Unexpected mail days are the best mail days!

 With the wrist injury I've been dealing with for 2+ years now I haven't been trading so mail days are pretty few and far between. I wasn't expecting anything beyond the few actual print magazines I am subscribed to. 

So it was quite a surprise when I got a letter from a name I recognized from the card hobby. An even bigger surprise awaited me when I opened it! 

Why, that is my #1 most wanted card!! 

I have been working on this set since it was issued in 1994 and they have been surprisingly difficult to hunt down. When I started keeping my Top 10 most wanted cards list, the last three cards I needed were all in the top 10. I got the other two but Jimbo eluded me. The last time I looked there was not a single copy available on either COMC or eBay! For only a 40 card set completion has been difficult, but now it's completed! 

Thank you so much Kurt!!

Fun fact: the card is a UER. Laura's hair should be brown. 

New People February 2025

 2025 started strong in January, but I gave myself a bit of burnout and didn't do anywhere NEAR the same amount in February, Whereas January saw me scan over 2000 cards, I only scanned 221 in February, and didn't really enjoy doing them...mostly working on them when it was too cold to work on models. It's too cold to spray paint outside now, so I'm doing a lot of prep work. 

Of the 221 cards scanned, 13 of them were new people, and 6 of them were people I got a card of at the card show specifically because I didn't have a card of them...it turns out I didn't have any of Ilya Zubov but I didn't know that until I did the monthly update of what is in my collection. 

On that topic, here are the people I didn't have before this last month.

15 new people. 

It wasn't much but anything that gets accomplished is a good thing. 

Black History Month Spotlight: Devante Smith-Pelly

 It would likely have been a long time before I got to Devante Smith- Pelly. He doesn't have many cards in my collection, and he was pretty instrumental in the Capitals beating the Golden Knights for the Stanley Cup my first full year watching. He never got another contract offer after that which was downright criminal. 

However, he was requested so I am writing this post about him. I have 4 cards of him, and all 4 are scanned!

2012-13 Score. This is my second favorite NHL set ever, after only 1990-91 Pro Set. 

2014-15 Upper Deck

2016-17 O-Pee-Chee. I have very few cards from this set...around 10 if I remember correctly. I wish I had more. 

2016-17 Upper Deck. 

I don't even have a single card of him on the Capitals, the team I most associate him with although he wasn't actually there for very long. 

Black History Month Spotlight: Grant Fuhr

 When you think of the top goalies of the 1980s, Grant Fuhr has to be in the conversation. He was in net for the Oilers dominant run of the mid-to-late 80s before bouncing around to a variety of teams, as goalies tend to do. His accomplishments led him to the Hockey Hall of Fame, and a fairly sizable showing in my collection, 27 cards, 18 of which I have scanned. 

Here they all are, in chronological order:

1982-83 Topps Sticker. You know when the earliest card in the collection is an All-Star card it's a pretty good sign the player will be in the Hall of Fame. This is a mirror foil sticker so didn't scan well. 

1983-84 O-Pee-Chee. I don't have much from the mid-80s. 

1988-89 Topps

1989-90 Topps. My copy is slightly out of register.

1990-91 Score American. The second set I completed for the NHL. I have scanned more of it than 1990-91 Topps which was my first completed set, so his card from that is still awaiting a scan.

1990-91 Upper Deck

1991-92 O-Pee-Chee Premier. This later season release shows his move to Toronto.

1991-92 Pro Set French. This is from Series 1 and shows him with the Oilers still. 

1991-92 Pro Set Platinum is not a favorite set of mine because each card is missing something- the player's name on the front. This was Pro Set's answer to Stadium Club. 

1992-93 Upper Deck

1993-94 Donruss. This is the only Sabres card I have scanned of him.

1995-96 Donruss Elite is a mirror foil set and scans terribly. 

1995-96 Zenith is also a mirror foil set and scans terribly.

1997-98 Leaf. I believe this was my first card of him in my collection.

1999-00 Aurora Glove Unlimited. This die-cut card is my only insert of him scanned (I have 2) and has a texture that makes it feel like leather. A really neat card.

2004-05 In the Game Franchises. One of my favorite sets, I was able to buy boxes of both American series of the 3 series set, but not the Canadian series.

2012-13 In the Game Heroes and Prospects. I've written about this card before. It's...hilariously awful. It's also my only minor league card of him. 

2013-14 In the Game Between the Pipes. Despite not having the NHL license, this set still showed NHL logos when they appeared on the helmets. I have them sorted into the NHL team albums on the Cardboard History Gallery. 

And that's all I have scanned of him so far. Being retired he doesn't get very many new cards into my collection, but being an all-time great he appeared in many sets that I haven't added to my collection yet, so there's a fairly good chance his collection numbers will go up by this time next year. 

