Thank you for being a card

 Picture it. New York, 2025. An intrepid young collector learns of a new card set, and after traveling by mule all the way to St. Olaf, Minnesota, he returned with a box of cards just in time to see the herring circus. 

That collector was me, and these are the cards he returned with. 

two base cards

a vintage parallel, printed on old school brown cardstock, 

an art insert 

and a Bubbly parallel which I assure you looks better in person than it does in a scan.

You didn't have to hit me over the head with a newspaper, when I learned Cardsmiths made a Golden Girls set I had to have some. It's a little pricey at $25 for ten cards but I already have cards of so many, many men I had to make space for the Golden Girls, one of only 4 TV series I've seen every episode of. I saved the other pack and don't know when I will open it. Perhaps I'll save it for when I'm all out of monkey money to buy more cards with. 

Hooping for the Holidays

 Christmas Day is associated with cards for me. Ever since I can remember, my family has given me cards for Christmas, and I usually spend most of Christmas day opening, listing and sometimes even scanning the cards I got that day. 

Since 2018, Panini has issued a set called Hoops Winter, which is a snow themed version of the basic Hoops design. However, I have very few of them. I didn't see the 2018-19 set for sale at all, but I was able to make a huge trade for them on the Database, bringing me 75 of the 300 cards. 

I missed 2019-20 in full. I don't have a single card from that set from that season.

2020-21 is even worse. Not only did I miss Hoops Winter completely, I missed regular Hoops as well. It was a very bad time for the hobby (and the world) and is a gaping hole in my collection. 

I missed 2021-22 and 2022-23 Hoops Winter as well, but at least I got a decent amount of the regular Hoops for both seasons. 

2023-24, I was finally able to find one single blaster which meant I truly got to experience the set! 

I thought I was going to miss 2024-25, which is the final season, but a trip to my local Wal-Mart in the first week of November 2025 - a year after they were released - surprised me with 6 of them on the shelf. I could only afford one, but I am glad I got to experience the last year of the product. 

I really like the set this year. (well, last year now) They have snow built up at the top and bottom and falling throughout the photo. 

Overall I like the design of the 2024-25 set more than 2023-25. They also have Prizm parallels with big foil snowflakes which are really cool but I didn't scan yet- holding out for a Heystack someday. 

Now that Topps has the NBA license back, they released a set called Topps Holiday and lean way more into the Christmas theme than Panini did. 

Every card has the snow theme and the holly wrapping the team color border, and the colors are candy-cane bordered too! I really like these...and part of the reason I didn't have enough money for more than one blaster is that I had already ordered a box of Topps Holiday, multiple boxes of Topps flagship and other card stuff. 

One in every 10 boxes of the Holiday set includes and oversize ornament, and I was lucky enough to get one, also of VJ, making this the first time I can remember that my first two cards from a set that I got naturally-meaning not buying singles- were the same person. 

It's gigantic, it's holographic, generally awesome! I won't be hanging it on my tree - not going to risk damaging it with a hook - but I do plan to use it as the image for VJ in my Encyclopedia of People in my collection. 

For the first time in Basketball card history, Topps released an advent calendar for the Holiday set and I got one waiting for me. I will be doing this day by day in December and I am sure it will appear on Cardboard History- perhaps I'll even find the motivation to post daily.  In the meantime, I'm going to appreciate the cards I already do have. After not doing much card stuff since last winter, it's like a switch was flipped and now I'm only doing cards and not models. It's not related to the basketball and hockey seasons starting, as they were both well under way before the switch. I can't really explain it, and I'm not even sure I should even be trying to figure it out. After all, the time I spent thinking about it and writing about it could have been spent cropping scans 😁

New People Scanned October 2025

 It's been a busy month card wise. I finally got caught up on my paper listing, after not touching it since April. I got more cards in the first week of November than I think I have in any other month of the year (or at least it seems like it!) and then I spent the last week putting all my new additions from the last three years on the Trading Card Database. 

Lost in all of that was my monthly upload, which I do on the 1st of the month, or at least start on the first. I didn't do much scanning in October, but I still got new people scanned, and I got new people in the collection, too. A good portion of them appear on both screenshots.

All but one of the new people scanned came from the "box" of Haunted Hoops I got for my birthday. Rajah is the lone person not from that, and I could swear I had scanned a card of him previously, but I was wrong. 

Every single one of the new people I got came from the Haunted Hoops birthday present. All of them appear in the above scan except Yongxi Cui who I got from the single pack I saved to scan, and which I opened on Halloween. I have not done any scanning at all in November yet- although I'm planning to do some as soon as I hit publish on this post- but don't be surprised if he appears in the November new people post's Newly Scanned screenshot. 

Stephon Castle was last season's Rookie of the Year so it was nice to get him into my collection. I've doubled my collection of him in November already! OK, that's not that big an accomplishment when you had a total of 2 cards :) 

I'm writing this on the 17th and I already know the New People Added screenshot is going to be much bigger for November. 

