Card Draft swag from west coast Greg

Well, a few weeks back I had the opportunity to get in a card draft over at Plaschke, thy Sweater is Argyle. 

Greg offered up a great selection of cards at a decent price, and I saw a couple of cards that were right up my alley, so I decided to jump in. 

First, some of the base/inserts that I grabbed...

The top row features a couple of cards that interested me because they are inserts that I like, but am only dabbling in here and there.   I haven't caught the Gypsy Queen fever, but the cards do look nice, and anytime you can add a HOFer to your collection, why not?  The Rafael Furcal is the die cut from '08 Upper Deck X (duh).  Again, another set that I never collected, but the X die cut cards are kind of intriguing to me, so I grabbed it.  On the bottom, as you can plainly see is an '84 Topps Tom Seaver.  The 80's for me were an absolute dark period for collecting, as I can honestly say I didn't purchase one pack of baseball cards during the entire decade, so again on a lark I grabbed this up as well.

I also picked up a couple of A&G national pride inserts....Manny Ramirez and Adrian Gonzalez.  Much like the state inserts in A&G, this is another insert set that interests me as well, and may be collected down the line. 

Of course, there were other cards available...I tried to get a hold of some '59s, but was too late on those.
Naturally, the first few rounds of any card draft are when the relics/autos get snapped up, and this was no exception.  I figured I'd have my pick of the hockey that was available, and I was on the money...

First up is the current captain of Les Canadiens, Brian Gionta.  Would have preferred the team logo on the upper right match the sweater, but hey what can you do, right?  Still an excellent auto...

UD Trilogy relics are always pretty cool, and I snapped up future Hall of Famer Doug Weight with this one.  Again the only drawback is the Islanders logo with him pictured as a Duck.  Still two different colored swatches is pretty cool. 

Finally, this one is of a guy who may be top 5 in goal scoring by the time his career is done...

Ilya Kovalchuk just picked up his 400th career goal, and at age 28 he has lots of career left.  The top 20 is only 173 goals away, and another 100 goals on top of that gets him to the top 5.  Barring any major injuries, I think he's got a great shot at being right up there with the best of all time.

Greg, thanks for the draft, I had a lot of fun!!

thanks for reading, Robert