A Truly Epic Mailday (Part 1)

The term Epic is thrown around a lot these days. Many times, what's being described as epic doesn't really deserve that tagline.

I think my mail day today might be truly epic.
I'll let the pictures speak for themselves...

The first picture shows the three boxes and the three padded envelopes I received. One of the small envelopes was a small two card purchase I had made, the rest were all gifts from fellow hobbyists, including my first gift from a fellow blogger, The Prowling Cat. I've heard that fellow bloggers were a generous bunch, and I saw that in action today.

The medium sized brown box in the middle was jam-packed with cards from a friend on the Database. He essentially sent me his duplicate stash. Many of them are hockey, but there was a little bit of everything in there.

The large box on the bottom, and the small white box, were both from my friend Ricky. He's taken it upon himself to help me build a better collection...especially hockey. In fact, when I sent him a message about finishing looking at all the cards, he was at an NHL game. The second photo is what greeted me when I opened the large box...wow is an adequate word to describe it. The big box weighed 16 pounds! It's the heaviest box of cards I've ever gotten in the mail.

The third photo shows all the cards after I put them into my boxes. Actually, not all of them made it into the boxes, the small stack with the Clint Bowyer card in the toploader are also new. I now have a small stash of duplicate hockey cards as well, visible in the top of the photo.

I have to say though, that this was my favorite card...

A Press Pass Ebay preview! This one got an audible "Holy Crap!" that my family heard on a whole other floor. I tried to win several of these Ebay previews when they were doing them, but I never succeeded. I had never actually seen one in person before today. This one, from the 2004 set, would have been on Ebay around Thanksgiving 2003, which is before I had an Ebay account, I joined in January 2006.

Before today, my hockey collection was a grand total of 29 cards. I don't know how many hockey cards I got today...but it's well into the 4 digits. It's going to be a few DAYS before I know for sure. (I keep very detailed records of my collection, including the order I get them in, so I will know for sure which hockey card is #1000....) I also got my first completed hockey set, and my first completed set of 2015. None of those 29 cards I had were from this 200 card set.

Today marks the first day where I got all 5 major sports and non-sports in the same day. I've been collecting since 1988.

I can't wait to find out how many new sets entered my collection today. Remember back in early December when I was happy to get 22 new sets in one day, which was my all time record? Well, that record fell today. I don't know if today's record will ever fall...I would not be surprised if I hit 100 new sets today. That will be something I post in part 2, in  few days, when I've fully documented everything.

There is another record that may have fallen today. As I stated, I keep track of my collection down to the very small details. I know, for example, how many cards I've gotten each day going back to 2000 (although it's not perfect- I only tracked NBA until 2003, and I haven't always kept up with it, something I really regret). My record for new cards in one day is 1388, set on July 9th, 2002. Christmas day 2002 also cleared 1000 new cards. (1208 to be exact) I know that my birthday in 1997 almost surely did as well, as my brother gave me 20 200 count boxes that day, but since I didn't yet keep records it's lost to history how many I got. I never thought it possible that the record of 1388 could ever fall for me. I can't spend the money on cards that I once did, and even that was a bit of a "Perfect Storm" situation that could be described as "once-in-a-lifetime". (I'll detail that in it's own post some day)
I believe I got more than 1000 cards today, and I am very much looking forward to finding out how many...but it will be a few days before I can sort them all, remove the duplicates and count the new additions. I would not be surprised if I actually hit 1500 today- and 2000 would not even really shock me.
With my hockey, football and baseball collections being very small, almost every card was new. The duplicates shown in photo #3- they were all cards that I got more than one copy of today. It's not like the NBA, where I can get a lot of cards and have most of them be duplicates. Case in point, my brother brought me one of those 75 card clamshells from Target a few nights ago, and I got 12 new cards, the rest being duplicates. That percentage is not going to be the case here.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned to Part 2 where I share just how many new cards, sets and records that happened today...along with some more highlights of cards included! (I didn't even show the autograph, promos, or my first serially numbered hockey cards, etc!)