Major, Major Milestone

 I knew it was coming but I didn't know when it would be. It was a long journey to get to this point, starting all the way back in February 1996. I knew I would hit it when I got my mail on November 8th, 2024, but I couldn't do it right away....the milestone? 100,000 unique NBA cards! 

Although NBA doesn't play as large a role in my life as it once did, it's still a big part. I'm still very actively collecting the NBA and I really wanted to get some of the Haunted Hoops set Panini made for this Halloween. I've been very critical of Panini over the years, but they did a great job with this. The cards are cheap, bright and fun, everything cards should be! I had to resort to Ebay to get my hands on a "box", which is actually just a really big pack with 40 more packs inside. They arrived to me on November 8th, but I had to scan them large pack before I could open the regular packs- and I had stuff on my scanner while I finished my monthly upload. I finally finished that on the 9th, and then scanned and opened the cards and entered them into my Excel collection chart, where I determined which card was #100,000. It turned out to be #40, Jusuf Nurkic. Of the 100,000 NBA cards I have, it is the 23rd of Nurkic. 

There were a LOT of new people to my collection in this box. NBA cards have gotten very hard to get locally, and almost all the players that have entered the league since 2020? About 60% of them were not yet present in my collection. This one box went a big way towards fixing that. Considering one of my main collecting projects ever is getting at least one card of every NBA player to get one, it was a big boost. This set also has photography from after the trade deadline of the 2023-24 season, so all of the players who got traded at the deadline or changed teams before the 2023-24 season appear with their new teams for the first time in my collection here too. I don't know how many people joined my collection for the first time yet, but I will soon, since I've pulled out all the new people to scan first. That will be revealed to me in full when I do my monthly upload starting on December 1st. I estimate it's more than 30 people in only 117 cards. I have enough cards now- and so many people, closing in on 20 thousand, that I can't remember who is actually in my collection 100% anymore, especially if I only have 1 card of them and it's not scanned yet. 

It's funny...back in 1996, my Mom gave me a pack of basketball cards as a gift for Valentine's Day, knowing that in my school, where she volunteered more than 10,000 hours, a lot of kids collected cards and I did as well, but I was collecting NASCAR and Non-Sport only...everyone else was collecting NBA. She got me those cards so I could have something with my friends to trade with. Later that night, I found a game on TV- Knicks and Hornets. I was hooked, and basketball cards became the biggest deal for me for the longest time, until I burned myself out in 2006. I returned in 2012, now considering the break I took one of the bigger mistakes of my life, but I am wise enough to now know that I will never fully walk away from something I love ever again, a lesson that needed to be learned the hard way. 

Of my friends who were collecting and trading back in 5th grade, I'm still in contact with most of them, at least loosely via Facebook...not a single one stayed in the hobby. I am the only one. 

My extreme, obsessive documentation started after I hit 25,000 cards...or at least when I thought I did. I didn't have the collection totals fully proofed and accurate until I finished typing everything in to my Excel charts earlier in 2024, but I'm counting it as accurate. 

A timeline of major milestones:

• 1st NBA Card- February 14th, 1996. 1995-96 Fleer #220 Sam Cassell
• 50,000th NBA Card - April 5th, 2003. 2002-03 UD Glass #75 Hedo Turkoglu
• 75000th NBA Card- February 14th, 2014. 2012-13 Panini Brilliance #175 John Salmons
• 100000th NBA Card - November 9th, 2024. 2023-24 Haunted Hoops #40 Jusuf Nurkic

Will this be the last Major Milestone for the NBA? There's the possibility that it is. Regular milestones are every 1000 cards, the next Major Milestone will be 125000. I simply don't add as many cards as I once did, my collection is advanced enough now that adding new cards isn't as easy, but the biggest hurdle is that they simply aren't making as many cards as they used to. I can't collect what doesn't exist. I don't enjoy the Chrome cards which is what the majority of Panini's current products are, and when Topps gets the license back in a couple of years, they are no better with making everything chrome all the time. Even if I got the complete flagship Hoops and Donruss sets every year, that's only 550 cards- and I've never completed a Donruss NBA set, and I have not completed a Hoops set since 2016-17, so the odds of that happening are slim, let alone every year. I am not trying to be defeatist or anything, but I'm just realistically thinking that it may not happen. Whether it does or doesn't I don't really mind. I've built a collection that even without my personal bias of it being mine, I think I safely say without hyperbole is nothing sort of incredible, not to brag. Looking through all the NBA history I've got documented on cardboard is without a doubt more comprehensive than the Basketball Hall of Fame, and documenting history is my main reason for collecting and truly doing everything I do- photography, model building as well. Writing this blog also comes from that- thus the name, Cardboard History. 

One weird thing about the 4 Major Milestones I have documented? 3 of them were purple based teams, with two being the Kings and one being the Suns. Not a single one of them was planned, all of them were from a pack that I opened. 

New People October 2024

 October saw a lot more scanning that I expected, with 958 cards scanned. Of them, 136 were new people.

