Topps NBA Advent calendar day 5

 Don't feel like writing too much tonight. 

Jase Richardson is the son of Jason Richardson who I remember when he was a rookie. Seems like yesterday but no, it was 24 years ago. 

New People November 2025

 November was a HUGE month for me for cards. I don't know why, but like I've mentioned before once November came it was just like a switch flipped and all I wanted to do was card stuff. It's not tied to the seasons for two of the three sports I collect starting, because they were both well under way when that happened. 

I ended up getting 1647 new cards in the month of November, which is not only the most for any month this year, it's literally 1/3rd of all the cards I've gotten in 2025. Of those cards, a whopping 180 of them were new people never before seen in my collection, which is, I believe, the largest number of new people since I began keeping track of monthly additions when I started this blog series. It was truly a great month. 

Of the 180 new people, 70 were NBA players, with the majority coming from the 2025-26 rookie class, although that's certainly not all of them. Quite a few others were seen in the card show recap, including even one player from the 1972-73 Topps cards I got. 

I didn't accomplish as much scanning as in other months, because documenting those new cards into my collection - and getting my collection up to date on the Database, which I've gone back to - took up a lot of time. I still managed to scan 532 cards in November which was still quite a bit. 

Appearing on both charts are a large number of wrestling ladies, a gift from a fellow blogger. 

87 of 532 cards turned out to be new people, with a decent mix of subjects. Some of the NBA players I could have sworn I had already scanned, but I couldn't find any proof of that. (Alexandre Sarr, Cason Wallace in particular). As I predicted last month, Yongxi Cui, who I added to my collection on Halloween, was indeed scanned in November. 

For the wrestling people I listed them only if they have a traditional name format, even though I know they aren't really their names in most cases. I view it as no different than for example an actor who uses a stage name or an NBA player that goes by their nickname, like Bonzi Wells, or who legally changed their name, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. If they only go by one name I didn't include them, except Asuka since it's somewhat common for Japanese athletes to use only one name. 44 of the 87 new people were wrestlers. 

There were so many new people this month that I had to use 4 extra images to get them all in! I really enjoy the documenting aspect of the collection more than anything else, so a big month like this was a lot of fun. In the few days during December that it took me to do the upload of all these scans, I got more new people into my collection already. Just 4 days (and a few bonus hours in #5) and the month is already off to a great start. 

Topps NBA Advent Calender Day 4

 Four days into this project and it seems pretty clear that there is going to be a Plaid parallel and a Making the Nice List insert in each pack. The latter is a 25 card insert set so if it holds true for the rest of the box, and there is no duplication, I should come up one short of the complete insert. Not sure if I'm happy about getting that close or annoyed that they leave me one short. The Plaid parallel is 200 cards so the chances of completing that is zero, but I am fully convinced I will be chasing these in the coming years. 

Today's pack includes former #1 overall pick Cade Cunningham, a Plaid parallel of Ivica Zubac, the Making the Nice List is Jeremiah Fears, and a base card of Jamal Murray, who really should be considered a superstar more widely than he is. 

Topps NBA Advent Calendar day 3

 Today was a big day for me. It was my last model club meeting in 2025 and I made it to all 24 meetings between both clubs! I've been a member of the Town of Newburgh Model Car Club since 2002 and the Hudson Valley Scale Modelers since 2009 and I've never been able to attend all the meetings for either club in one year, and this year I was able to go to both clubs in full this year! It took a lot of effort to get my health corralled but I was able to pull it off. 

After the meeting I opened my advent Calendar pack.

Topps NBA Advent Calender Day 2

 Another good pack today, hitting a plaid parallel from my other favorite team! 

Topps Advent Calendar day 1

 Today is December 1st and that means it's time to start the Topps Advent Calendar!

This is the first time they have ever made a advent Calendar for basketball cards and I am looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. 

This is the first pack, and I'm pretty sure that Miles McBride is the Advent exclusive Plaid parallel, and it's also my first card of him! That's a very good start. 

I'm going to try and post about it every day. 

