Topps NBA Advent Calender Day 4

 Four days into this project and it seems pretty clear that there is going to be a Plaid parallel and a Making the Nice List insert in each pack. The latter is a 25 card insert set so if it holds true for the rest of the box, and there is no duplication, I should come up one short of the complete insert. Not sure if I'm happy about getting that close or annoyed that they leave me one short. The Plaid parallel is 200 cards so the chances of completing that is zero, but I am fully convinced I will be chasing these in the coming years. 

Today's pack includes former #1 overall pick Cade Cunningham, a Plaid parallel of Ivica Zubac, the Making the Nice List is Jeremiah Fears, and a base card of Jamal Murray, who really should be considered a superstar more widely than he is. 

Topps NBA Advent Calendar day 3

 Today was a big day for me. It was my last model club meeting in 2025 and I made it to all 24 meetings between both clubs! I've been a member of the Town of Newburgh Model Car Club since 2002 and the Hudson Valley Scale Modelers since 2009 and I've never been able to attend all the meetings for either club in one year, and this year I was able to go to both clubs in full this year! It took a lot of effort to get my health corralled but I was able to pull it off. 

After the meeting I opened my advent Calendar pack.

Topps NBA Advent Calender Day 2

 Another good pack today, hitting a plaid parallel from my other favorite team! 

Topps Advent Calendar day 1

 Today is December 1st and that means it's time to start the Topps Advent Calendar!

This is the first time they have ever made a advent Calendar for basketball cards and I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. 

This is the first pack, and I'm pretty sure that Miles McBride is the Advent exclusive Plaid parallel, and it's also my first card of him! That's a very good start. 

I'm going to try and post about it every day. 

IndyCar? In de collection

 While NASCAR will always be my #1 favorite in everything, don't get me wrong - I love all forms of motorsports. IndyCar is my #2 form of motorsports, or at least tied for #2 in enjoyment. Clearly #2 in form of cards in my collection, thanks to Parkside Cards. For many years IndyCar didn't get any cards produced, but starting in 2024 Parkside has released multiple IndyCar sets, the flagships of which have made their way to my collection. 

I like the 2025 set much more than the 2024 set, but whew, did Parkside make it hard to keep track of what I have. All of my collection is card number based, so if I have card #1 for example, then that spot is filled and any other card #1s are duplicates. This is not a given in 2025 Parkside because they made a major error when creating the cards. 

The first 43 cards in the set were supposed to be the driver cards, and cards #44 through 86 were supposed to be the car cards. However, Parkside issued each car card as the car's number, which, for the teams with multiple drivers, leads to in some cases 4 different cards with the same number. That's quite a mess and since I don't know enough about who drives what car numbers, I determined that I couldn't make a paper list for this set, which is very, very rare for me. 

All these cards carry the #6, and I don't even have the card that was supposed to be #6, which is Scott Dixon's driver card. (Although I have some incoming from a friend and he may be included, I will find out when I open the package)

Other than the numbering gaff, this set has almost everything I'm looking for in a racing set. In fact, I can say without question this is my favorite IndyCar set ever. 

Every driver who qualified for an IndyCar race in 2024 has a card. Perfect. 

Not only does every driver get a card, every CAR also gets a card. That's even more perfect. After all, you don't have auto racing without the automobiles. 

After the drivers and cars, each race winner gets a card for the race they won, documenting the previous season. This is exactly what I am looking for in any sports card set. 

But it gets even better! Each race also gets a podium card showing the top three finishers from each race. This is elite levels of season documenting. 

But wait, there's more! There is a subset for the season award winners! There are 5 cards in this subset but I only got one of them, for the champion. That makes a pretty good example for this subset, doesn't it?

Next comes a subset showing each team logo for all the IndyCar teams. To my knowledge, this is the first time ever in the entire history of IndyCar racing - under all names, including CART and USAC - that the teams have ever gotten team cards! This style of racing has existed for more than 100 years, and we are still getting firsts. 

Finally, the set ends with a subset of Driver Debuts. This is very cool because for most of the drivers, there were no IndyCar sets issued during that time, or for the few that were around long enough to be included in previous sets, like Will Power was, there are vast swathes of their career undocumented on cards and the sets that did include them didn't always include race action photos. I looked it up...of the 10 teams included in the Debut subset, only 4 of them had ever gotten a single card before this set's release and one of them had exactly 1 made card before last year's Parkside set. There are huge gaps in IndyCar history not documented, and I truly hope Parkside does a historical set at some point. 

