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. 

First card of the 2025-26 season

Last weekend I went to the mall with my brother, and while I struck out at Target, I found some cards at GameStop. Them getting into cards has been a big deal on twitter but it's mostly graded stuff. I don't mess with that, I don't need anyone to think for me. So it was a pleasant surprise to see that had some real cards for sale, including a blaster of 2025-26 MVP, first set released for the NHL every year. Naturally I bought said blaster, and the first card of the year is this one:

Not a bad design. I like it. 

I find it pretty hard to believe we are in the 2025-26 season. I became a fan of stick and ball sports in the 1995-96 season so I feel pretty old now. If only Fleer, which was my first pack, still existed! I wish the hobby still looked like it did in the mid-90s. That was peak. I'm glad I got to experience it live. Of course it would be quite a while before I would begin collecting hockey, so I didn't get to experience that during the best days, unfortunately. Better late than never.

New People August 2025

 August is traditionally my least active month in the hobby. I don't really know why that is- it's usually too hot to do much anything else, although that was not the case this year. But for whatever reason August is always the month I get the least amount of cards. This year continued that tradition. I basically only did card stuff for 2 days on the entire month, one of which was buying some and one of which was scanning some. 

I did only 27 scans the entire month, and Cody Bass was the only new person scanned. This is actually the only card I have of him also, it was a gift from a friend. 

New People added was also small but it includes some pretty big names. Connor Zilisch is the biggest prospect in the sport to come up in generations. He's a Rookie of the Year candidate in the Xfinity series, and he's leading the points and has scored 8 wins, the most ever by a rookie...with 10 races left to go...and he missed one and a half races due to injury. It's already announced he's going to run for Cup Series rookie of the year next year, and everyone, myself included, expect him to contend for race wins pretty much instantly. Frankie Muniz is also a pretty big name, a TV and Movie star, he is running for Rookie of the Year in the Truck series, or he was before he broke his arm last week. He will probably miss the remainder of the season now because of it. He is chasing his dream to be a race car driver although the team he's with is not particularly good and the results just haven't been there. The cards of Muniz and Beers also added two new teams to my NASCAR collection, which is interesting. A third team was added that made it's debut last season with a veteran driver, Matt DiBenedetto. 

Also of note this month, the Buffalo Sabres became the 15th team in my NHL collection to reach 1000 cards. The Blues and Lightning are close, 4 and 17 away respectively. If I opened up all the packs I have stashed I know they would get there, but right now I'm more involved with my model stuff and probably won't get back into card stuff until it gets too cold to work on models. 

Sets I had none of on August 9th, 2010. What do I have now?

 I was doing some cleaning and found a hand written note that I wrote on August 9th, 2010 listing which major NASCAR sets I had none of at that time. Fifteen years later that has changed significantly, partially since I bought at least one card from each set on COMC, but also because that was before I was established on the Database and NUTS. 

So let's see how things have changed since then...

1996 KnightQuest is listed first on the list for some reason I no longer remember. 

It didn't take me long to get any cards from that set. My records show I got cards 9 cards on August 28th, 2010 and got the remaining cards from the set on January 30th 2016, when I also got 11 inserts/parallels from the set. Both times they came from other collectors. 

1993 Maxx Premier Series is a 300 card set, the largest set I was missing. I bought the complete set on Ebay and it arrived to me on January 11th, 2007.

1996 Maxx Premier Series is not as much of a success story as the first two sets. I have only one card from the set, an insert that I bought on COMC if I remember correctly. I still have none of the base cards from the set. The one insert I have I got on December 12th, 2016.

2008 Press Pass Legends is also pretty low in my collection. I have 8 total cards, 1 base card, 4 parallels and three inserts. The base card, which I got on Ebay, arrived to me on April 5th, 2015. I believe all the other cards I picked up via COMC. 

2009 Press Pass Showcase was the first stupid expensive set in NASCAR history, where the box was around $400 for 8 cards if I remember correctly. I currently have 3 cards from the set, two base and one parallel. My records show that I got the parallel on December 12th, 2009, and I know for sure I got that on the NUTS forum as a gift. I made a mistake when I wrote this paper chart.

2010 Showcase is funny because I wrote this chart on 8/9/10, and I got my first card from the set on 9/8/10! As of today, I have one base card, two parallels and one inset. I don't remember where I got the base card but I'm pretty sure the other three came from COMC. 