There are some pretty big names in there, too, especially in the non-sport, music category. 

I also hit a pretty cool milestone. Miscellaneous sports hit 1000 people scanned! Of the 7 major categories, it becomes the 5th to reach the 1000 mark. Non-Sport, which I actively collect but doesn't get many cards, is the lowest number of people, with 817. Baseball has not hit 1000 scanned yet, sitting at 877 after October's additions, but will- I have more than 1000 in my collection, I just haven't scanned them all yet. My records show that I have more than 1300 different people for Non-Sport, so I guess I really need to get busy scanning them! (of course, I'll get to them whenever they come out of the boxes- it's more fun for me to grab a random box to work on scanning, then going and specifically looking for one) 

Although I don't know who the 1000th person to enter my collection for miscellaneous sports is, I do know who was the 1000th I uploaded into the album.

I have not a clue for sure, but I'd bet at least 50% of the people in the Miscellaneous Sports section come from the SI for Kids magazine, as this one did as well. I scanned three months' worth of the publication in October, providing 16 of the 17 people added in the Miscellaneous category. 

Here are the new people I added this month.

The largest contribution of new people came from the WNBA rookie set I ordered from Panini Instant, which was 14 cards. All of the NBA players and the single NASCAR driver came from the blasters my Mom gave me for my birthday. There is one obvious mistake that I need to fix here, in that William Fargo is listed as WNBA, instead of Non-Sports. William Fargo was one of the founders of Wells-Fargo, and got a card in the Pieces of the Past Historical Premium Edition that I got. 

Breaking Down the Breakdown Box

I finished listing the cards I showed in the previous post from Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown. I'll take anything, and he had some stuff he wanted to get rid of, so it worked out perfectly!

He got my baseball collection over 1000 cards, before the box I had 901, I'm now at 1759! I know I have a couple more I've misplaced over the years as well, but I'll count that for now.

I also had 87 different baseball sets in my collection, now 216 are represented.  I'm not going to go crazy trying to chase down an example of every set like I did for NBA and NASCAR but it is fun to see how many I can get, just by taking the cast offs from other people's collections.

I also now have most of the Topps flagship sets in my collection. I am missing pre-1957, 1984, 1995, 1998, 2003 and 2005.

Working on these cards made me truly realize how good you baseball collectors have it. When Panini can't be bothered to give us a flagship set larger than 300 cards for a 450 man league, you guys are getting 600 or more cards on a regular basis. My preferred sport has not had a card set hit 500 cards since 1993-94, and my 2nd sport (NASCAR) has never gotten any larger than 340...ever. Topps designs may not always be great but at least you have the cards to chase.

In the final tally, it moved into second place for most new cards with a day, with 2827 new cards. I got 476 new baseball people for my collection, 164 new football people, and some others in other categories, bringing my collection total to 9765 different people..wow! I have a post I wrote up about my march to 10,000 people but I never got around to posting it. I really need to do that...

My favorite, as I mentioned the other day, is the Elton sketch, but since I posted that already, even if just a photo, here are my favorite baseball and football cards, respectively.

2013 Topps Update Emerald #US3. This card looks great in hand, even better than it looks in scan. Green has always been my favorite color and this really pops! It was one of the last cards out of the box and it's one of my favorites.

 2011 Topps Chrome X-Fractor. One of the very first cards out of the box-literally the second one I saw- was this one. I've always loved Refractors, and I've always loved parallels of refractors. This is my first non-NBA Refractor.

Editorial note: Another post I never finished writing, this has been sitting in my drafts folder since November 2016. I kind of trailed off because a lot of the cards were naked ladies which I will gladly collect but don't really show on the blog. Another reason is that a lot of the cards were already done on the Database which meant at that time I set them aside to work on getting things done that needed to be posted there. As I'm no longer contributing to the Database I now regret doing it that way but it's in the past and can't be changed. I'm still working through my cards and the vast majority Gavin sent me are still waiting for their turn to be scanned, 8 years later. Slow but steady I'll get there eventually, but I'm doing it in the way that's most fun for me- completely at random. The boxes are all labeled as to scanned or not scanned. and I'm working through them by simply grabbing a box that has not been scanned and working on scanning it. In theory, anyway. Most of the time I'm just trying to stay caught up with new additions and rarely ever actually grab a box of older stuff to scan. I don't think I've done it even once in 2024 despite being a year with a LOT of scanning in it. 

Anyway, thanks again Gavin! 

Contest Winnings

Editorial note: I wrote this post back in 2017 but never posted it, for some reason I no longer remember. I did not change it other than correcting a typo I found pre-publication. 

This isn't something that happens too often, but I actually won a card related contest! I am a fringe member of the Collector's Universe forum, which is owned and run by a grading company. My thoughts on that concept are not really a secret so I am not on the forum all that often...I try from time to time but there's way, way too much worrying about nothing and not a lot of real collecting. So, I get annoyed and take months off. However, there are still enough posts that make it worth reading, and I've been trying to work myself back into the message board scene...I used to spend hours on message boards every day. When you aren't able to do things, due to health issues, you have to find something to do, and for many years for me that was message boards. That kind of went by the wayside when I began scanning my collection in 2009, to the point where I didn't visit any of them at all. But I did enjoy them, so I'm slowly working my way back in.

