National Bound!

 I first learned about the National Sport Collector's Convention- colloquially known solely as the National, around 1998 or 1999, back when I used to read Beckett. I've wanted to go ever since then, and it's risen to a Bucket List item. 

Now, finally, I will be attending the National for the first time! This year's National is being held in Cleveland, Ohio, roughly 7 hours away from home. 

I will be there on Thursday for sure, MAYBE Friday and Saturday as well but that's yet to be determined- if my health gives out or I run out of money I won't be able to return. 

I've got some trepidation about my health lasting long enough to get through the show...I have limits on what I can do physically but I'm going to push myself as much as I can to see as much as I can. This may be a one and done experience for me, really not fond of driving to/through Chicagoland so going there is not too likely, and I think it's going to be there the next three years, although I'm not 100% sure.

And of course money is always a problem. I've been saving all year long but I doubt I have enough to bring home all I want to...of course when you are a set collector for three entire sports that's pretty much always the case. 

As I am a collector of opportunity, I'm going to see what I can see and see what I can add, but I'm not going there looking for anything in particular. I do want to see some of the high dollar vintage cards that I could both never actually afford nor would I want to buy, since they aren't my sports, but yeah...I want to see the old baseball cards on display at the grading booths for example. 

I may not be able to add as much as I am hoping to at the show. I know from looking at pictures in previous years it's heavily skewed to baseball, which I only collect a VERY small portion of, but more concerning for me is that I refuse to pay anyone to think for me and I tend to walk past graded cards without even really looking at them. The hobby prices are also insane lately and I may find the cards are overpriced vs what I am willing to pay for them. I am sure I will find something- It's probably statistically impossible not to at a show of this size, but time will tell just how successful I will be. 

I really don't know what to expect...while I have been attending card shows for more than 30 years now none have ever been on the scale of the National. No other shows are on this scale, this is the largest in the world. 

I generally stink at remembering names and who they belong to, unless I have dozens of cards of them of course, so if you see me, odds are I won't recognize who you are so please speak up. I don't want to come home and see that a member of the Cardblogosphere saw me and I didn't get a chance to say hello! I don't know what shirt I will be wearing each day yet but I will have my trademark neon green hat. (The same one I am wearing in the Dreams come true post). I know I plan to stop by the Puck Junk table so I will be sure to meet at least one fellow card blogger. 

One thing I am not planning to do is the autograph signings. While there are a couple of guys planning on being there that it would be cool to get an autograph from, I would rather spend my money on cards, but more importantly standing still in line is really bad for me- just standing on line exacerbates my health problems and I have to give that up if I have any chance of seeing the entire show, which is my goal. It's literally not physically possible for me to do both so I had to make my choice and it wasn't really a hard choice.  If they had any NASCAR people signing it would have been a harder choice but since they have exactly 0 on the docket the choice was easy. 

I really can't wait...I've been wanting to do this for so long, it's a little hard to believe that it's actually going to happen! 

Yo, Joe!

 I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on Cardboard History, but GI Joe played a huge part in my life. My brother introduced me to GI Joe the day after Thanksgiving in 1990, and it became one of my favorite things pretty much instantly. A LOT of my memories of that time revolve around Joes more than anything else- even cars. Even when the toyline ended in 1994, I stayed with GI Joe, through the revival in 1997, then the second revival in 2001 played a role in my life when I was going through a rough time. 

In 1991, Impel released a 200 card set for GI Joe that was based largely on the comics, which was the first comic series I ever had read to me (when I 6 years old) in consecutive order. My brother got the set for me when it was new, and I believe it was the third set I ever had completed, after 1990 Classic Monster Trucks and 1991 Marvel Universe. It may have come before Marvel Universe and be the second set I completed. At this late date there is no way to know. 

I've always loved the set (for the most part) but it had had very little of it scanned properly since I started my scanning project in 2009.  (only 48 of the 200 cards). I could not let that stand anymore, so for the past few days I've been working on scanning it. And now I have pretty much completed it, other than 5 of the "Honor Roll" subset which features characters killed off in the comics and three cards for the Corba-La characters from the 1987 movie. 

The set features an overall design concept that runs through the majority of the cards, with several subsets throughout. Here's a quick tour through each of them. 

Eco-Warriors starts off the set, and yes it's as preachy as you expect it to be. This is card #1. My copy is in poor shape and I have a better condition replacement, but I have not been able to bring myself to swap out the better examples, since these are my originals. My copy is yellowed from being stored in pages, as well as damaged from the ring of the binder and a bunch of small indentations on the front that I have no idea what caused. 

Rand & File comes next, for both GI Joe...

and Cobra, both featuring a cool camo pattern. 

Next comes the Original Team, which features the characters introduced in 1982 when GI Joe started. 