Because I am using this series for my own documenting of history, I scanned 132 cards in October. 

Card Show Report: Fishkill, NY November 8th, 2025

 I had planned to go to a model car show in Long Island, NY on November 8th, but my chronic health problems decided to act up and I wasn't quite up for the 2+ hour ride. However, I was up for a card show in the much closer Fishkill, NY, and I'm very glad I went! It was a special Veterans Fundraiser card show, run by the same people that do the monthly show but in a larger location and with a $3 entry fee that went straight to the local VA Hospital. 

First, I took two photos at the show of a dealer display.

But now we get to the good part...what I brought home. I did exceptionally well! The show was roughly 50% baseball, with basketball and football making up the other 45%, and Pokemon 5%. There was almost no hockey and I believe there were only 7 NASCAR cards in the entire show...which I got all of. 

Everything you see in this photo cost me $130. When I say I did exceptionally well I wasn't exaggerating. Most of my purchases came from the one dealer with a dime box, which had a lot of modern NBA stuff. 

Almost everything here in this photo came from that one dealer. The only things that didn't were the baseball pack - which you got free when you paid the $3 entry fee, and the Haunted Hoops pack I shamed a dealer into giving me just by hemming and hawing when he quoted $15 and then changed his mind to $20 for a handful of cards, LOL. 

I generally do not buy brand new stuff as singles but it's well known that I love parallels. I actually bought these even knowing I had a Fanatics exclusive blaster on the way. Luckily no duplicates. The Bam Adebayo became my 101,000th unique NBA card. It's unfortunate it is my least favorite team but oh well, I have nothing against Bam himself. 

Both of these photos show alternate jerseys or in the case of the bottom left two and bottom right one, parallels. The top 4 right cards in photo #2 are people I was missing from my collection. Unfortunately the Markieff Morris (middle top row, name obscured) and Jordan Clarkson cards both turned out to be duplicates. When you have as many cards as I do, it's not always easy to remember. Oh well, someday I'll get finished scanning, sort my cards and try and trade the duplicates away. 

 My second biggest purchase of the day was this lot of Prizm parallels, mostly from 2023-24 Select but a few other sets as well. 

I had gone through the box and noted a base version of that Marcus Sasser card but passed by it as I'm not a huge fan of the base Prizm/Chrome cards. I was thinking about going back and getting it anyway because it shows a jersey I didn't have represented in my collection, but right at the end of the box I found this Prizm parallel. Problem solved! 

More alternate jerseys from the Prizm grouping, and in the case of the Jerome Robinson, that's actually my very first card from 2018-19 Certified. It's also a parallel, but I wasn't actually aware of that when I got it. I did know it was a set that was not represented in my collection. 

I don't normally buy unlicensed cards and I don't normally spend this much on a single card but this one spoke to me and I had to have it. It's the most I spent on any single card at the show. 

The Alvin Jones is a very rare card, in fact I'd never seen the design before. Musa is not a great person (got essentially kicked out of the NBA for choking his girlfriend) but a cheap, rare Nets card from a set I didn't have in my collection is a guaranteed buy every time. Believe it or not, that's actually a base card from the Panini Dominion set. 

My last purchase of the day was this batch of 1972-73 Topps. That is the least well represented 1970s set in my collection, and I don't even know the last time I was able to add 10 cards in a single day. Wait! I can check that since I have my collection fully on Excel. OK, it wasn't all that long ago, January 2018. I also did it in 2017. Before that however the last time was 2005. Of the 264 card set I have only 104 of them. I don't think I'll ever complete it as I'm not willing to spend the price required for a Dr. J. rookie card, but it's still good to add a bunch of them. I was able to get on to the Trading Card Database while at the show and access my wantlist on there. Luckily, I hadn't added any cards to this set since that day in 2018, so it was still accurate. I had stopped keeping track of my collection on there but I decided to go back to it, determining while I was checking these cards that it really is the easiest way to check what I have or don't have while I am away from home. So, I have roughly three years worth of additions, including the trips to the National and FanaticsFest in 2024, to add. That won't take that long as I've not been getting as many cards as I once did. 

The $5 bill in the top left was given to me in change by one of the dealers, and as he handed it back to me I saw it was a Star note- something I save when I come across them. My currency collection is VERY neglected, but finding an addition in the wild is fun. 

However, my favorite addition of the day wasn't a card at all. 

The show did door prizes every hour, and I was going through the dime box dealer's boxes when they were calling numbers. I had my tickets out but kept going through cards as they were calling them. I didn't pay that much attention since my number wasn't called although I did clap for the winners. However, they DID call my brother's number, and he won this signed puck! It wasn't a situation where you could pick, either, so the fact that they gave him a prize from one of my main sports is just a happy coincidence! Other prizes before that were baseball and football stuff, so we both lucked out. Needless to say, I was shocked and thrilled when he came over and showed me that he won! It is the first signed puck in my collection!  

(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.