December 2016 trade recap

This is by far the latest I've ever posted a trade recap, but finally, here it is.

I made only two trades in the month of December, both on the Trading Card Database. Both of them were with people I've traded with in the past and one of them actually completed a very large set.

First to arrive was with RUWrong, which was the 4th trade I've done with him. Mostly I got newer cards from him, but I got 4 cards from 1991-92 Skybox as well and one that was not new but replaced one that was damaged in the flood of 2/5/15. I didn't scan any of them yet.
I also got two cards from 2012-13 Past & Present, 2 from 2013-14 Hoops and the bulk of the trade was 9 cards from 2014-15 Hoops. That was the Panini era Hoops set I had the least of, but I'm slowly getting there.
The highlight from this trade for me was that one of the 2014-15 Hoops cards was of somebody not in my collection previously, Alec Brown.

You may be wondering who Alec Brown is? Well, he was the 50th pick of the 2014 NBA draft, spent 2014-15 and 2016-17 in the D-League, and played in Spain in 2015-16. He has never played in the NBA, and his entire professional career (D-League and Spain combined) is a grand total of 62 games. he has twice been on the Suns' pre-season roster, in 2014 and 2016, but did not make the team either year. The only cards he's ever gotten are this Hoops card and it's parallel. and he was, I believe, the last person from the set missing from my collection.

I love to get cards of obscure players. The more obscure the better. But if superstars are more your thing, that was covered too:

Tim Duncan of course being one of the all-time greats.

My favorite photo of the 9 cards was this one.

I'm always going to favor behind the glass photos. Always. Hickson is out of the League right now. I am surprised by that. While not a superstar I thought he would be picked up by some team but nobody offered a contract when he came up as a free agent after last season.

Just because I did scan it, here's Jimmy Butler from the 2013-14 Hoops set.

The second trade was with cabz05 and it was a larger trade, and was almost totally 1990s- my favorite decade. It arrived on 12/30 but I decided to save it for the next day, meaning I got cards on the first day of the year and the last day, the first time that ever happened I believe.  This trade covered a wide variety of sets:
5 from 1989-90 Hoops, 1 each from 1991-92 Skybox, 1992-93 Topps, 1992-93 Ultra, 1993-94 Stadium Club, 1993-94 Upper Deck Special Edition, 1994-95 Topps, 1995-96 Ultra, 1997-98 Collector's Choice, 1997-98 Fleer, 1997-98 Hoops and 1997-98 Stadium Club. 8 from 1995-96 Topps and 12 from 1994-95 Ultra, the Ultra set with the lowest completion percentage from the 1990s in my collection. Ultra, of course, being my favorite brand.

First things first: I completed 1991-92 Skybox! At 659 cards, this is the largest set in NBA history, by a wide margin. (The second largest is 514 cards) The sad thing is that I got a box of Series II for Christmas several years ago and though I got a stack of duplicates more than 100 cards high I did not get them all...but now I have them, finally!
Here is the last card I needed:

It's not even an NBA card, but I don't mind, as I also am a big Olympics fan, as has been well documented, so I don't get unhappy when they are included in my NBA sets.

With these cards I am now one card away from 1992-93 Topps and 1993-94 Upper Deck Special Edition, and only two cards away from 1989-90 Hoops and 1992-93 Ultra. Hopefully I can knock them off my Wantlist by the conclusion of 2017!

Any time I can get a new card from 1995-96 Ultra is a good day. It's been years since I got any new ones. One of my goals is to have every base card of the 1995-96 season, and this trade brought me 9 closer.

Although a Maverick here Harris spent many years as the Nets' 6th Man.

Some 1995-96 Topps, the 1995-96 Flagship least well represented in my collection for some reason.

Two guys who I associate with each of their teams in the 1990s and Doug Christie on the Knicks...that's a rarity. Christie played 12 games with the Knicks in 1994-95 and 21 with the Knicks in 1995-96, before being traded to the Raptors. This is the only card issued of him in the 1995-96 season and I believe the only one as a member of the New York Knicks. The only one I'm not sure on is the 1994-95 Panini Sticker, and I'm not totally sure than even counts anyway. The Panini stickers are usually early season so it's probably showing him as a Laker.

Here are some of the 1994-95 Ultra cards I got in this trade.

 I'm not sure if Juwan Howard is impressed or disgusted...

 The best photo of the cards.