Official Battle Gear with the yellow border is 22 cards, which is the longest color based subset in the set. Most of them represent characters or uniforms introduced in the late 80s or 1990. 

Next comes a subset that has a modified image of each issue of the Special Missions comic, as well as a synopsis of each issue on the back. I find it odd where it was placed in the checklist, because not only does it come before the regular comics, it breaks up the character cards, since...

1991 Recruits comes next, with the Joes in blue and Cobra in red. 

Sonic Fighters in light green and Super Sonic Fighters in bright red are the two smallest character groupings, falling at six cards each. 

Then comes the cards for each issue of the flagship GI Joe Comic. Not every comic got a card which is surprising. 

Finally, 

the Honor Roll, which is based on characters that were killed off in the comics, (or were supposedly dead until they decided they were just THOUGHT to be dead because they realized they lost access to the majority of the Cobra hierarchy.  I really dislike this part of the set. I dislike the fact that they killed all of these characters off just to appease the letter writers who said it was not realistic that all the Joes always survived, or in the case of BattleForce 2000, simply because Larry Hama thought they were stupid. 

I feel when they killed all those characters is when the whole tone of the book changed, and it never really recovered or was as enjoyable after that point, even when they continued the story years later. 

Unfortunately at 25 cards this is the largest subset, and the only one to have horizontal backs.

They were particularly brutal about it too...

Although it's been a while since I've reread it, if I remember correctly the entire BattleForce 2000 was introduced and all killed off in three panels of one comic. 

Even though this was marketed as Series 1, there was never a series 2 unfortunately, and surprisingly, there were no inserts at all, even though 1991 and Impel by all rights should have had a slate of holograms. 

While researching this post (I had to check and see if there were truly no inserts or I just didn't have them) I discovered that there was a set issued in 2023 by Super7 featuring classic artwork. Even though I stopped collecting the action figures nearly 20 years ago, and I let the comic drift off about 3 years ago, I would still collect the cards if I knew where to find them. I also found out there was a sticker set about the 1987 movie made in 1989, which I had never seen before. Stickers are hard to find except very expensive on COMC but I will be keeping my eyes open for them too. 


I guess I should show a standard back too. 

Joes had green fields while Cobra had gray.

This is an example of the back of the comic cards, this one for my favorite issue of Special Missions, which takes place almost entirely in the Hudson Valley, where I live. 

The standard comic has purple backs. 

New People Scanned in June 2024

 It was a big month for scanning. I was working more on models, but then I accidentally cut into my thumb with my razor saw...so I needed to take a little break. Luckily, it did not impair my scanning, so I worked on that instead and scanned a grand total of 1257 cards during the month. Ended up being the most I've scanned in a month all year by a roughly 400 card margin. 

Only 50 of the people were new to my collection, which is actually a bit lower than I expected, and 14 of those people came from the blaster of Hoops Winter that I wrote about in my last post. Only two other people joined my collection in the month of June, everyone else had just been waiting patiently for their turn on the scanner tray. That time happened to come in June. 

My thumb is now pretty much totally healed. There's a little tiny piece basically missing but it's basically just a divot, not even any different color from the rest of my skin. It doesn't hurt anymore, even when I press on it. So basically just a minor setback that gave my time to scan a bunch of cards, before I head back to modeling, which I plan to do starting later today now that my monthly upload is completed. 

Snow at 94°

 My brother and I made a very rare trip to our local Wal-Mart on Saturday, which was an unpleasant 94° out for. My Wal-Mart usually doesn't have a good card selection and theirs is even smaller now than it was last time I visited, right around Christmas time. 

I didn't walk away empty handed, though. I got a blaster of Hoops, or so I thought. It was actually Hoops Winter, which is basically a reissue of regular Hoops but with snow added digitally to each card and gold foil instead of silver. As much as I dislike cards with messed with photos, I actually like these a lot. I've always loved snow, and they still show the real picture- mostly. They fall right in the spot of "messed with but whimsical enough that I like them" and I am not unhappy that I didn't notice the Winter label on the box. 

An even better aspect of it, is that I didn't have a single one of the Winter cards. I had opened 3 packs of regular Hoops. No duplicates! That's always a good thing and never a guarantee with Panini which tends to have the cards always come out of the packs in the same order, including inserts and parallels. 

You can see the white snow all over the design here, and with the snow bank on the top. I like how you can still see the real photo, just with the snow added to it. 

Because getting cards has been fairly rare recently, some of the veteran players appear in my collection for the first time from this blaster. This is Peyton Watson. 

I especially like the cards that show alternate uniforms. There are so many these days- each NBA team wears at least 4 uniforms every year, and at least one of them is exclusive to that season, so there are a lot of jersey designs that don't appear in my collection...and may not appear on any cards at all. I don't even know. 

Al Horford has been in the NBA since 2007 and finally got to celebrate a championship this season. 