Black History Month Hockey Spotlight

 Time to look at how my collections of the spotlighted Black NHLers have grown since last year at this time! I knew exactly how many I had of each person for the first time and now I will truly know how my collection has grown for these players, something I have not thought to track for anyone else. 

First up is P.K. Subban, who last year at this time I had 47 cards of, with 39 scanned.

I am still at 47 cards of him but I'm to 41 cards scanned. That's not really much of an update. I knew with him being retired he would stop getting new cards but there's still a whole bunch of old ones I don't have yet. 

2021-22 MVP Blue

Jarome Iginla also stayed put at 44 cards. Last year I was at 26 cards scanned and I'm now up to 29, so that's a good improvement. 

2001-02 Victory

The next player I highlighted was Ryan Reaves, who had 11 cards. He now has 13, so finally an addition! I have 12 of his 13 cards in my collection scanned, which is a very high percentage for anyone with more than 10 cards. 

2023-24 O-Pee-Chee

Anthony Duclair has been on a few different teams since I wrote my profile of him and now plays for the Islanders, although with Optimum being jerks and pulling MSG Network I can't see any of the three local teams. He also had a two card addition, bringing him to 21. Of those, I have 18 scanned.

2023-24 O-Pee-Chee

K'Andre Miller of the Rangers, my favorite team, had 5 cards in my collection at this time last year, and currently has 6, with my most recent addition coming on the first day of this month when I got his Metal Universe base card at my local card show. (Go back three posts to see a photo of it)

I mentioned in last year's post that I had gotten a Topps Now card of him but hadn't scanned it yet. I now have. I have only 4 of his 6 cards scanned so it's possible the other one besides the one I just got is also Topps Now now that I think about it. 

I only wrote one new player bio last year and that was Quinton Byfield of the Kings. At the point last year I had 11 cards of him with 8 scanned. I am now up to 14 cards of him, and all 14 are scanned! Wow, 100%, which I didn't even realize until I just pulled up his folder to check! I'm not going to post all my new additions just in case I don't get any more new cards for next year, if it wasn't obvious I haven't been adding new cards at the rate I once did. 

2021-22 SPx Finite Rookies Gold

I picked this card up at the National, and it's a lot cooler in hand than it is in a scan. The large logo, the Kings logo, his number, the SN and parts of the borders are gold foil. His picture and his name are clear plastic sandwiched between the front and back halves of the card. 

I only have one more profile written and ready to post- if there's anyone you want to see all I have scans of, let me know in the comments and I will whip up a post. 

Valentine's Day

 That is all.

New People January 2025

 That was a crazy large upload. January started strong scanning wise, with me scanning more cards in the month than I did in any month for over a year- 2091 cards to be exact. As it turns out, only doing cards without foil goes a lot faster than those with foil. Uploading took forever, complicated by a few things, including my chronic health problems acting up a lot, and Fotki not working for a day and a half, which is highly unusual. They may have been upgrading their servers because I notice the uploading process was faster when it returned from being down. 

Because I was working through whatever came out of the boxes, and not searching out anything specific, I ended up scanning a lot of baseball and football this month, plus a bunch of minor league hockey which led to a lot of new people. So many new people that I had to break the screenshot into three parts and combine them with Photoscape! 

220 new people got scanned for the first time this month! Including somebody I didn't even know was in my collection! I have 1 card each of two different baseball players named Craig Wilson. I didn't know this until I went to upload the scan of the second one and realized they were two different people. 

93 of the 220 were baseball players, 55 were hockey and 39 were football.  

You may notice that one person- Francois Groleau- is not highlighted in the screencap. He was not scanned this month, but I just created his listing due to a mistake on my part that I noticed and corrected during the course of this month's upload. 

The most important thing about this month's uploads- baseball hit 1000 people scanned! I talked about when they may happen in a previous post and it happened this past month. Frank White happened to be the 1000th person to be uploaded. 

Not only did Baseball hit 1000 people, it passed Other Sports! I didn't scan anyone at all for other sports this month, and with the influx of new baseball people it now stands at 1008 people scanned, while other sports is at 1005. Not a big difference, but interesting, at least to me. 

With 4230 people basketball still has a healthy lead, although hockey is closing in fast, taking the lead is not outside the realm of possibility. 

For people added to the collection, January was light. 

All the hockey players came from the Topps Stickers, which I no longer have access to due to Topps being stupid, so that cuts off my main source for new people added to the collection. My entire input of new cards in January came from the end of the Topps Now stickers, the SI for Kids magazine subscription I maintain for the cards, and a small purchase I made off a friend which yielded no new people. I made a mistake when I did this listing - Ayoka Lee should be listed as NCAA, not WNBA. I've corrected it in my listing but didn't feel like making another screeenshot.