Ho, Ho, Whoa! Christmas Cards 2017

My family always gives me cards for Christmas. Always. The last time they didn't was not in this century, let alone decade! (I don't know the exact year, it was sometime before I began keeping records on my collection in 1998) I was not expecting too much this year...but I got a ton!

I got: 3 hobby boxes, 9 blasters, 24 packs of Panini stickers (Something I stressed that I wanted) and a random assortment of other packs. It took me from around 10:30 AM to after 5 PM to open them all, although I did take a couple hours out for some other stuff....including spending some of the $100 my brother gave me for COMC!

Honestly, I was hoping I would get this year's UD Series 1 and maybe a blaster or two and a pack of Panini stickers or two, and I would have been happy if that had been all I received. Totally, truly. But, it wasn't! Now, since I know I won't finish listing these in my paper listing and Excel listings (OCD, remember), and I won't scan any until they are listed, I took some pictures of some of the highlights. There are a couple other highlights I missed, but you shall see them in a future post.

Here are some of the "hits" I got...and a MAJOR personal milestone!

 Jaylen Brown rookie year auto....nice! I'm watching him on TV as I type this.

 Perhaps my biggest name "hit" of the day. Draisaitl is the #2 player on the Oilers, after Connor McDavid.

 First time I've seen one of these clear parallels. They are really great. And rare! One in every 90 packs, so one per 4 boxes. I'm glad I pulled one. Wish they were not as rare because I'd love to get some more of them. Perhaps that COMC gift from my brother will be used for that...

 Another view

 Only my second card of his

 Not my first auto of Peters, but my best. Really stinks that Red Horse closed up in mid-season and left him without a ride, even worse was that he was contending for the title at the time.

 My first card of Corey LaJoie, and it's numbered! The Hemric Purple parallel is two per box, I also got Martin Truex Jr. who I didn't think to photograph. Dale Jr. is the base card. Only my second card of Hemric, and something like 700th of Dale Jr, my all-time favorite.

 The base and Ruby Murray came out of the same pack, back to back.

 My Ruby from the second box was a retired player.

 I believe, off the top of my head, that this is the first Brooklyn era relic I've pulled. I can't remember anymore. It's only my second card of him, too.

 This was actually the first hit of the day, but I didn't think to take a photo when I first opened it so I did it while the post composition page for this post you are reading was already open on my computer.

I hit an auto and a jersey in the same box! That's pretty cool. I also got my first card of Brady Skjei, (Pronounced Shay) who has become one of my favorite Rangers. I had been wanting a card of him for a while, and I  ended up getting two today. And...he gets to take part in my MAJOR personal milestone! This photo, well, it's the 10,000th I've taken in 2017. I started numbering the photos in order of being taken several years ago, as it helps me keep them from being jumbled, and in theory I can sort my website to show them in proper order if they don't upload in the right order, which has already happened a few times. It also plays to my OCD tendencies. My previous record was somewhere in the 5000s, I think. I crossed that in September and knew every photo I would take after that would increase the new personal record, but I didn't think that I would hit 10,000 this year. I was wrong! I don't know my previous exact record, but I know I've never hit 10,000. (I really need to make a list, but it would require paging though my entire website, and I have almost 400,000 images on it) I figured I would hit it next year- my brother and I are going to add in a weekly car show (and I have a tendency of photographing every car at a show if I can, even if I've already photographed it dozens of times) but it turns out I hit it this year. I was able to do this because I took almost 5000 photos in a week in September...at a 3 car show week. I may never do it again, but I am thrilled I was able to do it at all.

I'm actually pretty happy today, even though my health is acting up and physically I feel pretty awful.
And we had a White Christmas!

I hope everyone had as good a day as I did today.

Reflections on my first month of collecting the NHL

It is hard to believe that it is already a month ago that I made the announcement that I had become a hockey fan. I made the post on January 14th, and began adding cards to my collection the very next day.

I still have a lot to learn, but I am still enjoying every minute of it. My mom surprised me with Center Ice for Valentine's Day (although over a week early, so I could watch more games!) and now I've seen all but two teams play (Nashville and Carolina). I have read the Wikipedia entries for each active team in full, and I'm close to finishing the defunct teams.