That's kind of a long pre-amble, sorry about that.

In August, I won a contest on there. The game was to predict which driver was going to finish second in a particular Cup race. I don't even remember which race at this point, but I know I didn't get it for the first race after I posted. I didn't track the thread. A few weeks later, I see the thread is still getting new posts, so I clicked on it to see what the deal was...and as it turned out, I missed the part of the original post that if there was no winner, it would roll over...eventually, when Martin Truex Jr. finished second at Michigan...I won! The contest runner posted a bunch of stacks of cards and the winner was going to pick five of them. Since I was the winner, I picked the one that showed as Star Wars, the one that showed as hockey and the rest were NBA. The cards arrived and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the cards were from sets I have very few of, but also a little disappointed because I thought I needed a lot more of the Return of the Jedi cards than I actually did...so there were more duplicates than I expected. For some reason I can never remember that I bought a big lot of series 2 (blue border) cards a couple of years ago, and this is actually the second time I've gotten a "lot" of them expecting to add a whole bunch of new cards, only to find out I had them already. Maybe this time it will stick and I won't do it again...but knowing me, probably not.

Now, here are some highlights. I ended up getting 85 new cards and I am not going to post them all, LOL.

This was one of the bigger highlights for me, as it's only my second card from 2006-07 SP Game Used, and only my third of Denham Brown...but the first that shows him in NBA action. Plus, Serially Numbered cards are an addiction of mine.

Speaking of serially numbered cards, this Greg Oden card from 2008-09 Topps Treasury- a mini card that might have come out of a rip card (what a terrible concept that is) but it's SN 23/25. Nice!

One of my biggest achievements in the hobby was completing 2002-03 SP Authentic, including the autographs and serially numbered cards- of a 203 card set, all but 90 were SN. I pulled Yao's autograph, the biggest card in the set,which allowed me to do that. I couldn't do it with the 2003-04 set as I didn't pull LeBron's autograph, so I didn't chase it as much. I am still missing some of the Spectaculars subset, and Yao, card #100, was one of them!

When I first opened the package, I was pretty happy to get some Mystery Finest cards from 1996-97 Topps. Then I looked a little closer- these are Super Teams redeemed cards, significantly harder to find than a standard Mystery Finest. So much so, that I didn't have a single one beforehand. The first design, with the silver border, was the prize if you had a Conference winner. The second version, which has the broken border, is the prize for Division winners. There is also a third version that I have not seen...but I think may be a Refractor for the Champion winner, which would have been the Bulls that year. I actually like the Division winner design better, so I'm glad I got more of them...although I would gladly add the others if I found them in the wild.

Another good one is this Paul Pierce rookie from 1998-99 Ovation. The 10 rookies included in the set were all redemption cards, thanks to the Lockout. They aren't particularly rare as far as redemption cards go but I only have half of them counting this card. I had previously had the SN'd Gold parallel of Pierce- who just retired in June 2017 - but I don't think I got it via redemption, I think I got it on the secondary market. I don't honestly remember. Being the #10 pick (a steal!) Pierce was the final card in the set, #80.

With these two Mournings I'm now 3 cards away from completing both 1992-93 Hoops and Stadium Club. Getting real close, hopefully I will complete them at some point soon. I thought that this was going to knock Hoops out for me but a quick check of my Wantlist on here showed me otherwise.

 I got three of the Lottery Pick redemption cards from 1994-95 Hoops! That's one of my favorite sets, and I didn't have any of the Lottery pick cards previously. Unfortunately they have some contact damage, enough that the Grant Hill card didn't get scanned.

 This one kind of threw me. This is the wrapper exhange card from 1994-95 Hoops. I would never have done that- I save my empty packs- even if I could have. I didn't start collecting the NBA until February 1996 though so it was long expired by then.

Some more NBA highlights, including some great 1990s inserts. Anytime I can get new inserts from 1996-97 Topps is a great day, and here there are some more, in addition to the Super Teams cards. That's only my third Hobby Masters card- the previous two in my collection I pulled when the set was new. Magic gets me 1 card away from the 1989-90 Fleer sticker insert completed. 2006-07 Upper Deck is a set I have very little of...I think only two packs worth. The Rondo is my first RC from the set.

Some of the Star Wars cards I got. There were 9 new base cards, which I scanned all of but didn't show, and some of the stickers, which I needed much more of. The #49 sticker was the one they reprinted in the Abrams' book about the Topps Return of the Jedi set so I had to scan that one.

The set that saw the largest influx of new cards was 1991-92 Pro Set French. I more than doubled my collection of the set, although considering it's a 600+ card set and I now have 30 something, I still have a lot more I can add. I added a bunch here and only scanned a couple (and one of the English versions) because they were all done on the Database already.

Quite a few of the new addition are from the All-Star subset. Somebody sign Jagr already!