2010 Element is a fun set because it's one of the very few NASCAR sets to utilize old school brown cardboard. I now have 93 total cards from the set, 68 of them base. I got my first on August 20th, 2010, just 11 days after I wrote this chart. I don't remember where I got that card but I have a feeling I may have made a post about the sets I'm missing on NUTS and one of the people on there sent me one. 

1996 Wheels High Gear is crossed off because it doesn't exist. I had assumed it had and that I was just missing some. But I was wrong, it was never made. They didn't make it in 1997 either so I don't remember if I remembered that, if I thought I had it, or I discovered it right away after writing 1996 and that's when I crossed out 96. I don't remember at this point. 

So all those sets (that actually exist) are now present in my collection, with two of them complete. 

There are two sets I currently don't have represented in my collection:

• 2024 National Treasures
• 2024 Panini Prizm

I actually saw Prizm for sale at the Norwich, NY Wal-Mart a couple weeks ago but didn't want to spend the money on it. I am not a fan of the Prizm technology and I was going to a diecast store the next day, and I wanted the most money available for that as possible. So I didn't get any Prizm. After realizing it's one of only two sets I'm missing during the writing of this post I kind of regret not getting it. 

National Treasures is one of those insanely super high priced sets. For example, here it is on DA Card World...10 cards for $325, on sale from the usual $400. I will realistically never get to experience opening a box/pack of this brand ever. I will never know the thrill and excitement of being surprised with what I get. I'll never get a chance to truly get to collect this set, but I will probably end up buying something from it on the secondary market some day. It's not anywhere near as fun as actually collecting the cards yourself, but that's life. 

July 2025 New People Added

 I can't believe I forgot to type this post up at the start of the month. I went in to make a different post and realized it wasn't there. I don't expect anyone to care but I am doing this to track my collection growth, not because anyone else cares. 

38 new people which is a lot. I got some of the IndyCar cards locally, and I mail ordered a box of N G-League cards, which gave me pretty much all of the NBA guys. I hit the local card show for the second time this year (another post I need to write...) which gave me the hockey people. 

I didn't scan anyone new in the month. I scanned only 6 cards in all of July, 5 of which were shown in my last post about the Chinese NBA cards. 

Mystery Chinese cards

 Back in November of 2023 I went to an antique mall in North Carolina and grabbed a pack of a mystery NBA set. I finally found where I had put them and opened them up, and the mystery is no closer to being solved. 

Here's the pack. I used google lens but it didn't provide much help. 

Card fronts are colorful. They are just slightly smaller than standard size cards. So slightly that I didn't even notice they were different until I put them with some other cards. 

The card on the right is a contest card and I won a set of the rubber band bracelets. There's nowhere on the card or packaging to tell you how to get them though. 

The only date on the pack is 2015, but they MUST be newer than that since Anthony Davis didn't join the Lakers until 2019-20. Mario Chalmers last played for the Heat in 2015-16, so they are obviously pulling pictures from different seasons. The logos on the packaging and card backs seem to be a mix of ages as well, although I have to admit I can no longer truly remember when all the rebrandings have happened. I think the Kings, Suns and Nuggets logos are older than the others, and I don't remember the Atlanta Hawks being in Alabama either. 

I have no idea what year these were issued in. Anyone have an idea? 

June 2025 New People

 June was a weird month. It seemed like I did a lot of card stuff, but at the end it turned out it didn't. I only scanned 315 cards for the entire month and only 33 of them were done before June 30th. I did spend more of the month on my modeling hobby. I finished these all in June. Decaling is my favorite part so I was doing that and not finishing the builds, letting them get way too backlogged. There is literally months worth of work in this photo.

But I did scan cards, and of those 315, there were 82 people getting scanned for the first time.

You can see that quite a few of them were the ladies from the last post.13 of the 82. 

New additions of the month were very slim- 39 cards, 21 of which were Hero Cards I got at the Lime Rock race. I still need to write a post about it, but after 33 years as a NASCAR fan, I actually went and saw NASCAR on track in person for the first time! 

Every single of the people I added to my collection during June came from the track. Mabel Santley is included here too, but I actually added her to my collection in 2019....I just identified who she was this month. Close enough. 

Fun fact: Butterbean Queen is the first person in all of auto racing who has a last name starting with Q to get scanned. I have two cards of Dale Quarterley but they have not been scanned yet. He was in the race but did not attend the autograph session where I got all the cards. More on the racing stuff when I get a post written. Sorry I have not been writing much. Depressed and it's keeping me from doing much.