Christmas 2015 (Part 1)

Merry Christmas my friends and fellow bloggers! I hope you are having as good a day as I have been. My family is awesome (as I already was well aware) and I have gotten lots of new cards today....including some I never thought I'd ever have!

I have not listed them or scanned them yet, but I did take a few photos which I will share here...part two will be scans and a grand total of new cards and new people.

Here are the boxes I got...

I did not have a single card from 2008-09 Tipoff, and I had a grand total of 2 cards from 2011-12 Gold Standard. I had 3 cards from 2010-11 Season Update as well, and I had only one pack worth of the 2013 Topps 75th Anniversary set. If you remember my Top 10 most wanted boxes to open post, all three years of Fanfare made the list. I had never opened a box from any set from 2008-09 or 2010-11 before today!

Star cards! Today now is the all-time leader in new Star cards for a single day. Yes, that is a Lakers team set! I would never have bought that for myself. (I'm a cheapskate) Every single one of the team sets except the Nets set gave me at least one new person for my collection. I love Star cards, and all three seasons are covered here. I have no idea on those big cards. There are 5 of them...probably a promo set. I need to do more research on them. I am shocked to get this many Star cards! Also, with these cards, I now have two of the three years for both the Nets and Pacers. 

Other loose cards. I realize this is slightly blurry. A mix of NASCAR and NBA. As you can see by the thickness of them there are more than a few relics in here. The first card I got today was a Klay Thompson autograph, from the same insert set my Steph Curry autograph is from, even. I forgot to take a picture of it though. That will be shown in Part 2. There are some other cards that didn't make it into any of the pictures, either. The Warriors are my favorite current team, with several of the current Warriors among my top 10 favorite active players. I now have autographs from 3 of the 5 Warriors starters, with a 4th possibly on the way. (I redeemed an expired redemption for a Harrison Barnes autograph but I don't know if I will actually get it or not). I also have part time starter Festus Ezeli's autograph as well.

This was my most surprising present, from my brother...

Golden Age Captain Marvel comics! WOW! (Or should I say, Holey Moley!) I was totally shocked by these as I had no inkling at all these were coming. I may have mentioned it before, but Golden Age Captain Marvel is my all-time favorite super hero. These are my FIRST Golden Age Marvel family books! I don't think that they got far enough in the Archives to reprint any of these so the stories will be all new for me as well, even better.

I'm pretty well shocked speechless today. I have so many new cards to process I may not even finish today!

I hope your Christmas has been as good as mine. Mine has been one of the best ever!

It'll take more than a Penny Sleeve to cover this thank you post!

Back when I had some minor milestone- I don't even remember what it was, because I have the memory span of a squirrel, I gave away some cards. (and this was only a month or two ago!)  I was not expecting any thank you gifts, but Jon from A Penny Sleeve for your Thoughts sent me one anyway. Jon is fairly new to the Blogosphere so if you have not seen his blog before, take a look.

Jon sent along some really great stuff...not a duplicate in the bunch! I don't know if he checked my wantlists or just got lucky, but all the vintage NBA he sent me was new, and that can be a bit of challenge as I have roughly 75% of all 1970s NBA cards, including all from 1975-76 through 79-80.

This was the last one out of the box but the first one I'm going to show...a card from 1970-71 Topps! I had not gotten any new cards from this set since 2003 or 2004. Over a decade! Even better, it was a player I did not have in my collection! Rich Johnson actually is a 1 Hit Wonder, this is the only card he ever got.

He sent 6 cards from 1972-73 Topps. For some reason this set was always very hard for me to find. I have the 1971-72 set complete, and I've got more than three-fourths of the next two sets after it, but according to the Database, I have only 31% of this set, and that's with adding a dozen or so during 2015. 6 new ones makes this package the largest input of new cards from this set in a single day for me in over a decade. Nate Thurmond is a big deal, too! I scanned all six and will show them now.

1972-73 Topps was the first set to show unedited action photos since 1961-62 Fleer

He sent along several 1973-74 Topps cards, and 1 card from 1974-75 Topps, but I have not gotten them all scanned yet. I've only gotten 1 of the cards from 1973-74 Topps scanned and that is below. I didn't want to wait any longer before posting and I don't know when I will get to them, so this one has to do for now.

I'm always happy to get new ABA cards, I've always had an affinity for the ABA.

First out of the box was a pack of 1992-93 Fleer/Spalding promo. I had never been able to hunt these down before. 1992-93 Fleer is one of my all-time favorite sets, so I was very happy to get these. I didn't scan the cards yet, so here's the pack. I have not really mentioned it much but I also love promos, so these were a nice treat!

