too soon.  I haven't really cracked into 2018 Topps yet, so I don't have any 1983 inserts.  I do enjoy the original set, modeled here by lanky pitcher Jon Matlack.

Here is an eclectic smattering of Rookies of the Year.  We have regular vintage Topps, an early-Donruss Diamond Kings, a more recent A&G insert, and a lenticular card from 2010 Topps.  The players are an eclectic mix, too.  Hargrove was solid, but may better remembered as a manager.  Longoria has been a star, while Coghlan is better as a role player.  Carew is an absolute legend in the game.  These four players are all on different levels, but they all can claim they won a Rookie of the Year award.

Finally, here are just random cards that I wanted for my collection.  The two historical event cards are really cool to me.  My favorite class in college was Sports in American History, and my professor literally wrote the book on the Baseball Hall of Fame.  It made for some good conversations with him outside of the classroom.  These cards satisfy my thirst for commemorating history, not just immortalizing a single player on cardboard.

Thanks for the cards, Greg!  No, I don't have a package ready to go for you yet, but I will put something together for you.  I'm trying to keep up, I promise!

Wax Box Set Building: 1992 Fleer Football

My evolution as a set-builder has had me scouring ebay for the past few months for cheap wax boxes of yesteryear.  In my football collection, I recently completed two long-overdue projects: 1988 Topps and 1995 Collector's Choice.  I have a good chunk 1996 Donruss completed and 1997 SPx is done.  From there, I have no complete sets until 2006 (Rookies and Stars).  I'm thisclose to 2008 Topps, 2012 Topps, and 2012 Rookies and Stars.  Then beginning in 2013 I see multiple complete sets from each year.  In light of this collection breakdown, I decided to try to complete one set from each year that I have collected.  That would be 1988-1997 and 2012-present.  With the completion of 1988, the years I lack are 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993.  Eventually, I'll go and find a set from the 15 gap years, but I decided to start with the early 90s years because A) I want something to represent those first years of collecting and B) some of those junk wax boxes are pretty cheap.

I started with 1992 Fleer.  I actually busted this box a while ago and my wantlist has been up on the blog for quite some time.  I haven't actually shown the cards from the break yet, though.  Let's take a trip in our time machine to 25 NFL seasons ago with 1992 Fleer.

Here is my box of 36 packs.  Each pack contains a whopping 17 cards!  There are four insert sets in this product--All-Pros, Rookie Sensations, Team Leaders, and Mark Rypien performance highlights.  I don't think the Rookie Sensations or Team Leaders were found in the type of box I got.  The other "features" mentioned on the wrapper--Pro-Visions and NFL Prospects--are subsets of the base set.

This set took me back to the Utah State Fair when I was 9 or 10 years old.  As my family walked through the vendors and booths, I always had my eyes open for someone selling cards.  My first taste of 1992 Fleer was when I bought a Thurman Thomas Pro-Vision and couple of loose packs from a vendor.  It seems like I paid a quarter for the Thomas and 50 cents each for the packs, but my memory isn't that great. 

Now with 612 cards in the box and a 480-card set, I should have no problem completing this set, right?  We'll see just how close I came.

The Good:

I really like this design.  It's clean, simple, classic.  I'm glad that Fleer used team color schemes on bottom bar.  The team logo in the NFL shield shape looks good.  I like the company logo both clearly identifies the product and stays unobtrusive.  The photos are clear and high-quality.  The base cards just look nice.  Plus, in an old product like this, you're bound to find a good number of Hall of Famers.

The league leader cards are nothing special, but I do like the subset 25 years later.  It's fun to look back and see who was dominating the NFL back then.  Here we have the sack kings of each conference, the AFC receiving leader and the NFC interception leader.  None of these guys probably come up in conversation to often nowadays.

The Pro-Vision cards are pretty cool.  In 1991, they were inserts.  In 1992 they were moved to the base set, but two years later, they became inserts again.  I just noticed that all three of the cards I scanned feature the moon.  Not all of this subset have the moon, just so you know.

The Neutral:

 Both of the insert sets are neutral.  They both have the same navy blue border and gold foil.  I like the All-Pro a little more than the Rypien highlights.  It's interesting to me how Mark Rypien came from nowhere, led the Redskins to a Super Bowl victory while winning NFL MVP in 1991, and by 1994 Washington was drafting Heath Shuler in the top five of the draft.  I will always keep my Rypien cards though, because my dad was a big Redskins fan at the time and Rypien was a household favorite.  Interesting note: his nephew, Brett Rypien, is the quarterback at Boise State.

