The Kindness of Strangers #2

I have said many times that the kindness of fellow collectors is over the top. The people in this hobby are top notch. This as-needed series takes a look at the cards people send me just because they are nice people.

I start with the now-legendary day of July 27th. It ended up being the third biggest day in my 29 years in the hobby, with 1,418 new cards showing up in one day! Two of the four packages were trades, the other two were gifts.

Douglas from Sportscards from the Dollar Store hit me first, with a box full of people for my NHL collection. My project of getting as many different people into my collection took a big boost from him as he went through my list of people IN my NHL collection and pulled out cards of people not on the list, and sent them south of the border. He also sent me some Rangers in the box.

The same day, I got a gigantic box of cards from a fellow named Rob, who read my introduction on a hockey card forum I joined on Facebook, and liked the fact that I am trying to learn as much about the history of the sport as possible from cards.

Now...my memory is bad, and I got so many cards I got a little overwhelmed...and now I don't remember which person sent me which card, for the most part. I'm going to just show some highlights, which start with the relics...

 Holy mackerel! My first Stick relic, and a piece of jersey number!

There were two autographs...

And lots of Serially Numbered cards. I am really addicted to SN cards and really love to add them to my collection. In fact, a lot of times when I get some money on COMC, I will just go to the SN page and buy however many I can before I run out of money. It doesn't really matter who is on the card, as long as it's SN. (So far I have not purchased any duplicates inadvertently, but being SN, it wouldn't really matter if I did)

Douglas snuck in some NBA as well

Some of the above cards are numbered on the back.

Now, here are some non-SN highlights that mostly are cards that needed to be scanned for the Trading Card Database.

 My very first Golden Seals card! This one, which I am sure came from Douglas, is one of my favorites.

 1977-78 was the only year missing from my NHL collection from 1968-69 to current. Douglas sent me one each from O-Pee-Chee (shown) and Topps, solving that problem!

apparently an image variation

Douglas also sent me a handful of new Henrik Lundqvist cards, who has taken an early lead as my favorite player.

Whew! What a great day of cards. Naturally, I didn't scan all of them yet...because it will take me months to do all these cards.

Just two days later, I got two MORE packages of cards! This second day ended up being my 16th most new cards in a day all-time, which is pretty amazing to think about it. 7 of my 10 best days for new additions were gifts from fellow collectors. Two of the other days are Christmas Days. Only one day in my all-time top 10 best actually came from me purchasing cards.

Trading Card Database member Mihome316 sent me a big mailer of, surprisingly, baseball. He also stuck about 100 cards from 1990-91 Pro Set hockey into there, too. That set is turning out to be one of if not my favorite hockey set, and John sent me a bunch of them.

I only scanned the very first baseball card out of the package. These Bowman sets are confusing...thankfully the Trading Card Database has them all fully documented and I was actually able to figure out exactly what I had.

This Pro Set card is one of the people added to my collection from the mailer.

Next came a jam-packed small priority box from Joel Freedman, a frequent trading partner who I've mentioned several times in the past. He sent me cards from only two sets, but a whole bunch from both of them! 2005-06 Ultra had only one base card in my collection previously....now it has 132! 2005-06 MVP also took a big upgrade.
Here's a sample card from each set:

Since I got such a wide variety of cards, I decided to take a screen cap of my team listings on the Trading Card Database both before...

and after entry.

It's really small so I suggest clicking on them to make them bigger. I will say this though: Previously only 20 teams had hit the 100 cards in collection total...now 27 do!

Whew! It took me more than a week to properly document all the new cards I was given and traded for. While I was working on them, I got a surprise package from Jason German of Jason's Sports Card Blog! It was a mixture of everything. NHL, NBA, Olympics and even historical, although technically counted as baseball.

I didn't scan them yet, but the NBA was mostly vintage! Three from 1974-75 and 1 one from 1973-74. One of the cards from 1974-75 is nearly perfectly pack fresh, something you rarely find with this set.

Not technically cards, but very much like them, comes a gift from Doe of Now and Zen. These are stamps, but they are really very card like. They are lenticular, and they are AWESOME!

I'm pretty sure the three F1 cars are actually plastic models, mixing several hobbies of mine. Cool!! Umm-Al-Qiwain became one of the United Arab Emirates and that is the extent of my knowledge of the country. There were some other stamps there as well, but these are far and away my favorites...not just of this mailing, but of my entire collection!

I got a single card from bkim on the Trading Card Database that wasn't new, but completed a set for me! 1993-94 Upper Deck was short one Michael Jordan and a friend had sent me one...but it didn't survive the trip cross country. Now, I've got one that's darn near perfect.

 

I feel like I'm forgetting something, so if you gave me a gift and it's not here...my apologies. It's not a slight, it's my memory not working properly. 

Since there were so many new people added to my NHL collection- about 400 or more- I've decided to put my New People Added to my NHL Collection on hold for now...I will get back to it at some point but I am not sure when. I am having a hard enough time keeping my records straight, let alone taking the time to scan, edit, research and type each post...I simply don't have the time right now. 

One final bit of news....I fixed the "Followers" feature on here...I was pleasantly surprised to see my followers now total 30 people, when it quit working on me about a year ago I had only 17.

The next posts...many posts, with the exception of possibly one or two, will all be about my largest COMC haul ever.