Easter Additions

Whenever there is a gift giving occasion, any holiday, birthdays, even just random, my mom gives me cards. This has been going on for more than 25 years now, and this year is no different. Sometimes it's packs, sometimes it's singles...this year it was the latter and a gift certificate for COMC which will result in it's own post when it arrives.

My mom is a regular reader (and commenter, as Hotrod Mama) and this year she used the "Sets missing from my collection" chart to choose gifts for me...these below are all new sets to my collection!

2009 Showcase, one of only 4 NASCAR sets missing...

2007-08 Topps Triple Threads, the Emerald Parallel. The card has a canvas texture.

2007-08 Bowman Elevation. I'm not sure yet if this is base card, or a parallel. It's not SN so it's probably base...I have more research to do but I love researching cards so that's a good thing.

2005-06 Topps Big Game. I didn't know this set existed until about a month ago! I thought I had all the 2005-06 releases, but then I discovered this one listed on the Database.

2008-09 Radiance. This card is printed on plastic and is all holofoil. It's only my second card of Jamario Moon.

2010 Press Pass Five Star! This was the most expensive NASCAR set ever released, and both years were missing from my collection....not anymore! I am down to only two missing NASCAR sets from my collection, at least until Panini starts issuing them. This card is as thick as a patch relic and SN35 is the base card, NOT a parallel!

2009-10 Rookies & Stars Longevity. It's hard to tell in the scan but the card has a slight mirror foil effect. The 2010-11 set was much easier to tell the Longevity version from the basic but I already have a bunch of them.

In addition to the new sets, I also got ten cards from 1954 Topps Scoop, one of my all-time favorite non-sports sets. All are high number issues, with the lowest #115. Here are all 10. They aren't in numerical order or the order I got them, they are just in whatever order they got scanned.

This depicts an actual event, DeWitt Clinton poured a jug of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic Ocean at the conclusion of the first journey on the Canal.

Where did they get an electric lamp in 1803? :)

This set came out of packs with a black coating on it that you rubbed off with a coin. This card still has some of that, to the left of the caption box and on Napoleon's ear area.

Thanks Mom!

Stay tuned for Part 2, which will happen whenever COMC gets the shipment to me...it's already done and waiting for them, so hopefully it will ship tomorrow.

And, in just a few short minutes, I get to watch my all-time favorite player, Elton Brand and the 76ers, take on the Golden State Warriors, which feature three of my favorite players in the NBA currently, in Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson.

Non-Sports Collectors: Let's Trade!

I finally have an accurate tradelist for non-sports cards! I had what I thought was an accurate list, but after receiving several trade requests where I could not find the cards, I knew I had to totally overhaul it. That is now complete, and my non-sports tradelist is now totally accurate for the first time ever.

The list is not particularly large- 1,367 cards. That is due to two factors, being a) I mostly stayed away from non-sports between 1996 and 2010, and b) I only listed perfect cards. Any cards with damage- being either a weak corner, scratches, dents, or anything else that keeps them from being perfect- they did not go on the list. Honestly, some of the flaws I rejected cards for are so minor that most people would probably not even notice them, but I am not going to tell somebody I have a card, send it to them, and then have them be disappointed because the card is not all they were hoping for...when you get a trade from me, you won't have to look for an upgrade. (I actually rejected more NASCAR cards for flaws than I put on my tradelist, but luckily the number I rejected for non-sports is only about 2/3rds of what I accepted)

Here is the list of sets I have available on my tradelist:

To see the cards on the tradelist, simply click on any place the word tradelist appears in this post, or... CLICK ME

For trading with me...I will take anything. It doesn't have to be on my wantlist,  it doesn't have to be non-sports, basketball or NASCAR. I'll take literally anything. I don't care what. It doesn't even have to be cards. I basically won't turn down any trade. The one thing I will NOT do is sell. I'm quite proud of the fact that I am in my 28th year in the hobby and I've never sold a single card, not even a duplicate...and I have no intention of changing that.


Here is a look inside the reject box-

 As you can see, none of my older stuff got past the reject stage, unfortunately. (The airplane cards on the far left are 1952 Topps Wings, the other ones in the middle are 1959 Sicle). There are also some cards from the 1963 Topps Flags Midgees in the box, but not pictured. I'm not sure what I will end up doing with the rejects. If anybody wants them, let me know. Most of them hit the reject box because of bad corners.

50,000th

This will be another short post from me- not very like me, but they can't all be mini-books, right?

I just discovered that on Friday night, I hit 50,000 card fronts posted to the Trading Card Database.

That's a heck of a lot! Yet I don't even rank in the top 5 contributors, either. (OK, I'm 6th...the Database gives those stats on the home page)

But just consider...I just hit the halfway mark on scanning my NBA collection sometime in February. I've been working on my NBA collection since 2010. Every. Single. Day. And I just hit halfway. There's lots more to come. Indeed, I have nearly 10,000 more images waiting to go. (Counting fronts, backs and packaging). I'm slowly working the stash of scans onto the Database. I think I've built up enough now that I no longer have to worry about running out of something to post any time soon.

This was card #50,000.