The Bad:

Yes, the back does have a unique photo that is generally more close-up, personal shot.  The drawback is the truncated stats.  Only four years are shown.

The NFL Prospect cards are just bad.  First of all, they're boring.  Second, there is no logo anywhere, and I'm not a fan.  Last, the checklist is awful.  There were no great players in the 1992 Draft.  No Hall of Famers.  Troy Vincent was probably the best first rounder, and he isn't even part of the set.

The last bad aspect of this set is the glaring omission of some big stars.  My understanding is that some players refused to sign with Fleer, so they could not included.  Players who are missing?  You may have heard of some them: Montana, Marino, Aikman, Bruce Smith, Deion Sanders.  Even the complete set feels incomplete without some of the greatest players of the day.

The Ugly:

The collation.  This set had horrible collation.  Remember how I had 612 cards in the box to try to put together a 480 card set?  Well, I currently have 338 of those cards--a measly 70% of the set--and not all of those came from this box.  Some cards I pulled four or five times, while I others I never laid eyes on.  At first this break was fun, but as the dupes piled up for the same cards over and over again, it got kind of tedious.  I even pulled extra Mark Rypien inserts.  The collation in this box was just downright ugly.

That didn't stop me from enjoying the set.  My wantlist is up, so if you have any extras of this cheap junk wax set, I'm still looking to complete the set to fill the 1992 hole in my collection.

I have other 1990s boxes to share, too.  I'll be posting more later as I try to complete more sets from my childhood.

Update: Almost Done (Some Trade Bait Posted)

2017 Update is almost done, that is.  For the first time ever, I decided to build an entire flagship set: Series 1, 2, and Update.  I know that 2017 is not everybody's (or anybody's) favorite design, but I decided to make a go for it.  I don't think I'll do it again.  The experience wasn't all bad, but I found that I spent most of my card money on flagship and don't have much else from 2017.  Moreover, I worry about trying to store all my cards if I'm collecting 1000 flagship cards every year, plus whatever else I pick up.  I'll stick with smaller sets, I think.

I finished off Series 1 and 2 before Update was released.  I started in on Update, but I was growing frustrated with my inability to pull Judge and Bellinger.  I knew those cards would be the most expensive on the secondary market, so I was hoping to pull them out of the packs that cost me seven cents per card.  The fact that they both appear three times in the set didn't help.  But I couldn't pull any of them.  When an ebay coupon for some percentage off came my way in December, I decided to use it on a retail box of Update, and came away with 24 packs for right around $25-$30.  Since I was only about halfway done with the set, with none of those pesky rookies in hand and the duplicates piling up, a full box seemed like a good plunge to take.  I was banking on the collation being good enough in the box that I would limit the amount of dupes I would pull while working toward the set.

I was not disappointed.  While I ended up pulling some of the same cards I already had, I didn't have any cards repeat themselves from the same box.  Now that I have finished breaking the box, I stand in need of only 11 base cards.  I'm happy to report that all of the expensive rookies are in my collection.  Interestingly, it took until the very end, when I pulled two Judges and one Bellinger from the same, second to last pack in the box.  What a pack that would have been for an ebay seller in October, when Update first released.

Everyone has seen 2017 Topps ad nauseum by now, and it's not even the current flagship release, so I'll skip the base cards and show the inserts/parallels that came from my retail box.

I pulled three Rookie Cup reprints.  Oddly, they were all 2013 reprints.  And now all three of them fit in my collection, thanks to the Yu Darvish signing.

 I like the Untouchables set, so even though I don't collect Colon and Lincecum, they'll stay in my collection.  Javy's fancy glove work is a nice insert for this Cubs fan, and this great Chris Coghlan Gold parallel fits neatly into my ROY collection.

I also pulled five SPs from the box.  I'm keeping these four.  I think it would be hard to top these four players in a random grouping of SPs from one box.  The Griffey is a great photo, to boot.

Now for the trade bait inserts/parallels.  If you want one of these, they are available.  Just let me know.

Of the three 1987 inserts in the box, not one fits in my collection.  If they happen to fit in yours, they're available.  The MLB Network set, while an interesting concept, doesn't hold much appeal to me.  Who's building it?

These Postseason Celebration cards look really washed out in the scan.  None of them were too interesting to me, since the set is filled with Cardinals, Yankees, and Red Sox--three teams I find it difficult to cheer for.  The Cubs Celebration card was my favorite of 2017, but this I have an extra now if someone wants it.

Here is the lone serial-numbered card from the box.  It's blue parallel Red Sox Celebration, numbered 295/500.  It's also available.

I have some gold parallels, if anybody is looking for these.