IndyCar? In de collection

 While NASCAR will always be my #1 favorite in everything, don't get me wrong - I love all forms of motorsports. IndyCar is my #2 form of motorsports, or at least tied for #2 in enjoyment. Clearly #2 in form of cards in my collection, thanks to Parkside Cards. For many years IndyCar didn't get any cards produced, but starting in 2024 Parkside has released multiple IndyCar sets, the flagships of which have made their way to my collection. 

I like the 2025 set much more than the 2024 set, but whew, did Parkside make it hard to keep track of what I have. All of my collection is card number based, so if I have card #1 for example, then that spot is filled and any other card #1s are duplicates. This is not a given in 2025 Parkside because they made a major error when creating the cards. 

The first 43 cards in the set were supposed to be the driver cards, and cards #44 through 86 were supposed to be the car cards. However, Parkside issued each car card as the car's number, which, for the teams with multiple drivers, leads to in some cases 4 different cards with the same number. That's quite a mess and since I don't know enough about who drives what car numbers, I determined that I couldn't make a paper list for this set, which is very, very rare for me. 

All these cards carry the #6, and I don't even have the card that was supposed to be #6, which is Scott Dixon's driver card. (Although I have some incoming from a friend and he may be included, I will find out when I open the package)

Other than the numbering gaff, this set has almost everything I'm looking for in a racing set. In fact, I can say without question this is my favorite IndyCar set ever. 

Every driver who qualified for an IndyCar race in 2024 has a card. Perfect. 

Not only does every driver get a card, every CAR also gets a card. That's even more perfect. After all, you don't have auto racing without the automobiles. 

After the drivers and cars, each race winner gets a card for the race they won, documenting the previous season. This is exactly what I am looking for in any sports card set. 

But it gets even better! Each race also gets a podium card showing the top three finishers from each race. This is elite levels of season documenting. 

But wait, there's more! There is a subset for the season award winners! There are 5 cards in this subset but I only got one of them, for the champion. That makes a pretty good example for this subset, doesn't it?

Next comes a subset showing each team logo for all the IndyCar teams. To my knowledge, this is the first time ever in the entire history of IndyCar racing - under all names, including CART and USAC - that the teams have ever gotten team cards! This style of racing has existed for more than 100 years, and we are still getting firsts. 

Finally, the set ends with a subset of Driver Debuts. This is very cool because for most of the drivers, there were no IndyCar sets issued during that time, or for the few that were around long enough to be included in previous sets, like Will Power was, there are vast swathes of their career undocumented on cards and the sets that did include them didn't always include race action photos. I looked it up...of the 10 teams included in the Debut subset, only 4 of them had ever gotten a single card before this set's release and one of them had exactly 1 made card before last year's Parkside set. There are huge gaps in IndyCar history not documented, and I truly hope Parkside does a historical set at some point. 

There are also parallels and inserts, both of which I like better than the 2024 set, but the base set really is the star in this set. The lack of team owners and crew chiefs (I believe they are called lead engineers in IndyCar) are the only thing that keeps me from giving this set a perfect rating, yes, even with the numbering blunder. 

Although it's not really something you can tell from scans, this set also has a very interesting texture, unlike any other card sets I can recall. 

One other thing worth mentioning - and that contributes to this being my favorite IndyCar set ever - is that the back of the driver cards have complete career statistics! The car cards have 2024 specific stats.  This is something that hasn't appeared on a NASCAR card since, if I recall correctly, 2002. Possibly earlier. That's a big deal to me, and these stats are more complete than anything that has ever appeared on any other racing sets I've ever seen which, not to brag, is probably all of them. 

Honestly, finally getting these scanned, and writing this post? This set is not only my favorite IndyCar set ever, it's actually somewhere in my top 25 favorite sets ever, all sports and non-sports combined. It is structurally the best racing set issued since 1996 and to be honest, if it had the owners and crew chiefs, it would have been the most structurally perfect set in auto racing history. (The first racing set was issued the same year as the first Indy 500, 1911. It appears to have been made before the 500, and I question if it is actually a 1911 release or 1910)