There are also parallels and inserts, both of which I like better than the 2024 set, but the base set really is the star in this set. The lack of team owners and crew chiefs (I believe they are called lead engineers in IndyCar) are the only thing that keeps me from giving this set a perfect rating, yes, even with the numbering blunder. 

Although it's not really something you can tell from scans, this set also has a very interesting texture, unlike any other card sets I can recall. 

One other thing worth mentioning - and that contributes to this being my favorite IndyCar set ever - is that the back of the driver cards have complete career statistics! The car cards have 2024 specific stats.  This is something that hasn't appeared on a NASCAR card since, if I recall correctly, 2002. Possibly earlier. That's a big deal to me, and these stats are more complete than anything that has ever appeared on any other racing sets I've ever seen which, not to brag, is probably all of them. 

Honestly, finally getting these scanned, and writing this post? This set is not only my favorite IndyCar set ever, it's actually somewhere in my top 25 favorite sets ever, all sports and non-sports combined. It is structurally the best racing set issued since 1996 and to be honest, if it had the owners and crew chiefs, it would have been the most structurally perfect set in auto racing history. (The first racing set was issued the same year as the first Indy 500, 1911. It appears to have been made before the 500, and I question if it is actually a 1911 release or 1910) 

I have a new favorite card back-and it's a wrestling card?!?

 I'm not sure I've ever written about wrestling cards on Cardboard History before, and to be honest I know very, very little about wrestling and wrestling cards. Perhaps that's somewhat of a surprise because among my friends in school, going back to the 1990s, it was probably the most popular sport amongst my friends. Enough that just by listening to them that I will recognize most of the names from circa 1996-02 era. 

Even though I don't actively collect wrestling, I will take any card into my collection. They all have a home with me, and in the museum I still hope to open some day. 

Earlier this week I got a surprise in the mail which was a huge box of cards packed full to the brim. One of my friends in the blogosphere dumped his unwanted cards on me which was a pleasant surprise, and among them was a box of wrestling cards. 

2015 Topps Heritage uses the 1985 Topps Baseball design, which is kinda strange on the surface that they used a baseball design for the wrestling throwback set, but that's Topps for you. They've been producing cards since 1949 yet ONLY use their baseball designs for throwbacks, I guess. Maybe they ran out of original wrestling designs to throw back to? I'll have to look that up at some point, I suppose. 

However, that worked out well in this case because just look at that card back. It's the brightest, greenest card I've ever seen, and green has always been my favorite color, the brighter the better. The cardstock used makes it really pop, much more than the brown cardstock of the original baseball set. 

Card backs don't get a lot of love in the hobby, but the instant I saw this one while going through the cards it became an instant favorite. 

I suppose if I'm going to show the back I should show the front too.

Just like the baseball set, the front design isn't as interesting as the back. I realize while typing this that knowing Topps they have probably used this exact design in a number of baseball throwback sets but I don't think I've seen any of those yet. I now have 6 cards out of this wrestling set, so yeah, the baseball ones would be tied as favorites. 

Now that Topps has the NBA license for the first time since 2009, I am hoping we get a Heritage or Archives set again. Topps Archives actually debuted in the NBA I believe, but we only got two Heritage sets, in 2000-01 and 2001-02. Fingers crossed we get one now in the current era going forward. 

Hey you! Stay awake!

2018-19 MVP Puzzle Back #56

 

Tourna-mental

 A couple years back the NBA introduced an in season tournament. I have to be honest...I thought it was a stupid waste of time. I didn't pay attention to it at all. 

Last year, while I still don't care about the tournament itself, I did get into it, for one big reason. During the tournament, each team has a special court, which is usually some bright color. Now THAT I can get behind! I paid a lot of attention to the tournament last year, solely to see what all the different floors looked like. This year is turning out to be much harder to follow along as my local cable company took away NBATV, but I do know it's going on now. 

Earlier this month I picked up a second "box" of Haunted Hoops, and in that came my first card showing one of the Tournament floors.

Most of the floors are team colored (Rockets have a red floor, Suns orange, etc) but some of them are kind of strange. The Bucks had a blue floor and wore blue jerseys for the tournament games even though they have never used blue in their 50+ year history. Most of the teams wear special jerseys for the tournament games also but not always. The Bucks blue shown here is the same design as their normal jersey only blue instead of dark green. 

