Total Blaster 13

Before I get into my latest edition of what is now my least popular series, I got a package from Peter K. Steinberg of Baseball Every Night. This is a blog I was not aware of but I found a comment from Peter on Bob Walk the Plank and clicked on his name. I am guessing this is my Blogger Secret Santa package but I didn't open it yet just to be sure. Peter or Matthew, if you see this can I get a confirmation on that? I have added his blog to my blogroll so I will see updates from him in the future.

I also need to thank Tyler of Rekindling the Cardboard Flame for sending me along 2 packs of 2016 Topps Update. I opened one of them and I think it may be the second baseball pack I've ever opened...but I can't be sure as my memory is like swiss cheese. Large holes obliterating pretty much everything between 1998 and yesterday. It is the first time I've gotten the smoke design of 2016 in hand, and since every blog has pretty much commented about them already, I'll just say that I don't think they look as bad in hand as they do in scans.

OK, now the cards you all didn't come here to see, based on my declining viewership of this series.

 Back to smart phone pictures today.
Jeb Burton, son of 2002 Daytona 500 winner Ward, was considered a young gun in 2014, but now is considered more of a field filler, although he hasn't gotten much time in any good equipment.
Mark Martin red parallel...Mark's final season was 2013, but he still got a base card in this set (all photos and text in it relates to 2013, not 2014). Mark won 40 races over his 31 year career, three times hitting the 5 win mark, with a top performance of 7 in 1998, but he is most well known for being the driver with the most second place points finishes without a championship, of which he has 5...although by all rights he should have been 1990's Champion as he got a bogus penalty that cost him 46 points, he finished the season 20 something points out of first.
Jimmie Johnson Acceleration, first time we have seen that card in this project, but unfortunately I already had the card. I had a grand total of 2 blasters worth of this set before I began this project, and that happened to be one of the two I had gotten. Spoiler alert: I'm still finding it hard to believe he has now won 7 Cup championships. And I would not be surprised if he gets more. He still trails Jeff Gordon for 3rd place in all-time wins by 14 but he might get that too- he gets 5 per year pretty much every year, with a best of 10 in 2007, one of only a handful of drivers to hit double digits in a year in the modern short schedule era (1972-current).
Junior Johnson is the second time his Hall of Fame placque appears in this project. Jimmie and Junior are not related.

Relic is Matt Kenseth...again. Kenseth has become one of my least favorite drivers. At least it's a nice big relic, fairly low numbered, and the photo depicts a special paint scheme, the only card it appears on that I'm aware of. Although you can only see half of it due to burnout smoke....it still counts.

At least it wasn't another Bowyer.

Total Blaster 12

Another less than great box. 3 new but my second duplicate relic.
Austin Dillon base is new, Jeff Gordon Red is new, Leonard Wood Hall of Fame is new, Jeff relic is not, and this is the third Keselowski Acceleration card I've gotten...it's only a ten card set but I have not completed it yet, but am getting third copies anyway. I really don't miss Press Pass.

Lost & Found: Hockey Promo

I found my box of missing oversize cards (which will get their own post in the near future) but a surprise for me waited in the box. I had absolutely zero memory of having this, but there it was waiting in the box.

It's an uncut sheet of promos for 1993-94 Pinnacle series 1. I learned on the Trading Card Database that they issued promos for series 2 as well, something you don't see very much in the world of cards.

The question now is, where did this come from? I had no memory of it. It's not in the greatest shape- there is some scratching and chipping on the back. I probably got it for free somewhere- hockey was not on my radar until very recently. It's possible my dad may have brought it home. He would find things left on the buses he maintained and while he was supposed to throw the stuff out, he would bring it home instead if he felt like it. The very first baseball cards in my collection came to me that way in fact. (a couple cards from 1979 Topps and more than 20 from the Pacific Tom Seaver set of 1992)

I have no idea but I am happy to have it. It was not counted as part of my collection so now that I've found it it brings my NHL collection to 2999 cards....almost all of which I've received as gifts.

Total Blaster 11

This blaster of 2014 Total Memorabilia didn't pan out as well as some others, because 2 of the 5 cards were duplicates...but you get something new for this series of posts, an actual scan!

