(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. 

Stacking and slacking

 I recently discovered something on Twitter called a "stack sale", which is where a seller puts up a series of posts with cards for sale, generally on the lower end of the price spectrum, and you claim the cards you want. When the seller finishes the sale, they send you a total, you pay them and then they send you the cards. It's kinda like digging through a box at a show and pulling what you want but from a distance. 

I really enjoy doing this. My most common person to buy from is JTmailman but I have also stacked with LeBron's Locker and BiggE. (and in case you're wondering, LeBron's Locker is not only NBA, although that's what I bought from him- LeBron is his last name)

One thing you have to worry about in the stack sales is not getting there fast enough. The more popular a stacker is, the more competition there is. I've missed out on several cards I would have added because they were claimed before I even saw the post. 

This is my most recent stack sale arrival, from JT Mailman, and covered everything I collect, although most of it was a Simpsons set I've never heard of before, which appears to be a Chinese set from last year. I even grabbed a baseball card, because it's a hologram and I love holograms. And I may not actively collect baseball but I will spend either a quarter or a dime (I forget what it cost) on a hologram any day of the week. 

My previous sale was a smaller one and came from LeBron's Locker.

I got NBA exclusively from him, although he also had football and I think baseball available. 

I can't seem to find the photos of my previous stacks with JT Mailman or BiggE. I've been a little bit slacking in processing pictures and doing the stuff I should be doing. The slacking in the title? Yeah that's part of it. Mostly however it refers to my paper listing. This is what defines my collection, and it's how I know what I have. It is normally the be-all-end-all for my collection, so much so that at one time I didn't count a card as part of my collection if I didn't list it in my paper listing. 

I normally do my paper listing on a fold up card table in my room, but I took that down in either April or May to put my air conditioner in, and I haven't put it back up so I could do some cleaning and other stuff. I haven't listed any of my new additions since then, and it's stacking up, although not as much as it could be since I haven't really been getting too many cards this year. In fact, I've not opened some of the cards I've gotten specifically so I wouldn't have more to list and be backlogged on. 

I've been spending almost all my time on my modeling, but the fall is here and very soon it will be too cold to work on models. I will catch up on my card listing when that happens, which most likely will be before the end of this month if tradition holds true, or the first few days of November if not. 
I'll also get back to scanning then I suspect, I've only done about 20 cards all summer. 

Speaking of slacking...I got the most recent batch of cards from JT Mailman on September 21st, and LeBron's Locker on September 19th. I thought of the post title on the 21st but I didn't edit the pictures or actually write the post until October 14th. 

New People September 2025

 September was a pretty light month for me card wise. I spent most of the month doing model stuff. The season is almost over for painting, by the end of this month or the first week of November is usually when it gets too cold to paint so I'm trying to get as much accomplished there while I can, but that leaves little time for cards. However, as it gets colder and modeling isn't viable I'll be switching back to doing card stuff a lot more, so perhaps next month's post will be more interesting than this one. 

I scanned only 9 cards in September, one page worth of the new MVP hockey set which I showed in the last post. None of the people were new. 

New people added were also very light, with only 4 people added. Three of whom came from the same MVP blaster I bought. Q is a pretty rare letter to get someone new from, so there's that at least. V used to be rarer but there are a lot of hockey players with V names so not as rare as it once was when I was only doing NASCAR and NBA.