Problem solving

 During the past week, I thought up a post title for weaseling out of my "scan whatever comes out of the random box" take on my scanning project, because I came into a huge stack of 1990-91 Score American, from when my mom gave me the factory set as a gift back in 2020. I was going to title it "Making rules, breaking rules"...but while I was thinking of how I wanted to word the post, I went ahead and finished the huge stack of cards. OK, so huge may be a bit of an overstatement, but it was more than 200 cards. 

That happens to be a fairly easy set to pull scans out of, with it being a very bright set....so I got them all done in just over a day. (I had one page left to do the next morning)

The problem solved itself! 

Here's a random card so you know what set I'm talking about.

The other problem to solve- the NASCAR cards. They aren't in the boxes I'm grabbing to scan randomly. They are all in their own cases, mostly sorted by set already, from back when I had to keep them separated so I didn't type them into my overall collection chart. That's a moot point now that I finished typing everything in, but that doesn't help me get them scanned in the random boxes way I'm doing them now. 

So, I decided that I would work on NASCAR cards while watching races. I decided I would start with the 24 Hours of Daytona, which is an IMSA race, technically a NASCAR division but totally separate. The 24 Hours of Daytona happens to be my favorite race of the year, but this year my chronic health problems acted up so I wasn't able to work as much as I would have liked to during the race. During the entire 24 hour span of the race, I only was able to scan and edit 6 pages of cards. That's not too many, so I decided to finish the stack I had taken out expecting to work on during the race before going back to the mixed boxes. 

Even though they are mostly sorted by set, I'm still taking the random approach in that I'm not picking which set to work on. I'm just taking whatever is on top, and the first cards I happened to scan out of the first box was a full page of 1996 Classic, which is not a set I have a whole lot of.

Due to pure luck of the draw, Robert Yates happened to be the first card I placed on the scanner and then cropped. 

While I wait for the Heystack machine, I'm setting every card with foil aside and a LOT of NASCAR cards have foil. Easily 3/4ths of them out of this box got set aside for the future. That's OK, because I'm really enjoying working on the foilless cards for right now. The fact that the majority of the foilless cards happens to be from the 1990s and older surely doesn't hurt. 

Feels good to solve two problems in a span of 2 days. Although to be honest calling both of these problems is a stretch, it at least gives me something to write about.

Set Completed: 1990-91 Score American

It's funny, when I was doing the factory sets on Easter, I needed less cards from Score than Topps...in my head, I reversed it, thinking I needed more Score and less Topps. I'm really glad I did this factory set because I discovered some errors in my paper listing- cards from the identical except for numbers 100 Hottest Rookies and Rising Stars promo set were listed as base cards, so this was good to be able to figure that out. Also, a lot of the cards I had from the set were in rather poor shape, so many upgrades will come from this set. In the end, I added 224 of the cards to my collection on Easter.


Set: 1990-91 Score
Set Size: 440 cards, plus several errors & corrections
Began Collecting: January 31st, 2015
First card added: #312, Patrick Roy
Set completed: April 12th, 2020, 1898 days according to calculator.net
Full checklist and Gallery: 1990-91 Score American
Thoughts: This is a fun set. The borders that are colored like a hockey rink are pretty iconic, and have been thrown back to by the Score brand at a later date...1990-91 was the watershed year for hockey, when other brands were finally allowed to join Topps and OPC, truly kicking off the "modern era" of hockey cards...Score had a lot of subsets, and unlike the Topps set actually included rookies in the set...this set, and 1990-91 Pro Set, are the oldest sets issued to include a player active when I became a fan of the sport in 2016, which is the ageless Jaromir Jagr...there are 9 cards that had an error and a correction issued, supposedly...the factory set was a mixture of both, I am not entirely sure they all exist. I don't consider them needed to have a complete set, I have each number and each person, that's complete for me, although I will continue to look for the other versions forever, unless I find them...the previously mentioned 100 Hottest Rookies and Rising Stars set uses the exact same design, photos and text as the base cards in the set do, but have different numbers, which is very challenging to figure out, and cannot be done without a reference tool like the Trading Card Database...the only insert for the set is the 5 card Eric Lindros set simply called "Eric" that was exclusive to the factory set, which I also got...there are two box sets that I consider inserts in Rookie and Traded, which feature a yellow border, and Young Superstars, which has it's own exclusive design...there are 4 promos available, counting the error and corrected Wayne Gretzky version...the American set has a blue Score logo and only English text, while the Canadian version has a red Score logo and bilingual text, but uses the same photography.
Favorite memory of the set: My mom's reaction when I showed her the Jaromir Jagr card on Easter
Last card needed: #7 Brian Bellows

I believe I have a factory set of the Canadian version waiting in my stash from SumoMenkoMan, so now that I've begun to complete sets, don't be too surprised if you see a completed set post for it by the end of 2020! (Update: I do! And the 1991-92 Score American set as well)