Ryan Gifford is from the Young Guns subset, but I don't think he's made it up higher than K&N. I don't really watch Busch (Xfinity) or Trucks much anymore, although I will in 2017 as they finally are going to get the Cup drivers out of the series for the final 8 and 7 races, respectively.
Newman is the red parallel. The Jeff Gordon card appears in the second consecutive pack and the Richard Petty card is a duplicate...possibly the third copy I've gotten.

Regan Smith is my relic for this box, a good one as I am a fan of his, and though it barely shows on the card, there are two of the wear tabs on the relic, one at very top and bottom. That lets me know this relic piece comes from the sidewall of the tire. (where the lettering is). Most of both of them is underneath the cardboard flap.

Linsanity strikes!

I was a little disappointed with this year's Black Friday sales...I had saved up $150 after seeing how great last year's were...and this year, it fell flat. I ended up buying one box only, and it cost me less than $30. Some of the rest of what I had saved went to COMC, most of it went to non-fun things like paying for the medicine that keeps me alive.

What I did end up getting was a hobby box of 2011-12 Hoops. It was a risk, I knew, because I had done a retail box in the past. But it was still missing a lot of cards, so I felt it was cheap enough to take the risk. I'm glad I did.

Right off the bat, I was missing 5 people who were in this set but not present in my collection, and all 5 of them now are. Only one of them is still in the NBA. Since Panini didn't bother to include rookies during the lockout, they included some people that they normally ignore so they weren't present in my collection. They began appearing in the second pack I opened.
They were:
Cole Aldrich (still in the NBA, never left it, but didn't get a card again until 2016-17)
Solomon Alabi
Hasheem Thabeet
Sundiata Gaines
Jerome Jordan

Each box included 2 autographs and my first was a big one:

In 2011-12 Jeremy Lin stepped in to the starting lineup of the New York Knicks and became a sensation. Linsanity swept NYC and the entire NBA. I remember watching those games, 2011-12 is when I was just getting into the NBA again after several years away. Lin was not included on many checklists before then, but it really is what launched his career. He has been in the NBA ever since, although never reaching the levels of success he had that 2-week span when he was carrying the Knicks. Now he is the starting Poing Guard on my favorite team, the Nets, although he has missed most of the year to injury.

This would have been just about the biggest card of the year that year- to be honest it's still a big pull. It's a big enough card that I could not afford to buy it a single, and for me that's always a good pull.
The second autograph was great in it's own way as it was a very obscure player. Derrick Caracter is so obscure that this is only my second card of him- the first being the base version of his card from this very set. Most people would be really unhappy to pull this, but not me. I always prefer to get the rarer guys.

Here are the new players for my collection.

This Hoops design is not really the greatest, Panini got better with that over the years. It was their first Hoops effort and the first time the Hoops brand had been issued since 2005-06. I've now done a hobby box of every year of the Panini era Hoops set except 2013-14, and I have too many to make it worthwhile now, I'm only about 20 cards away from the 300 card set.

Overall box breakdown is not great here- I have a huge stack of duplicates but I'm still 7 cards away from the complete set. I have one pack yet to open- I saved it to scan the pack- so I'm hoping I can complete it that way. If not, I'll see if I can trade for them, but knowing I won't find anybody to trade them to me, I will probably just break down and buy them on COMC. Panini HAS gotten better in that area as well- you usually don't get any duplicates in the Hoops box now, but you get less cards than the set includes even not counting the inserts and parallels, which keep you even farther from a complete set. But they make the sets so small that buying a second box would be a waste of money because it would be mostly duplicates.

There's a whole bunch of inserts but most of them are kind of pointless. The Action Photos insert is a good one though, I have always loved cards where the photo was taken through the backboard.

And that's it for my Black Friday box busting. I did get a large order from COMC- at 68 cards and two comics, my largest ever- and when it arrives I should be able to get 5 or more posts out if it, might even take me into next year as I am not always very quick...I never finished the post for the 2015 Black Friday boxes I did, after all!

November Trade Recap

After a few down months, November had me make a couple of trades back and forth with other bloggers, so much so that I'm typing up the beginning of this post on November 17th, where usually I whip it up the night before I post it, or even right when I post it. But I have too much to cover to do that this month!