1990 Maxx Holly Farms #HF5. This is a set I just completed via the Database actually. I bought a set on ebay- or at least, I thought I did. I was so blinded by the great price (under $5) that I didn't notice that it said "NEAR" complete, when it arrived it was missing card #1, Dale Earnhardt. A fellow Database member GAVE me the missing Earnhardt when I had nothing he wanted on my tradelist. It wasn't even the only RAOK from a Database member to arrive that day!  

I've been kind of busy working on a scanning project which I'm not really ready to post yet, so no HOST this week again. There may be one of you out there that misses it, but that may be an optimistic number.  It will return anyway, because I enjoy writing them.

The Greatest card ever made!

It's been quite a week for me card wise. I've finished a huge project, came up with a new goal for the year (to replace one I failed during February) and I've gotten a lot of great cards in the mail- both from purchases, trading and a couple of RAOK.

But right now I want to highlight just one card- the Greatest Card Ever Made!

After being in the hobby for 28 years this year, it isn't every day that a new all-time favorite card enters my collection...but yesterday, March 9th, 2016, it happened. (Which, coincidentally, is my Mom's birthday!)

Yes indeed, that IS a card of me!!

A couple of years back, I had a friend of mine whip up the front for me, and I used it for a while as my profile picture on Facebook and on my own website. The 1991 Maxx design has always been one of my favorites, and it's the definitive NASCAR set in my mind. So it was a natural choice.

Flash forward to sometime last week, Gavin of Baseball Card Breakdown posted up his set of Simpsons customs that was available on a limited basis...I had to have it. I've been a Simpsons fan most of my life and I've seen every episode many times. Many, many times. Well into the triple digits for a large majority of episodes. There's not a day that goes by that I don't quote the Simpsons more than once, and I end every day with reading a portion of one of the Simpsons Library of Wisdom books.

So I asked Gavin if he would take on a commission to print my card, to send along with the Simpsons set, and he would. So...I delved into my files and had the front ready to go. The back was another story. I had never had a back of the card made up.

I decided to make it myself.  I wrote the text, lined it up, and did the stats, which were the hardest part to do in getting them lined up. Those are my actual stats, by the way, not just numbers made up randomly to look good. I even changed the photographer credit to reflect the fact that my mom took the picture.

Writing about myself in the third person was kind of strange, but I wanted to make this look professional, and cards don't talk, so Billy made the adjustment.

When the card arrived yesterday, I was thrilled to see how it turned out. Perfect! Exactly how I imagined it. The colors match an actual 1991 Maxx card perfectly. It now is my all-time favorite card, and I think it will be for a long time.

Thanks for making this a reality, Gavin!

In case you are interested, this was the card back I used to make my own. The only thing I could not match was the font used for the name. I just had an idea that I could have done to match it, but it would have significantly raised the amount of work for me, and of course, it didn't occur to me until right now.

Finding Greatness in the Duplicate box

Had a bit of a surprise tonight...but a very good one!

As you all know by now, I'm always scanning something. I've been working hard on some sets to post to the Database, but when I was getting them out I also got out some other cards I wanted to scan- including my stash of LeBron James rookie cards, most of which were not posted yet. I scanned the 2003-04 Standing O card yesterday. That turned out to be important.

Quite some time ago, I no longer remember when, my brother got me a clamshell repack from our local Target. He does this from time to time and while I remember this one specifically, I don't remember when it was...it may have been anywhere between 2014 and summer 2015 but my gut feeling says 2014.

I was surprised to find that in the middle of the repack was a LeBron James RC- or so I thought. I was excited to find it, but the excitement faded quickly when my records showed that I already had it.

But 2003-04 Standing O is not a set I really have a lot of memories of. By the time it came out in 2004 I was starting to lose my enthusiasm. I was still getting every box that came out but I would catalog them in my paper listing then type them into my Excel chart, the one I've talked about several times that I lost to a floppy disk crash shortly afterwords. It was one of the last sets that came out before the time I sorted my collection by player, where it has been ever since, sometime in 2004.



That is a long way to go about saying that this is not a set I really know on sight.

So...I did not realize exactly what I had.

Flash forward to today, March 3rd, 2016. I made a trade on the Trading Card Database, my first of the month. I needed to round up 36 cards to send off to their new home in Ohio. One of the cards turned out to be missing- I am 99% sure I traded it and forgot to remove it from my list. So, I went through the boxes of duplicate cards I've gotten in the last several years that I have not sorted and entered into my tradelist. They are so unsorted that they aren't even separated by sport. All duplicates I get go into various boxes until I sort them and enter them.

I didn't find another copy of the missing card, but I came across this LeBron James card...and I realized right away that this card was different from the one I had just scanned and edited the night before!

Holy mackerel, this is the Embossed parallel!

The embossed aspect does not show in the scan, but the silver foil "swoops" on the top right and bottom left were the first thing I noticed when I came across it in my duplicate stash.

Silver foil doesn't really scan well, but you can see it there in the corners.

Here is the base card, which if I had not just scanned, I would never have realized this was NOT a duplicate!

The foil aspect is most noticeable on his right leg.

The backs of the cards scan identically, but of course you can see in hand that the embossed card is, well...embossed! You can see a little bit of the embossing on the card back but not a lot.

Embossed

Base

What an incredible find...this great card, a legitimate rarity, has been languishing in my duplicate box for who knows how long?