And finally, a couple Topps Salute inserts and the fifth SP, which I don't plan on keeping.

If you like these inserts, let me know.  As I mentioned before, I'm only 11 cards away from completing three series of 2017 flagship.  These are the Update cards I'm missing:

#41--Mitch Haniger, Diamondbacks
#82--Matt Boyd, Tigers
#96--Brett Phillips, Brewers
#176--History Makers (Rizzo/Bryant), Cubs
#244--Justin Turner, Dodgers
#247--Dansby Swanson, Braves
#248--Ender Inciarte, Braves
#251--Daniel Descalso, Diamondbacks
#257--Alex Wood, Dodgers
#288--Miguel Sano, Twins
#296--Giancarlo Stanton, Marlins

If you can help me out, let me know.  Here is the list of base trade bait I have, if anybody is looking for 2017 Update.

I'm almost finished with my first ever full run of Flagship for a year.  I'm hoping to close this out before we get too far into the 2018 offerings.

Just Commons, Really

I have such a backlog of scans that I haven't even started on my Black Friday COMC order yet.  That's okay with me; my collecting has been slowing down so much in recent months that I'm not overwhelmed with too many unscanned, unheralded cards.  I'm just pacing myself and coming up with some good blog posts that aren't necessarily centered around recent acquisitions.

One problem with being so far behind, however, is the fact that the site I used to purchase these cards has been completely overhauled since I placed this order.  I picked up some set needs from Just Commons, which is no longer.  It has since been born again, with a new look and a new name.  Just Commons has been christened Card Barrel, but it's still the same great site.  By the way, if you had unused reward points with Just Commons, just contact the owner of cardbarrel.com and tell him your email and username from the old site and he will transfer your reward points over.

Some more for my 2016 Archives build.  These are my favorite of the lot.  Bartolo Colon and his chins kind of steal the show here.  I have questions about 2018 Archives.  Isn't 1983 Topps due up for Archives this year?  And isn't there a 1983 insert in Flagship this year?  Does that change Topps's plans for Archives?  And what about 1993?  I like the original set, so why am I not so enthusiastic about seeing it done for Archives this year?  So many questions.

I've mentioned before that the 1992 Pinnacle Team 2000 checklist actually had some pretty decent players.  None of these guys were necessarily the future of baseball, but there are some solid names here.

I never opened a pack of 1998 Ultra, but I've got a nice shiny spot in my binder for some of the cards I might have pulled.  I bought a collection off of a guy who had some great late-90s cards, and there was a good partial set of the Notables insert set and the Pizzazz subset.  I really like the Notables cards; I think the design is beautiful and classy.  The Pizzazz screams 90s.  You can't tell from these scans, but the cards are really sparkly, even more so than Topps Metallic Snowflakes from these last two years.  When I decided to go ahead and complete the subset, I didn't realize that I was chasing SPs.  I've found that some of them are more pricey than I typically like to do for a set, but it sure will look nice when I'm done.

I've already pre-ordered my box of Opening Day for this year.  In the meantime, I'm still putting together my favorite Opening Day insert set from last year.  Opening Day!  Bring it on!  It's only February and I'm already using exclamation points in excitement!

Finally, to round out my Just Commons order, I picked up some former Rookies of the Year who were lacking in representation in my collection.  Cards older than I am and some oddballs on the cheap work for me.

Next time I order, it won't be from Just Commons.  But Card Barrel will probably be my friend and my go-to site for my set builds.

A Couple of Odd Packages

I've been more active on ebay over the past two months than I normally am.  I've just found that with my current collecting focus, ebay has served me better to find what I need than other outlets. I'll be posting a little more about these purchases in the coming weeks.  During my recent ebay shopping, I've come across some oddballs that I've snatched up.  One of these purchases was an oddball set that was advertised as containing Kurt Warner's rookie.  Plus, it was a promo set, so I took a chance on it. 

This is what I got:

Here is the checklist that met me on the top of the package.  From what I have been able to learn, 989 Sports was a subsidiary of Sony that made video games.  I never owned a video game console as a teen, so I only vaguely recall this.  Apparently, 989 Sports hosted a Players Party before the Super Bowl and NFL players competed in video sports.  The various card companies got in on the action with some promo cards for the party.  I don't know how they were made available.  This set is from the 2000 Players Party and features 1999 card designs.  There are 12 cards in the checklist.

The checklist is pretty darn good.  Here is the aforementioned Kurt Warner "rookie."  I don't truly consider a promo card to be a rookie, but it is the rookie year of a Hall of Famer.  Edgerrin James was also a 1999 rookie.