 One problem 1994-95 Ultra suffered from was being cropped much too closely. It's like there was a rule that they couldn't show feet. Jaren Jackson was undrafted but won a championship with the Spurs.

The 1994-95 Ultra set was the first to have silver and gold foil on every card and foil on both sides. That was a selling point in 1994. I don't mind foil, but a lot of the Ultra cards had a problem with it not being applied right...there's not supposed to be a drop shadow, as is visible on the Dan Schayes card. Some of them are so badly off, it really detracts from the card. Like so:

An otherwise very good card is held back by the poorly aligned foil name.

In a bit of an ironic twist, I got some of the same cards from Kerry of Cards on Cards just a few days later. They were both in the mail to me at the same time. The good thing is, at least one of them is a conditional upgrade, as one of the cards I got previously but did not scan (Trevor Wilson) had a printing flaw. I'm glad I held off, and hopefully I will get the scan made of the new one in time when I post about that package. (I did- this was written first but is being posted almost a week later)

Here are some of the other cards I got in the trade. I didn't scan the 1989-90 Hoops cards yet.

That's all there was for trades in the month of December. A light month, but I got some great cards!

December Trade Recap

December was another good month for me for trading. I consider any month where I make more than one trade a good one. My total number of trades for 2015 was 14, which is a little more than I expected, to be honest. Considering I have almost exclusively base cards available to trade, it limits the number I can do. 6 of my 14 trades came in November and December combined.

All 14 of my trades were made on the Trading Card Database, and one of them, early in the year, was the largest trade I have ever made..  I discovered a mistake in the post I made about it back then. I stated that it got me to 1 card away from 1993-94 Upper Deck. that isn't actually true, because the trade I just got in the mail on 12/28/15 got me to 1 card away from the set! When I was looking at my listing, I missed the card I got this trade. The info on my tradelist on the Database was correct and helped me get the card now.

I don't have any idea exactly how many cards I got in trade in 2015, other than in the month of December. I got 5 cards in the first trade, 4 in the second, and 56 in the third and final trade, 65 total. I also got several replacements for cards that got destroyed in the flood of 2/5/15, including the 1991-92 Upper Deck Muggsy Bogues card, which was totally obliterated in the flood. It, and the other replacements, are not counted as part of the 56 new.

Trade #1 for December saw me get 5 of the 1991 Vette Set cards. This is a set I was fairly close to completing, and as of now it is one of many sets where I am missing only 1 card. I only scanned 1 of them I got. This is card #99 of 100 in the set. It didn't scan all that well, the real card does not have those lines on it.

The second trade saw me get 4 of the Distinguished Service inserts from 2007 Topps Baseball. This was a very interesting set, it highlighted baseball players who served in the military, as well as some military only people. I got one earlier in the year as well, now having 5 of them. Again, I only scanned one. These arrived just a couple of days before Christmas and I've been working on the cards I got that day ever since.

The last trade to arrive, arriving on 12/28/15, was the largest, which saw me receive 56 new cards, as stated above. All 56 are NBA, and cover in age 1988-89 through 2004-05. The largest group of them was from 1992-93 Fleer, one of my all time favorite sets. I got 23 new ones here, and, even better, it brings me to only one card short of the set! While I did not complete any sets with this trade, it moved 4 sets to one card short. In addition to 1992-93 Fleer, it also moved 1991-92 Fleer, 1993-94 Upper Deck, and 2002-03 Topps to that mark. I also got some new cards for sets that I have not added to in a long time. 2000-01 Victory got two new cards...my records show my last new addition to the set was all the way back on July 23rd, 2002! For a 330 card set, that's a very long time. Of course, I was pretty much totally away from the NBA from 2006-12. 2003-04 Standing O got a new card, and the last time that happened was 3/2/04, and 2004-05 Ultra, my favorite of the three that I hadn't added to in over a decade, saw it's last new addition on 8/11/04. The package also included 6 new cards from 1997-98 Upper Deck. For some reason this set almost never comes up in the mixed boxes I like to get. Although this was not the first time I added to the set in 2015, is the largest new addition I've made to this set since 2002 or 2003. Here are some highlights.

 

This is a scan I made of the original card, which is now lost. I am glad I got a replacement for it as Muggsy is one of my all-time favorite players

Thank you to all my trading partners in 2015, and hopefully I will be able to make more in 2016!