(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. 

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.