I pulled both cards of phenom, #1 overall pick and Rookie of the Year winner Victor Wembanyama, my first two cards of him in NBA uniform, and 2nd and 3rd cards overall. The base rookie, shown second here, is actually an error as it's missing some foil from the final A in his last name, but odds are it will stay in my regular collection and not get moved to the Error collection. While Wal-Mart had 2 or 3 more blasters, I don't really have the money in the budget to get them. 

The top card of him is from the Tribute subset, which really doesn't need to exist. Just an excuse by Panini to get the superstars into the base set twice, and keeping active players from getting a single card. 

The inserts are also snowy, although a little hard to see on the Arriving Now of Anthony Black. The Holofoil parallel of Maxwell Lewis is more easily seen. 

I still have one pack left to open, but this was the only parallel I've gotten so far, a purple foil parallel. Personally I'd much rather have parallels than inserts. 

I also pulled the one per blaster autograph or relic, and it is my first and so far only card of Jaquez Jr.

Finally, here is a Winter card and a standard Hoops card showing the difference. 

Sometimes dreams DO come true

 There is one constant in all of my life, and that is my love of cars. I don't really know why cars resonate with me so much, but they do, and have my entire life. 

For many years I have had the dream of being able to enter a car show, not just spectate. I've been attending car shows since I was a little kid being pushed in a stroller, but they actually caused me some anguish too, as I've gotten older and my health has gotten worse. 

I am not able to drive or work on old cars. It seemed like I would never be able to achieve that dream. I thought it would be always out of reach, that I would always be on the outside looking in. 

Until tonight! 

My brother needed a new car, and ended up buying a 1989 Cadillac Coupe DeVille off one of his coworkers, and he began driving it today. Today also happened to be the weekly cruise-in in Hyde Park, NY, and we took the Cadillac...and entered it! While it's not "my" car, I still got to go and be a part of the show. 

It was truly a dream come true! 

Me with the car

Me putting the show registration under the windshield wiper

Our car, in the car show for the first time! 

Seeing it in the background of other car photos is still a thrill...and I have to be honest, I aimed it specifically so it would be. 

There it is again!

Looking at some of the rest of the show while standing behind the Cadillac

After the awards were announced the cars left in droves, lol. We stayed until 8:30 but there were few cars left and the bugs were starting to decide I was a good place to land and walk around so we left too.

By the time we got done in the store there were very few cars left in the show. 

Here are a couple of my favorite cars that weren't ours

1940 Plymouth pickup, very rare

1948-52 Ford F-3, I don't know which year exactly. The hood design tells what year is which but I can't remember which year is which design.

and it's matching trailer

Here are all the pictures I took from tonight: June 12th, 2024 Hyde Park Cruise

The plan is to be a regular at our two local cruises. But this will always be the first, and I already know I'm going to wake up tomorrow and wonder if this really happened or if it was just an awesome dream! 

New People Scanned in May 2024

 It was a fairly light month of scanning, as I got more in to the scale modeling aspect of my life as the temperatures warmed up. I scanned 378 cards, 26 of which were new people. 

15 of the 26 arrived to me from my friend that sends me his duplicates, the source off all the football and baseball in this month's batch as well as a couple of the hockey, including the Bourque.

A last makes a first

 I don't think I've even seen a card issued for a team's LAST game. Of course, that makes sense because teams don't fail very often, thankfully. The last NHL team to fold was before I was even born, until, perhaps, this year. 

The Arizona Coyotes have been poorly managed for longer than I've been in the sport. Just a couple of years ago they got locked out of their arena for not paying the rental bill, for example. For the past two seasons, they have been playing out of a college arena, which led to the road locker room being a tent in the parking lot. Yeah, just two of the more extreme examples, but their biggest problem is not having an arena capable of hosting major league hockey. 

So they are probably done. Probably? Well, the current owner, IF he can get a piece of land, AND completely build a new arena ready for play by the 2028-29 season, will get the Coyotes restarted. Those are pretty big ifs and I am somewhat dubious it will happen. 

For now, the contracts of all the players and the hockey operations have been sold to the new Utah NHL franchise, which will debut next year without a name. I will be calling them the CoyUties myself. 

I watched the last Coyotes game on Center Ice. It has never been my favorite team but watching the last game made me sad, for the players, the fans, the team support staff and broadcasters....it was the saddest broadcast I've ever seen. 

Now Topps has issued a card for the last game in the Topps Now set. 

This photo was taken at the conclusion of the game when all the players came out to salute the fans. You can tell by the faces visible and the body language that it was not a particularly happy moment for them, despite blowing out the Oilers. It was truly the end of that era. 

I'll be curious to see what the future holds- both for the new Utah team that will be made up of former Coyotes, but especially to see whether the Coyotes themselves can be restarted. Only time will tell.