I have no idea why they did that, but who cares? It's fun and unique and that, I like. Alternate jerseys is something I specifically try to buy when I am shopping for single cards so the fact that I pulled this one is a plus. 

I actually knew if I saw any cards showing the Tournament floor I'd have to buy them, but again, I pulled this one, so the problem solved itself. 

I couldn't tell you who won the tournament last year, but the courts in vivid colors? Those I will always remember. 

I withhold the right to start caring about the tournament if the Knicks or Nets win 😆

Thank you for being a card

 Picture it. New York, 2025. An intrepid young collector learns of a new card set, and after traveling by mule all the way to St. Olaf, Minnesota, he returned with a box of cards just in time to see the herring circus. 

That collector was me, and these are the cards he returned with. 

two base cards

a vintage parallel, printed on old school brown cardstock, 

an art insert 

and a Bubbly parallel which I assure you looks better in person than it does in a scan.

You didn't have to hit me over the head with a newspaper, when I learned Cardsmiths made a Golden Girls set I had to have some. It's a little pricey at $25 for ten cards but I already have cards of so many, many men I had to make space for the Golden Girls, one of only 4 TV series I've seen every episode of. I saved the other pack and don't know when I will open it. Perhaps I'll save it for when I'm all out of monkey money to buy more cards with. 

Hooping for the Holidays

 Christmas Day is associated with cards for me. Ever since I can remember, my family has given me cards for Christmas, and I usually spend most of Christmas day opening, listing and sometimes even scanning the cards I got that day. 

Since 2018, Panini has issued a set called Hoops Winter, which is a snow themed version of the basic Hoops design. However, I have very few of them. I didn't see the 2018-19 set for sale at all, but I was able to make a huge trade for them on the Database, bringing me 75 of the 300 cards. 

I missed 2019-20 in full. I don't have a single card from that set from that season.

2020-21 is even worse. Not only did I miss Hoops Winter completely, I missed regular Hoops as well. It was a very bad time for the hobby (and the world) and is a gaping hole in my collection. 

I missed 2021-22 and 2022-23 Hoops Winter as well, but at least I got a decent amount of the regular Hoops for both seasons. 

2023-24, I was finally able to find one single blaster which meant I truly got to experience the set! 

I thought I was going to miss 2024-25, which is the final season, but a trip to my local Wal-Mart in the first week of November 2025 - a year after they were released - surprised me with 6 of them on the shelf. I could only afford one, but I am glad I got to experience the last year of the product. 

I really like the set this year. (well, last year now) They have snow built up at the top and bottom and falling throughout the photo. 

Overall I like the design of the 2024-25 set more than 2023-25. They also have Prizm parallels with big foil snowflakes which are really cool but I didn't scan yet- holding out for a Heystack someday. 

Now that Topps has the NBA license back, they released a set called Topps Holiday and lean way more into the Christmas theme than Panini did. 

Every card has the snow theme and the holly wrapping the team color border, and the colors are candy-cane bordered too! I really like these...and part of the reason I didn't have enough money for more than one blaster is that I had already ordered a box of Topps Holiday, multiple boxes of Topps flagship and other card stuff. 

One in every 10 boxes of the Holiday set includes and oversize ornament, and I was lucky enough to get one, also of VJ, making this the first time I can remember that my first two cards from a set that I got naturally-meaning not buying singles- were the same person. 

It's gigantic, it's holographic, generally awesome! I won't be hanging it on my tree - not going to risk damaging it with a hook - but I do plan to use it as the image for VJ in my Encyclopedia of People in my collection. 

For the first time in Basketball card history, Topps released an advent calendar for the Holiday set and I got one waiting for me. I will be doing this day by day in December and I am sure it will appear on Cardboard History- perhaps I'll even find the motivation to post daily.  In the meantime, I'm going to appreciate the cards I already do have. After not doing much card stuff since last winter, it's like a switch was flipped and now I'm only doing cards and not models. It's not related to the basketball and hockey seasons starting, as they were both well under way before the switch. I can't really explain it, and I'm not even sure I should even be trying to figure it out. After all, the time I spent thinking about it and writing about it could have been spent cropping scans 😁

New People Scanned October 2025

 It's been a busy month card wise. I finally got caught up on my paper listing, after not touching it since April. I got more cards in the first week of November than I think I have in any other month of the year (or at least it seems like it!) and then I spent the last week putting all my new additions from the last three years on the Trading Card Database. 