I still have not picked a favorite team or player yet, but I do have a couple of leading candidates. I do think I'm going to favor the Vegas team, considering it was because of them that I started watching. Brent Burns, Jarome Iginla and Henrik Lundqvist are in the early lead as favorite players. However, like I do with the NBA and NASCAR, I will be and am collecting everyone, every team. It's just not in my nature to collect only a portion of something. I collect primarily to document history after all.

And about that collecting...I began with exactly 3000 cards thanks to several friends sending me bunches of them before I became a true collector...in the month I've been actively collecting, my collection has grown to 3835 cards! Even more amazing...all but about 250 of them were cards I received as gifts from fellow collectors!

Card collectors are a great group of people. I've said it before, but it really does bear repeating. The kindness and generosity among collectors is topnotch. I truly believe if more people were like card collectors the world would be a better place.

I do not have any autographs yet...and my only relic is the one I claimed from JBF's Christmas Tradeathon. I have specifically not purchased any on COMC or anywhere else, even though I do have a couple of dollars in my COMC account. That's because I want to pull my first, especially autograph. In both NBA and NASCAR I purchased my first autographs, and I really want to pull my first for the NHL. This may be difficult as I mostly do only blasters...not really a haven of many autographs. I'm considering springing for a hobby box of the two series of Upper Deck Flagship this year, considering it's my first year collecting, but that's a lot of money to lay out with them going for more than $60 each. But the UD Flagship has never been big on autographs if it is anything like when they had the NBA license. The boxes that guarantee multiple autographs are out of my price range, and that's kind of like cheating, if it's a sure thing, right? Maybe for my upcoming birthday (October) or Celebrating not dying day (any day between April 26-May 1) as my Mom and Brother always get me something nice on those two days.

What I have pulled is my first Serially numbered parallel. I am a huge fan of SN cards. I have a definite affinity for them, and while I mentioned it in a previous post, I never showed it, so here it is now:

Interestingly, it's SN 084/100...I was born in 1984. That splotch under the P is on the actual card...not sure if they are all like that or this is a single flaw in my card.

I hope that a lot of SN friends will join it, but with no local shops that do singles it might not be as easy to pick them off as it was in my heyday of collecting the NBA in the early 2000s.

Honestly, sometimes I've wondered if it was stupid for me to take on another sport. I'm already doing two sports, the Olympics sets, and some non-sports, and I have very little money to spend on the hobby, so it seems almost like a fool's errand. Then I put on a game and enjoy the heck out of it and remember why I started in the first place. It is something that occasionally crosses my mind, I must admit.

I have not yet determined if I want to tackle getting every set and every player like I did for the NBA and NASCAR. It's worth noting that I didn't finish the latter part for either sport, (not even close!) and the NHL has had a much more extensive history of getting cards...whereas the NBA's first set was in 1948, and NASCAR's in 1988, the NHL's was in 1923-24! Maybe even older, some of the early stuff is not always easily visible on the Trading Card Database. For some of the early players and sets finding an example may prove to be more troublesome than affording it, although that would be an issue as well.

Finally, I have posted a small tradelist along the very top bars of my blog. It's not very much, but I've only been collecting a short period of time, so I don't have much to offer yet. As is always the case with my tradelists, all cards are in virtually perfect shape. No corner issues, no surface flaws, no cards you'd ever need to look for an upgrade on; I have plenty of those damaged cards from all sports but I don't list them. I am not ready to post any wantlists yet because there is so much I don't have.

And now, here's just some random cards I've added to my collection and scanned but hadn't posted yet.

Thanks for reading!

 I got the entire Rangers team set at my local dealer on the 15th of January but didn't get any scanned in time to post in the second post that I linked to above.

 This and the next one below are actually cards I had as part of the 3000 that I started with, but I scanned them in January.

 This one was also part of the original 3000, but I didn't realize it was the French version and had it in my duplicates box. When I got it out to enter it in my tradelist here I realized it was not the English version!

 This MVP Silver Script and the two O-Pee-Chees that follow were also part of the Original 3000

 

This was in the pack that was included in the Repack I profiled. In fact, it was the first card out of that pack. I had not opened it when I wrote the profile. What an excellent photo this is!