A few posts ago, I mentioned that there was a GI Joe card set I knew existed, but didn't have any of. Jon hoped he was sending me that set, but without knowing it, he sent me something better- a GI Joe set I had no idea existed! And he sent me the entire 55 card set! I'm shocked! Thank you! Apparently, in 1987, Comic Images issued a GI Joe set, with most, if not all, of the artwork coming directly from Marvel's comics. The set was issued 6 years into the run of GI Joe, when it was at it's peak. The cards are somewhat crude- I'm not sure if there are two in the set that are cut to the same size- but who cares, this is from the glory days of GI Joe, and even better, I had no idea they existed, and now I have them complete!  Here are three cards from the set.

Thank you again Jon, this was an excellent surprise and every single one of these cards will have a happy place in my collection for years to come!

By the way, Merry Christmas to my fellow Bloggers! My family knows me very well and I am sure I will have new cards to post about tomorrow, Christmas is usually the day of the year where I get the most cards- all gifts from my family. Even if by some chance they went a different route this year, I'm sure I'll still be able to put a post together about memories of cards I got for Christmas...there are lots of them, and had I had more forethought on the topic, I would probably have posted about that this year as well. Well, I can't cover every topic during Cardboard History's first year, can I? :)

Sets in my collection #13: 1933 Planters Big Game Hunted Animals

Another set from 1933. That makes 4 of them...or literally half the different sets from the entire decade in my collection!

When I think of Planters, I think of Mr. Peanut, the mascot that defines not just the company, but the entire world of peanuts.

I don't think of trading cards.

Perhaps if I lived in the 1930s, that would not have been the case. Inserted with Big Game peanut bars were 25 smaller cards of Hunted Animals. (Although I've never heard of kangaroos being hunted, card #11). I did a search and could not find ANY reference whatsoever to the Big Game bar, not even a reference to these cards. I have no idea if the advertised "Trapped Animals" set was ever issued.

These cards are fairly small, about half the size of a standard modern card. The scan displays significantly larger than the card is.

There's a lot of action going on on this card- the buffalo has chased a man up a tree while a hunter takes aim at the buffalo, which looks to me like it's getting ready to try and knock the tree down and presumably, eat the man in the tree. (I am assuming the buffaloes are carnivorous)

Figuring out exactly how many people are in my collection

I'm back! I finally went and saw The Force Awakens today. I don't want to give any spoilers, but...I was not particularly happy with it. I was enjoying it but then they threw away any enjoyment I could find in it. And that's the entirety of what I'm going to talk about it for now and that alone should tell you what I think.

I didn't go on the internet at all since my last post, which wasn't actually as hard as I thought it would be. I missed the Database, and I missed blogging, but other than that...well, I was actually having fun with my cards.

An idea hit me several weeks ago- figure out how many people are in my collection. I already knew how many were in my NBA collection, and NASCAR collection, but I have lots of other cards in my collection and I had no real idea. So, I got out all the other cards- almost all of which I received as gifts during 2015...and went through every single one, typing each name into an Excel chart, one sheet for each sport or topic and then one other sheet with all of them combined. It was a lot of work, taking me three full days. I can't guarantee I got it totally correct- there may be people entered twice, there may be people I missed- but this is good enough for me to be happy with the end result.

Before I show the screencap of the stats page, here is a picture of my stash of cards already entered into the Database before I could scan them...or at least part of it. There are more NBA cards not included in this photo. These boxes cover at least 7 sports plus non-sports cards...two angles of the same boxes. All but about 150 of these cards were either given to me as gifts or came to me in trades since June 2014. It's been one heck of a year (and a half)!

OK...here's the grand totals....

I've already gotten more names since I originally finished. A friend sent me a small stack of several sports that saw me add names to the football, baseball and 1 hockey. Also, during the time I was away from the blogs, 2015-16 Panini Prizm and 2015-16 Complete came out, and I got new NBA players in both sets.

At some point, I plan to type up a complete listing as a page along the top here- and denote which aspect of the collection they come from- but I am not sure when I will get to it. There's a good chance I won't get to it until 2016, as the conclusion of 2015 is rapidly approaching, and I have some other card related things I need to do by the end of the year that take precedence.

There are actually a LOT more names than I thought there would be. I estimated in the 5000 range, but I was way off!

A couple of notes on how I did the counting. First, the person had to have a card all their own. A person who shares a card, or only appears on a team card, is not counted. Only people living on this planet, at some time or another, are counted. No comic, Star Wars, etc. are included. Multi is people who have cards in more than one sport. IE, Brad Daugherty...known for his NBA career, but also has cards in NASCAR. NCAA basketball is players who did not make the NBA...or in a couple of cases, I am missing the NBA cards but do have college card(s) of the person. Other basketball is mostly Harlem Globetrotters, but also includes a few international players. For baseball, football and hockey, pro and college is combined. Note that there are more hockey names than there are NASCAR, despite the fact that I've been collecting NASCAR cards for 23 years this coming Saturday. Before January 31st this year, I had 28 hockey cards....total.