Lost in all of that was my monthly upload, which I do on the 1st of the month, or at least start on the first. I didn't do much scanning in October, but I still got new people scanned, and I got new people in the collection, too. A good portion of them appear on both screenshots.

All but one of the new people scanned came from the "box" of Haunted Hoops I got for my birthday. Rajah is the lone person not from that, and I could swear I had scanned a card of him previously, but I was wrong. 

Every single one of the new people I got came from the Haunted Hoops birthday present. All of them appear in the above scan except Yongxi Cui who I got from the single pack I saved to scan, and which I opened on Halloween. I have not done any scanning at all in November yet- although I'm planning to do some as soon as I hit publish on this post- but don't be surprised if he appears in the November new people post's Newly Scanned screenshot. 

Stephon Castle was last season's Rookie of the Year so it was nice to get him into my collection. I've doubled my collection of him in November already! OK, that's not that big an accomplishment when you had a total of 2 cards :) 

I'm writing this on the 17th and I already know the New People Added screenshot is going to be much bigger for November. 

Because I am using this series for my own documenting of history, I scanned 132 cards in October. 

Card Show Report: Fishkill, NY November 8th, 2025

 I had planned to go to a model car show in Long Island, NY on November 8th, but my chronic health problems decided to act up and I wasn't quite up for the 2+ hour ride. However, I was up for a card show in the much closer Fishkill, NY, and I'm very glad I went! It was a special Veterans Fundraiser card show, run by the same people that do the monthly show but in a larger location and with a $3 entry fee that went straight to the local VA Hospital. 

First, I took two photos at the show of a dealer display.

But now we get to the good part...what I brought home. I did exceptionally well! The show was roughly 50% baseball, with basketball and football making up the other 45%, and Pokemon 5%. There was almost no hockey and I believe there were only 7 NASCAR cards in the entire show...which I got all of. 

Everything you see in this photo cost me $130. When I say I did exceptionally well I wasn't exaggerating. Most of my purchases came from the one dealer with a dime box, which had a lot of modern NBA stuff. 

Almost everything here in this photo came from that one dealer. The only things that didn't were the baseball pack - which you got free when you paid the $3 entry fee, and the Haunted Hoops pack I shamed a dealer into giving me just by hemming and hawing when he quoted $15 and then changed his mind to $20 for a handful of cards, LOL. 

I generally do not buy brand new stuff as singles but it's well known that I love parallels. I actually bought these even knowing I had a Fanatics exclusive blaster on the way. Luckily no duplicates. The Bam Adebayo became my 101,000th unique NBA card. It's unfortunate it is my least favorite team but oh well, I have nothing against Bam himself. 

Both of these photos show alternate jerseys or in the case of the bottom left two and bottom right one, parallels. The top 4 right cards in photo #2 are people I was missing from my collection. Unfortunately the Markieff Morris (middle top row, name obscured) and Jordan Clarkson cards both turned out to be duplicates. When you have as many cards as I do, it's not always easy to remember. Oh well, someday I'll get finished scanning, sort my cards and try and trade the duplicates away. 

 My second biggest purchase of the day was this lot of Prizm parallels, mostly from 2023-24 Select but a few other sets as well. 

I had gone through the box and noted a base version of that Marcus Sasser card but passed by it as I'm not a huge fan of the base Prizm/Chrome cards. I was thinking about going back and getting it anyway because it shows a jersey I didn't have represented in my collection, but right at the end of the box I found this Prizm parallel. Problem solved! 

More alternate jerseys from the Prizm grouping, and in the case of the Jerome Robinson, that's actually my very first card from 2018-19 Certified. It's also a parallel, but I wasn't actually aware of that when I got it. I did know it was a set that was not represented in my collection. 

I don't normally buy unlicensed cards and I don't normally spend this much on a single card but this one spoke to me and I had to have it. It's the most I spent on any single card at the show. 

The Alvin Jones is a very rare card, in fact I'd never seen the design before. Musa is not a great person (got essentially kicked out of the NBA for choking his girlfriend) but a cheap, rare Nets card from a set I didn't have in my collection is a guaranteed buy every time. Believe it or not, that's actually a base card from the Panini Dominion set. 

