Lost & Found Part 2 / NBA Finals Update

I've got a small post today, which covers two topics. First is Lost & Found Part 2. We worked on the storage unit most of the week and found more cards. (Every day has turned up at least one card, although not all of them were new).

I also processed the cards into my collection and discovered that the bag's worth of cards I showed in Part 1, well...it wasn't all duplicates. My gut reaction was that it was, but there were cards in there that were new, in all topics except the Craftsman cards which were clearly my duplicates from the packs I opened when the set was new in 1995. Surprisingly, some of the NBA stickers were NOT duplicates, and some of the NASCAR was not either, including the Bobby Labonte card shown in the photo. I am now pretty much convinced these were unsorted cards- a mixture of new and duplicates that I must have put in the bag to sort later, sometime in 1996, and never did! I would not be surprised if they were cards I got on vacation in Lake George that I put in the bag to bring home and when I got home, totally forgot about. That seems unlikely but I can't imagine any other senerio how that could have happened. Perhaps it was one of the many times I was sick or something. I don't know.

Here is a breakdown of the new cards I've found so far...

I created an Excel chart so I could get the screencap, I will try and keep it updated and post a new screencap in future Lost & Found updates.
That is a LOT of cards! Scans of some of them are at the bottom of the post. 

Unfortunately, not all the cards survived in perfect shape...

Thankfully, they were all duplicates! The Desert Storm card would not have been if I hadn't opened a box of the set in 2010. The Marlin card was really badly curved but it's already flattening out some. I think I can get it flat if I put it under a full 5000 count box. (If anybody wants it, or the Jarrett shown I will PWE it to them.) Keeping the Desert Storm card for now until I can compare it with the one from the box, there were a lot of printing variations in that set and I don't want to lose a variation by mistake.
Also, one of my pet peeves in cards is when people don't rotate a card to it's proper orientation, like making a horizontal card stand vertical...yet I did it in this very photo. Duh!

While not technically cards we did find some of my stash of card packaging. I am the kind of person that saves empty boxes and packs...all of them...no matter how many I open. (Remember, I'm a hoarder...) I will be working on scanning all of these boxes and posting them to the Database...but doing the boxes is not a lot of fun, so I may get bored and put them back in storage for a while. We'll see. That 2003-04 Ultra box shown in the photo is the first box I opened after I got my first digital camera in 2003. I know this because I took a photograph of it back then, which was the first photo of anything card related I ever took, at least on digital. I do have some taken on actual film too.

I would like to say that I kept them neat and in boxes most of the time, like so...

but most of them time they ended up stored like this...

Yes, that is a trash bag full of card boxes! And I have to say, I'm glad that they don't do blasters where you have to rip them apart to get at the cards anymore. I don't recall seeing blasters before the 2001-02 season but I could be wrong. These were some of the earliest I got, or at least remember getting. They will be fun to scan. [/sarcasm]
If I were to get any like that now, instead of ripping them I would use a letter opener to cut one of the end flaps, but apparently that didn't occur to me in 2001-02.

Now, on the other topic....when I wrote up the post previewing the NBA Finals, I made a big deal about LeBron James making it to his 6th consecutive NBA Finals. That is a big deal, because so few players in the NBA's 70 seasons have done it. But...I made a big mistake, in that I totally forgot that James Jones is also playing in his 6th consecutive NBA Finals! Jones, a career role player, was on the Miami Heat from 2008-09 through 2012-13, including the 4 consecutive years they made the finals, and then he followed LeBron to Cleveland where he made the finals again in 2014-15 and this year.
Despite the fact that he has been in the NBA since 2003-04, he has not been popular on cards, not receiving a singe card in 2006-07, 2008-09, or 2011-12. He only got one base card in 2015-16, Complete #268, which is shown.

 I had to get this in here because the Finals may be over by the time I make my next post. The Warriors have a commanding 3-1 lead heading back home, one more win and they will raise the 2015-16 NBA Champion banner...and they get to try at home, where they beat the Cavs by 15 and 33 points(!) in game 1 and game 2 respectively, so...it's pretty much over. A game 6 will surprise me, let's put it that way. We'll find out Monday night.

Now, back to the first topic, here are some scans of cards that I have found in storage. It takes a lot longer to scan then photograph or type about so this is only a small sampling. There will be more to come.

1992 Score '90s Gridiron Stars #4

 All the football cards found were from 1992 Score, and I have no memory of them whatsoever. Three of the inserts needed to be done for the Database so they are the only ones I scanned now.

1992-93 Upper Deck Hologram Set Checklist

 I found the complete box set, which I remembered having but didn't know where it was!

1994 Upper Deck USA Gold Medal #82

 A parallel from a set I had completed.

1995 Maxx Retail #235

 I found a pack's worth of 1995 Maxx Retail, of which 4 cards were new. The Retail version has no foil, whereas the hobby version of series 2 has foil and glossy coating.

1996 SpeedFlix ProMotion #1

 There was one pack of SpeedFlix that the Marlin and Jarrett cards shown above came out of, this one and a Mark Martin card not shown were also in the same pack. They both have some curvature but not too bad- they still sit pretty much flat.

1997 Action Rich Bickle. This was a 1-race only car.

Power Chrome Legends '95 #67

 I love the Power Chrome Legends '95 set, always have. Like all Chrome/Finest/Prizm cards, though, I like them less now that I scan my collection instead of just looking at them. I still think I have a complete set waiting to be found in storage.

Power Chrome Legends '95 #73

1997 Upper Deck Electric #207

1995 Upper Deck Electric #242. This is the card visible on top of the NASCAR stack in post #1

1995 Ultra X-Men Hunters & Stalkers #3. I think this is the base version but it may be a parallel.

 The Hunters & Stalkers insert has three variations and I can't really tell them apart. I know one version was a Wal-Mart exclusive but I don't know which version this is. I know it's not the gold version because the background would have been gold instead of blue.

1993-94 Skybox 1993 All-Rookie Team #AR5

1996 Return of the Jedi Widevision Promo #P1. This is the bent oversize Star Wars card talked about in post #1

Winner's Circle 1997 Lifetime Series Dale Earnhardt Bonus Car

This card does not actually show Dale Earnhardt, though. Dale only drove one race in the #8 car in 1975, the World 600 at Charlotte. In that race, the car was solid blue with a yellow hood bulge, yet Action insists on using the car with the entire yellow roof, which you can tell this photo is by the stripes that run the length of the car. This is almost surely Ed Negre in the photograph. although Dick May drove for Negre once and Dean Dalton twice. Adding insult to injury: Negre, who was both a car owner and driver in NASCAR from 1955-79, (owner until 1981)....does not have a single card of his own. This is likely literally the only trading card to show him, and he's not even mentioned...not even on the back of the card. Negre died in 2014 at the age of 85.

Here's a photo of the car as Dale drove it. The yellow rookie stripe proves that this is how Earnhardt drove the car- Negre, May and Dalton were all veterans in 1975.

And from the front.

Photo credit on both goes to the Randy Ayers' NASCAR modeling message board.

This is the diecast that the card shown came with. Clearly NOT correct!

I and several others have been trying to get Action to issue the correct solid blue car for years, but they don't even acknowledge us and the photo evidence, let alone correct the error.

If there are any strange typos or words being in the wrong place, I managed to slice open my finger tip of my left pointer finger on, of all things, a plastic Christmas light. It's not a bad cut, but it does require a band aid, and it has thrown off my typing a bit.