Going offline for a few days...for Star Wars!

I'm not going to be around for a few days. With Star Wars: The Force Awakens releasing on the 18th, I don't want to get any spoilers, so I'm going totally offline. No Facebook. No Blogs. No Database. I've done it before- the last few times my computers died (I'm on #3) I did it. I went without the computer for almost 2 weeks the last time. Not to mention, of course, all the time before spring of the year 2000, when we got our first computer!

Journey to the Force Awakens Black #110

I will put the time to good use, though. Not only do I plan to keep on scanning, I am going to work on a typing project I've been putting off since I thought of it about 2 weeks ago. I am going to figure out, or at least try to, exactly how many people are in my collection. I've got the NBA and NASCAR collections pretty well documented, but I do not have, in any form, lists of how many people I have in my baseball, hockey, football, non-sports, and other sports collections. I expect, with all the sports and non-sports combined, I will be approaching 10,000 different people in my collection. My NBA collection alone is over 2600 different people, NASCAR is over 1000. My friend gave me almost 3000 different hockey cards, plus my MLB and NFL collections are both over 500 cards...plus the non-sports, where most people have only one or two cards at best in my collection. Then you have the Olympics and the other forms of auto racing. Not to mention college basketball and multi-sport sets. It really does add up. Like I say above, I expect the total number of people to be in the 5000-10000 range, with a rough guess at in the 8000s. But, I am notoriously bad at estimating things, so who knows? Hopefully, when I return to the net after I see the movie, I will!

It's a lot of work, but it means I get to spend time with my cards, so I will enjoy it.

This was the line waiting to get into the Phantom Menace in 1999, at the Poughkeepsie Gallaria, or I should say, a portion of it!

I won't go to opening day of movies anymore. Been there, done that...for all three prequals. No desire to do that again. So it'll be a few days before I go see it...but I will be back posting in time for Christmas.

Also, that means there will be no Hot Off the Scanner Tray this week as it will fall under my self-imposed exile. I will still be scanning, so the next week's post will probably be a big one!

I just know I can't trust the internet not to spoil the movie. If Kylo Ren turns out to be two Ewoks standing on each other's shoulders, I don't want to know about it until I see the movie, you know what I mean? :) I know it debuts internationally on the 16th, so when I go offline tonight...I won't be coming back tomorrow.

Hot Off the Scanner Tray Week 11

 Back to HOST posting, after not scanning anything that didn't go to it's own post at all last week!

Starting out is a cool insert from 1999-00 EX, EX-Ceptional. I found out recently these came in three different colors, I've only seen red. I wish my scan of the Elton Brand card in the set came out as good as this Odom card did!

Here are the two Taco Bell cards I wasn't able to get scanned in time to make my November trade recap. Note the rounded corners, which are a dead giveaway they are Taco Bell issues. The copyright info on the back also mentions Taco Bell. 

I think I've gotten more Anderson Varejao cards in 2015 than I have in any other year of his career, which is over a decade long, now!

Take a look at this 1993-94 Fleer base card. Do you notice anything strange about it?

 How about the 5 foot 3 Muggsy Bogues guarding the 7 foot James Edwards? Bogues, the shortest player in the NBA's history, would normally not have been guarding Edwards, yet here we have photographic proof that at one point, he did! Muggsy was always one of my favorite players, by the way. Speaking of extremes on height in the NBA...

This card from 1994-95 Hoops shows two of the three tallest players in NBA history, missing only Manute Bol, who was ending his career with the Golden State Warriors during 1994-95. Interesting, he played (briefly) with both the Sixers and Bullets during 1993-94, when this photo was likely taken. (Also with Miami during that season). Note that they are so tall...Muresan was 7 foot 7, Shawn Bradley 7 foot 6 (which is why they wore 77 and 76, respectively)...that both their feet and the top of their hair doesn't even fit on the card!

I really miss team cards. The last that were issued that I am aware of was 2010-11, and the last time before that was 2005-06. There is so much that can be done with a team card, but they go ignored. (Team stats, a recap of their season, history of the team, team records, all-time leaders, and that's not even counting the simplistic team checklist.) This card, from 1993-94 Upper Deck, carries the team's schedule for the 1993-94 season on the back.

Is there a card that better represents the 1990s and 2000s in the NBA? One of the few cards to feature these two players combined. It's not too easy to tell from the scan but the borders are holofoil.

Remember when UD3 was a big deal, and considered revolutionary? Seems hard to believe today but when this came out, it was the highest end card set ever made for the NBA at that time. I was never a huge fan of UD3, although I like the 1996-97 set more. Both sets are only 60 cards, which is way, way too small. Embarassingly, I have not completed either of them yet, although I am one card short on the 1996-97 set. Here is the clear card for Damon Stoudamire from both years.

