Lost and Found: Since 2007!

I found something overnight that I had been looking for for literally a decade...and it turned out they were within a foot of where I store my card collection the whole time.

Back in January 2007 I finished making my paper listing for my NASCAR collection. My paper listings tell me what I have in my collection, they are actually the most important thing I've ever actually made. I started creating them in 1998 and I didn't finish until 2010, if you can believe that. I don't know when I finished the NBA, I did all of non-sports in 2010, and I worked on NASCAR starting in 2003 and eventually finished in 2007. (It stands to reason I finished the NBA in either 2002 or 2003 but logic doesn't always play a role in my actions).

I distinctly remembered taking a pack of oversized Star Wars cards out of a box so I could put NASCAR cards in said box when I was finishing my NASCAR listing. But I hadn't seen them since. I didn't remember what set it was, or what any of the cards were, just that it was Star Wars and that they were the oversized cards Topps loves to force on us.

I never saw them again, and feared they had been lost forever- not thrown out, just lost. Things have a tendency to go missing, for no apparent reason. There are multiple model parts I've had before lunch, gone to eat, and come back to never see them again, for example. I have no animals or small children in the house, so I can't explain it.

Now, today, I was working on my card storage area. It's been a bit of a mess to be honest, because let's face it: I'm not very organized, a bit scatterbrained, and when you add in the fact that I need help to physically move them, it's gotten to be a bit jumbled. But that is no more. I finally, after 29 years in the hobby, roughly 22 of them using the white boxes to store my cards, have them sorted. The boxes are sorted by size and I have the boxes scanned facing one way and the waiting to be scanned facing another. I have a mish-mash of all sizes of boxes, ranging from 5000 count to 135 count, and before, they were all in basically whatever order I last touched them in.

As I was finishing up, I decided to investigate what was on the box next to where the cards are, and I found some long lost stuff. I think, with this long preamble, you can guess what I found...

Unfortunately, the Disney shenanigans have pretty much killed my love of Star Wars. 2016 was the first year in my life I did not watch a single Star Wars movie. (My earliest memory of anything is watching Empire Strikes Back). 2017 will join it.

Oh, but there's more. I found some NBA cards I didn't know I had! I have no idea where these came from, but they must have been late in my first run with the NBA. I quit on the league sometime between September of 2006 and Christmas 2006, but I don't know exactly when. These probably came in that time period. I didn't remember ever seeing them before in my life, so unlike the Star Wars cards, I didn't miss them because I didn't remember ever having them! They were in large white envelopes so they must have come from some sort of repack.

Amazingly, this Karl Malone card was NOT damaged despite being stuffed into a standard sized toploader!

Unfortunately, two of the autographs were college.

 way to phone it in on photo quality there, Sage.

I also found something that normally would be a very big card...if it wasn't a knockoff.

The Lucky 13 set was an exchange program Fleer did in 1996-97, and Kobe was the biggest name of them all. Unfortunately, this is not the real card but a knockoff. You can tell by the poor quality of the colors, and the slight blurriness of his name and the copyright info on the back. The UV coating also feels "off" but that can't be captured in a scan.

Although the back looks OK in the scan, it's not, in real life you can tell.

This was in the display case of my local card/comic book store with a pricetag of $34.95. (I know this because it was still in that same toploader when I found it) but after I explained the issues to the store owner (who fully admitted to know really knowing cards) he gave it to me. I was just wondering whatever happened to this one and now I know- it's been sitting in a box since 2006, unseen by light or human eyes.

One last good find- a Star card of Isiah Thomas. Back in the mid-2000s when I got this I would have considered it a knockoff like the Kobe or the college cards, and not counted it as part of my collection. Now I know better, that I have broken free from the Beckett bias.

I'm really not a fan of Thomas, but I'm still glad to add this card to my collection proper.

The crazy thing? I must have moved this box a dozen times, probably more, without ever looking too deep into it. It was not a large box, but on top was some model stuff, so I must have assumed that the whole box was model stuff. I was, quite clearly, wrong.