Christmas Cards

I love my wife.  I had to start this post with that sentence, because she has supported my insane love for collecting cards the entire time that we've been together.

She's shown appreciation for the older stuff that I've brought into the house (especially the 64's and 59's) and never complains when I hit the card aisle at Target or Wal-Mart when we go together.

But she's never ventured into buying cards for me at Christmas time (or any other time of the year).  She's admitted being nervous about getting the wrong thing for me, which is understandable.  She knows I'm picky at times.  But this year she took the plunge.  

My wife actually hit my trash can to check out the wrappers of packs of Upper Deck hockey to make sure she was buying something I wanted. 

In my stocking, there were two fat packs of this year's UD waiting.  She had better luck picking than I have had so far...

I've bought 3 fat packs, a blaster and a couple of single packs, but hadn't hit an Auston Matthews.   Bang, first pack there he is!!  The first pack also contained a David Pastrnak Shining Stars insert, which is available if any Bruins fans need it.

I pulled a couple of Young Guns in my blaster, but nothing in the other packs.   Sure enough, there is Nathan Walker's card in pack #2.  William Nylander has also been nowhere to be found until now; I love that photo from the Winter Classic warm up.

This last card I'm going to show is already a double, but is perfect for the goalie mask frankenset.

What a great photo!  I wish there were more cards like this for the set. 

I may have to ask her to pick packs for me in the future.  Her luck is better than mine...

Thanks for reading, Robert

The last of the COMC order...PC's please

First off, I hope that those of you out there who celebrate Christmas had a very merry one and spent it in the company of loved ones.

It just wouldn't be a COMC order without a dose of cards for my player collections.  Often inspiration for picking up a card of Sakic, Thome or McCutchen (and now Ichiro) comes from seeing cards on the site while I'm writing up posts on my other blog.   I end up finding parallels, or as you'll see in this post, serial #'d cards from sets that I don't purchase much of.

I did pretty well with my #1 PC, Joe Sakic, picking up 8 more base/parallel cards:

Love how well the emerald parallel for Pacific Dynagon scanned.  OK, that was a bit of sarcasm as the scan doesn't show half of the dark green that the card contains.  The bottom and top portions of the card, as well as the "starburst" lines are all emerald and the card looks fantastic in hand.
I'm becoming more and more intrigued with the Beehive cards from the mid 2000's.  I totally missed out on that set when it was released, and I'm picking up cards here and there at shows or online. 

It's also getting tougher to find Sakic cards under a dollar, as I'm now more into the parallel/serial #'d portion of the cards I need to collect.  Half of the cards on these 2 scans were in the $1 to $1.50 range; still not exorbitant but it starts to add up. 

I did a quick count of my Sakic cards, and was stoked to find that I'm up over the 700 card mark now on his PC, and I'm looking to hit 800 in the new year.

In what had to be a moment or two of insanity, I grabbed a handful of Moments and Milestones cards from 2008 for the Thome and Ichiro PCs.  Yes, they were all below a buck, and add more cards to the PCs.  I need to make sure that I don't get carried away with chasing all of these, because there are so many cards with variations that it's absolutely head spinning.  

Well, with the end of the PCs from that order, I can say now that I've hit the 1600 post mark for the blog.  Now while 1600 posts is nothing compared to a few other bloggers out there that have passed the 2000 mark a long time ago, for me each time I hit a "milestone" post such as this one, it makes me happy because I realize that I'm making an attempt to entertain people. 

Why do I do this?  Just because I enjoy cardboard, as all of you do.  

Here's to many more milestones....

Thanks for reading, Robert

It's not all about the baseball sets

I didn't do a whole lot for my other hockey sets (save for the SPs that I showed off yesterday) on the last COMC order, but I didn't totally neglect them.  I snagged some old and some new to knock some numbers off a trio of want lists.

One set that I've taken on is the 71-72 OPC set, and I'm finding that it's difficult to find cards on the cheap.  These were all around a buck a piece, and all some kind of flaw that is easily spotted.  I know that I'm never going to put together a NM copy of this set, it's not possible with the number of sets I'm tackling and the cost that a high grade set will be.

No matter, these are still great to look at and knocking off 4 cards from the set at a reasonable price is always a good thing.

One of the greatest nicknames in hockey, Ken "the Rat" Linseman was a vital part of the first Edmonton championship team.  He was traded that summer to the Bruins, and then traded again a few years later to the Flyers, but he never changed his game.  Ken was a tough competitor, great on face-offs and defensively. 

I've still got over 1/3 of the 83-84 OPC set to go, with a bunch of Gretzky cards to find.  Maybe 2018 will see this set completed (or hopefully close).

Serial #198

Finding numbered parallels from premium sets such as OPC Platinum at a decent price can be tough.  I was able to pick up this red prism of Jarome Iginla for under a buck. 

This guy is proof positive that you're never too small to play.  I could go on and on with his accomplishments, but I'll limit the commentary to the card that I'm happy to have as part of the SNI hockey set.   I've always liked the SP Authentic set, it's a good mid range set with a good selection of rookies.  This is the 12th Tampa Bay card for the set as it approaches the 300 card mark.

The last card of this post is the highest number I own in the set, another SP Authentic card featuring JS Giguere, then of the Maple Leafs.  I enjoyed being able to watch JS in Toronto for the 2 seasons he was there; sadly he was part of a couple of poor teams that didn't make the playoffs. 

Yeah, not a lot here to show, but it still knocks numbers off of want lists.   I wonder what I'll ever do if I don't have any want lists....

Perish the thought.

thanks for reading, Robert

short print cinema

A big part of some of my want lists right now are short prints.   The dreaded high number cards that companies enjoy making in order to give set collectors nightmares. My recent COMC order knocked a few cards off of the Short Print hit list.

Sadly, I'm still working on O-Pee-Chee sets from 4 and 5 years ago.  The high numbers in those sets number 100 each, and thus it's been a slow go finding cheap enough cards to fill the bill.

O-Pee-Chee mixes legend cards in with the rookies in order to fill up the 100 cards #'d 501-600.  The first five cards from this scan are from the 2012-13 set.  Needless to say, they stretched the term rookie a little bit in order to fit Joe Sakic into that portion of the set, since it had been a quarter of a century since Sakic had been a rookie.  I do like the old time photo of Joe in his number 88 jersey which he only wore during his first season before switching to #19.  Sami Vatanen is the only 2013-14 card that I added on this order; this set is much further away from completion with 130 cards to go, 54 of those being SPs.

The 2017 Heritage set also is rife with SPs (as you well know).  I decided to make a more concerted effort to get this set done a little more quickly than the 2011 set which took me 5 years to finish.  My hunt was for SPs that cost less than a buck, and these 6 fit the bill.  There are some high prices on the high numbered cards, with the Kris Bryant card being the highest that I've seen on COMC; the cheapest Bryant card is currently $13.75, or about $13 more than I really want to pay.

I still have 80 of the SPs to go, so it may be a year or two before I make a real push to finish the set. 

Frugality always wins out...

Thanks for reading, Robert