In case it's not easy to tell, the 1996-97 card is die cut. My example here still has the protective coating.

While not related to cards (yet), here are a couple of pictures of our Christmas tree.

I say for now, because my family knows me, and I know my family...there will be some cards under the tree soon!

Raining Cats and Dawgs

Card bloggers are good people. I mean, I think we know that's a given, because only cool people take the time to write a card blog (right?) but some go above and beyond. In the past few days I received packages from bloggers with animal themed titles, and of course I have to post about said packages...it's Cardblog etiquette.

First up was a package from Angus at Dawg Day Cards. A few days ago, he posted up that he was going to give away cards to anybody who emailed him their address. I didn't do that, but I had previously made a large trade with him on the Trading Card Database, and he must have saved my address because sure enough, I got a Christmas card packed with cards!
These were the new cards- he sent me two complete promo sets and two cards from the 2015-16 Tim Horton's hockey release (those are really nice looking cards in hand, much better than my scan shows!)

He sent along all three Sun Drop cards but I had acquired one locally earlier this year. The Mario Andretti card is so detailed it even includes the date he came to the USA and the date he became a US citizen.

The next day saw the arrival of a large package from The Prowling Cat. He has been running a "cleaning out the clutter" series of posts where if you want something he's got up for cleaning, claim it and then figure out what to send him back later. (He likes pocket schedules, of which I've got one headed his way shortly with some other stuff). I claimed three sets, which is way more than I'm going to be able to scan and get posted in anything resembling a timely order...so I'll post an example of each set, instead.
First up was Bon Air Fire Engines Series 1. The Fire Engines series is actually the largest automotive themed set ever, including racing sets, at 500 cards, 100 per 5 series. I had a couple of packs' worth that I got when they were new, but only from series 2.

Next was Series 4, which is cards #301-400. The fronts look very similar but the location of the fire engine photographed is much more prominent. On series 1 and 2 it appears on the back of the card only.

How cool is a green fire truck? Green has always been my favorite color, but I've never seen a green fire engine before. That's why I chose this example to post.

The first two series' backs are white and light yellow, like so:

  

 Speedway, Indiana is of course the home of Indianapolis Motor Speedway...which is why it's called Speedway. Neat, huh?

Series 4 has this very obviously 1990s yellow and blue flame scheme on the back of the cards. What a great decade it was. I have no idea what series 3 and 5 look like on the back. Series 5 was not produced by Bon-Air, but by another company, I can't remember which one right now. It was also issued several years later. Continued the numbering series though so to me it's the same series. I won't consider it complete until I have all 500 cards. With the package that prowled to me this week, I now have more than 200 of them, so that's a pretty good start.

 

The first set I claimed, but the last to come out of the box, was the 1994 Cardz Hanna-Barbera Classics set, which is 60 cards, and he sent along all of them. 2015 has been a down year for me completing sets, so it was extra nice to get a full one all at once. The set is a little frustrating, though, in that they did not produce cards of some of my favorite cartoons. For example, Wacky Races does not have a card, yet both it's spinoffs do. Instead, they gave multiple shows 5 cards (Yogi Bear, Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby Doo and Jonny Quest). All of those long-running shows could probably have supported their own card set. Also, they use up 8 cards on magic tricks. Those were totally unnecessary, especially as there were so many shows that didn't get a card or even a mention. The production quality was high, and I'm glad to have them, I just wish they had been a little wiser with subject selection. I have grown up watching most of these cartoons, and if they were still on, I'd still watch them. (Wacky Races is one of only 4 TV shows I've seen every single episode of, thanks to the DVD set)
Here's a Scooby Doo card.

It's actually funny, although I was actively collecting non-sports cards when these were issued in the 1990s, I've gotten more cards from the Cardz company in 2015 than I did new. In addition to the 60 cards of this set, I also completed the Muppets set earlier this year.

And wait, there's more! The box he used to send them to me was not quite full, so to keep the cards from flopping around and getting damaged, he stuffed the remainder of the box with late 1990s NASCAR cards! Most were from 1999, which, for some reason, I got very, very few cards of. Here's a small sampling of what I received, there are more I didn't yet scan.

1999 Upper Deck Road to the Cup #85

2000 Wheels High Gear #31. I love car shots, by the way!

1998 Collector's Choice #105

1999 Wheels #61

1996 Maxx #46. Maxx's last flagship...not the best design but the one I have the least of, so this was very welcome!

1999 Upper Deck Victory Circle #4

1998 Collector's Choice CC600 #CC11

1998 Collector's Choice CC600 #CC9

1998 Collector's Choice CC600 #CC42

1995 Action Packed Winston Cup Country #16