Here we have Upper Deck, Topps, and Collector's Edge.  I'm not sure which Upper Deck product is shown here, but it will pop up again later.  So will 1999 Topps.

Dorsey Levens represents the lone Packer and lone Fleer Tradition card in this set.

The final three cards are good ones, with Herschel Walker's return to the Cowboys and a John Randle.  Most of the players in this set would fit in my collection otherwise, so I'm happy with the purchase.  I'm tempted to divvy them out to my various player pages, but I'm keeping the set together.

Also from the same seller, I picked up a 1982 K-Mart set, complete with the original box.  I've always liked this cards and the set was on my wantlist, but I hadn't even approached half of the 44 card set.  Now I picked it up all at once.

For those of you who don't know (and I doubt there are many who don't), this set commemorates K-Mart's 20th anniversary with the AL and NL MVPs from 1962-1981.  Each card features a picture of their Topps card from their MVP year.  The final three cards mark important records: Don Drysdale's scoreless inning streak, Hank Aaron's home runs, and Pete Rose's hits. 

If that package wasn't odd(ball) enough, I recently completed a trade on TCDB that brought me some oddballs.  The entire PWE consisted of

Denny's Holograms and UK Minis.  Now these were some of the oddest packages I've ever received. 

I Made a Trade with LV Through TCDB, BTW

It's always interesting to me to come across fellow bloggers on other sites.  While I don't post every trade that I make, I always post what I get from bloggers because I know my thanks won't fall on deaf ears.  In today's case, I was contacted by TCDB user stevienicks77, who turned out to be none other than Laurie D of LV's TTM Autograph blog.  We worked out a trade in December, so I'm a little late in posting, especially because she already posted on her end. Stevie, erm, LV, erm, Laurie was able to help me with a few set needs.

The majority of my end of the trade came from 2016 Archives.  I'm getting so close to finishing that set I can taste it.  Here is a sampling of the 1953 design from the set.  I'm always glad to add a Satchel Paige card to my collection.  I don't think he receives half the recognition he deserves for his amazing career.

Representing the 1979 design, we have some legends, current stars, a promising rookie, and a late ace.

1991 was my favorite design redux of the set, and these cards are the best.  It would be tough to find a better group of players than these six.  The Nolan Ryan card is phenomenal.  I also like the Goldschmidt because his cards usually feature him with a bat in his hands, but the 3-time Gold Glover is no slouch in the field, either.

Finally, I received one card each from two other sets I'm trying to complete.  I didn't even register that the "When I Was a Kid..." subset of 2013 Triple Play was an SP until had a hard time tracking them down for a price I was willing to pay for such cheap cards.  I'm completing the set just because I can, but I have to say that the SPs are better than the rest of the base set.

So there's my trade with a blogger through the outside venue, TCDB.  Thanks for the cards!  I appreciate the set help.

How I Spent My Christmas Break

In my last post, I wrote that I was finished with cards for the year.  I had two weeks off of school and I made the decision that I would refrain from spending any time with my cardboard collection.  In the meantime, I planned to spend some time with one of my other hobbies, namely building stuff.  Like P-Town Tom a few weeks back, I pulled out my trusty Kreg Jig and my miter saw and set to work building a window seat/storage bench for our upstairs loft. 

This is what a two week break from cards will get you.  Child not included.  It's all finished now except for the painting, but that's my wife's job.  I saved a little time and money when I lucked into some dresser fronts in Ikea's scratch and dent corner.  All I had to do was frame it in, attach the facades, and build the lids.  Next project: a built-in bookcase to the left of this picture to complete our kids' reading nook.

Though I vowed to keep myself away from cards, the cards didn't stay away from me.  Since this is a card blog, I'll take this opportunity to show off some cardboard that came in the mail over the break, which I glanced at and tucked away in the closet until I could scan and file them.

First, there was a small PWE trade with Nachos Grande.  We swapped some Topps Gallery.  He is working on the set, and I just saw some guys I collect on his trade list.  The top two are base cards.  The Addison Russell on the bottom is an Artist Proof parallel.  Eric Hosmer is shown on a Masterpiece insert, which I really think is the best-looking set of the year.

Right before Christmas break, I made a purchase on ebay.  This Leaf Valiant card is quite pretty in-hand.  It's a shiny on-card auto, representing the 7th Brad Sorensen autograph in my collection.  And it only cost me $1.29 shipped.  I'll take that all day long.

It was good two weeks off, but I'm glad to be back at it now.  I am referring to both work and cards, of course.  I hope all of you had a good holiday season and have started the new year off on the right foot.