My last purchase of the day was this batch of 1972-73 Topps. That is the least well represented 1970s set in my collection, and I don't even know the last time I was able to add 10 cards in a single day. Wait! I can check that since I have my collection fully on Excel. OK, it wasn't all that long ago, January 2018. I also did it in 2017. Before that however the last time was 2005. Of the 264 card set I have only 104 of them. I don't think I'll ever complete it as I'm not willing to spend the price required for a Dr. J. rookie card, but it's still good to add a bunch of them. I was able to get on to the Trading Card Database while at the show and access my wantlist on there. Luckily, I hadn't added any cards to this set since that day in 2018, so it was still accurate. I had stopped keeping track of my collection on there but I decided to go back to it, determining while I was checking these cards that it really is the easiest way to check what I have or don't have while I am away from home. So, I have roughly three years worth of additions, including the trips to the National and FanaticsFest in 2024, to add. That won't take that long as I've not been getting as many cards as I once did. 

The $5 bill in the top left was given to me in change by one of the dealers, and as he handed it back to me I saw it was a Star note- something I save when I come across them. My currency collection is VERY neglected, but finding an addition in the wild is fun. 

However, my favorite addition of the day wasn't a card at all. 

The show did door prizes every hour, and I was going through the dime box dealer's boxes when they were calling numbers. I had my tickets out but kept going through cards as they were calling them. I didn't pay that much attention since my number wasn't called although I did clap for the winners. However, they DID call my brother's number, and he won this signed puck! It wasn't a situation where you could pick, either, so the fact that they gave him a prize from one of my main sports is just a happy coincidence! Other prizes before that were baseball and football stuff, so we both lucked out. Needless to say, I was shocked and thrilled when he came over and showed me that he won! It is the first signed puck in my collection!  

(Belated) Birthday cards

 My birthday is October 18th, and every year I know my family will give me cards. It's the main thing I ask for, usually. This year was no different, and my family covered all three of the sports I collect.

Mom had actually given me the Star Rookies set once before, but I did pull a blue parallel of Lane Hutson, who won Rookie of the Year. 

Donruss 2025 has been a frustrating set. I purchased a blaster back in August and a Mega Box in September. The Mega Box was fine on the outside but every single card inside was badly damaged. The contents of this blaster were mostly the same as the first blaster, but I did get replacements for 4 or 5 of the damaged cards from the mega box. In typical Panini style, the cards are in the same order with different parallels/inserts. 

I pulled a Ty Dillon autograph which was really cool. 

The highlight of the Birthday cards was the Haunted Hoops. I really love that set, which is perhaps a bit surprising as I generally don't care much for Halloween. These are so fun though. They have updated photography post trade deadline so in a lot of cases it's my first cards of a player with a team. They also have in game photos from rookies instead of posed Rookie Photo Shoot shots like the flagship Hoops and Donruss do. Since I don't get many cards anymore there's also quite a few players appearing in my collection for the first time here. However, they are also just genuinely fun, especially the parallels. 

The base cards look like flagship Hoops but without foil and spiderwebs added:

There are two main parallels that are pretty common- you get one parallel per pack and it's most likely going to be one of these two:

Pumpkins or Slime. I really can't decide which one I like better. Slime is neon green (my favorite color!) and purple, while Pumpkins has those awesome pumpkins. Wait, I'll show the Tribute subset which shows them even better.

It's impossible for me to not love these cards. 

But wait, that's not all!

There are multiple holofoil parallels this year too! There are 5 holofoil "level 2" parallels and I was able to pull two of them. 

Webs, which is black and orange themed, and Bats, which is also purple and green, which is so cool. And it's serially numbered! There were no numbered cards at all in last year's set.  There are two other numbered parallels I was not able to pull- Trick or Treat, which I don't know what it's numbered to, and Sky, which is numbered to only 31 copies. Hopefully some day I will be able to add some of them to my collection. 

It still looks so weird and wrong for Klay Thompson to not be in a Warriors uniform. This is, I believe, my first Mavs card of him. 

Panini only did this set for two years and I'm generally not a fan of Panini's stuff, especially the last couple of years, but I am genuinely going to miss this set. 

As usual, my family gave me a great birthday, and my apologies to them (even though I know they won't care) that it took me so long to get this post written.