First up is a trade with Spazmatastic who I know from both NUTS and the Trading Card Database. Adam and I chat regularly- usually sending each other a message every night- mostly about NASCAR, and it actually evolved into a trade. (not the first we've done) First things first, I feel terrible about this trade because I promised him two cards and then couldn't find them. I made up the difference with paypal but I still feel terrible about it.
From him I got the Panini Instant card from the Charlotte race, which his favorite driver Jimmie Johnson won. Only 80 copies of this card were purchased, and he got 5 of them. I bought the first Instant NASCAR card, but I have not gotten any more on my own since then or any of the NBA ones. I meant to write a post about the Truex card I bought but I never got around to it.

I got another PWE from north of the border from CrazieJoe. included were some more Ultra cards from 2004-05, a set I love but needed a few of, luckily he's pulled more than a few of them. 5 more of them joined my collection here, including this card of Brian Cardinal. I like getting cards of big name players of course, but what I really love is to get cards of obscure guys. This is only the 14th Brian Cardinal card in my collection. Ray Allen, who was also in this PWE, has about 300 cards in my collection, for example.

Another rather obscure guy in the PWE was Willie Green, who constantly foiled Charles Barkley's attempts at "Who he play for?" I don't know how many I have of him yet as I have not scanned my collection of him, but it's probably only about 15 cards give or take.

I posted on the Trading Card Database that I was looking for a copy of the Craig Sager card from 2016 Topps Update's First Pitch insert, so member griffey423 just sent me one. Much appreciated!

New member of the Trading Card Database sahal694 is also a basketball collector and we pulled off a simple two card trade. While I've done hundreds of trades online, going back to around the year 2000, it was the first trade he'd ever done online. That's the second time in the past year I got to be somebody's first trade, but I can't remember the other one. The bubble mailer I sent to him covered from New York to Phoenix in just two days! Of the two cards he sent me, one did something that doesn't happen too often- it completed an insert set! I'm a base card guy, that's well documented, but I like non-base cards as well. Inserts getting completed for me is fairly rare, and in fact, I don't even have a list of the ones I've completed....that's definitely something I need to do! David Robinson Flagship Series was a 10-card insert set in 1992-93 Skybox, and #R6 was the last one I needed to finish it off. The Ray Allen from 1996-97 Stadium Club Rookies I brings me to within only two cards for that set, as well.

 My friend who sent me the Racing Champions card that got it's own post earlier in the month sent me some other great stuff too. And not just NASCAR!

 This is only my 3rd flag relic and first Blue Flag. The blue flag with yellow stripe is one of the rarest in NASCAR, used to signal out a lapped car in the way of the leaders, it's the second rarest flag to see, with only the reg flag displayed less frequently (although with the growing number of rain relays it's a about a draw now). Another rare flag is red with yellow X, it is displayed when the pits are closed.

Terry Bradshaw! My first card of him. While from everything I've heard he was a great football player, I know him more from his many appearances on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It's Serially Numbered to 999 as well.

While I teased the shifter boot card he sent me in the first post, I am going to hold onto that for now as I have an idea for a post that it will show up in shortly, hopefully by the end of 2016.

Thanks for reading.

Total Blaster 10

Halfway today with my first Total Memorabilia blaster of December, and also my first new cards of the month as well. Today you get an actual camera picture, instead of a smart phone photo.

Trevor Bayne Base, Harvick red parallel, Jeff Gordon Acceleration and Dale Inman Hall of Fame Placque. The Inman is a duplicate but the rest are all new. The camera flash didn't play well with the name area on the Kevin Harvick red parallel but it really makes the red foil pop out I think. The mirror foil inserts show up better in the camera photo vs. phone.

I forgot to take an actual photo of the relic, so here is the image cropped out of the above photo. It's new, and it's SN 100 of 275, which I like. Off the top of my head this is only my second relic of the 2012 Champion.

Overall a very good blaster, even if I did get the Inman card two blasters in a row.

Tomorrow I will post my November trade recap, which is the largest one since I began posting them, I think. I wanted to get it posted on the 1st but time got away from me.