Optic-al Illusion

You don't see free group breaks very often, but Colbey from the Cardboard Collections blog offered up a couple of 2016 Donruss Optic boxes this past Saturday to the card world, asking only shipping costs be sent.

Very generous indeed.

I did quite well for myself in this break, getting most of the base team set....

There's a SP version of the Bautista showing the ever famous bat flip which I'd like to find.

I thought that the Diamond King card of Josh Donaldson was an insert; turns out it is part of the base set.   I wound up with 3 of those, along with the Power Alley insert featuring Joey Bats.

Love the purple parallels, and I guess I was lucky enough to get 4 of them (2 of them were Josh Donaldson). 

Last but certainly not least was the Aqua parallel of Jose Bautista, numbered 53/299.  Colbey pulled quite a few of the numbered parallels out of the 2 boxes, and I was happy to get one for myself!

I will say this, a lot of online sellers can learn a lot from Colbey.   27 envelopes went in the mail first thing on Monday morning after a weekend break, which is quite incredible. 

I'm still waiting on a Sportlots package I ordered on the 19th...but that's a story for another day.

Thank you for the break Colbey!!  The cards are really appreciated!!

Thanks for reading, Robert

Digging for Cubs

I'm sure that many of you out there that are on twitter follow the One Million Cubs Project account.   I recently saw a tweet from him that offered up some 1980 Topps cards in exchange for some Cubs.   So I started digging, and it was interesting what I found sitting in boxes while looking for some North Side cards.

PC cards?  I found about 10.   McCutchen, Ichiro, Tkachuk and Sundin all have more cards added to their collection.

The other card that I found I remember buying from a card show quite a while ago.   I don't think I paid a whole lot for it, but for some reason it wound up in a box and out of sight for quite a while.

A nice '74 Topps Al Kaline card.  Funny that I've had this for so long, but never marked it off the '74T want list.  I'm now down to 150 cards to go to finish that set; and speaking of want lists I finally got them organized today, and you'll see the fruits of my labor at the top of this page.  There's still a bit more work to do, but the major reorganization of them happened today.

All that aside, I managed to dig up 96 Cubs cards to send up to Beau.  He had 135 '80 Topps cards to send my way, and I was quite fortunate that Beau said that I wouldn't need to make up the difference, even though I offered.  So by the end of the week my '80T needs will be less than 70 cards. 

Considering I just started putting that set together a few months ago, I'm very pleased at being that close to complete so quickly.   Hopefully I can knock a couple of other sets out that quickly as well...

thanks for reading, Robert

Little victories

I was going to make this a Serial Saturday post, but instead I decided to show off all the Larry Fitzgerald cards I received from my latest COMC order.

I didn't do too bad, pulled in 13 new cards for the Fitz PC...

What I'm enjoying so far about putting a decent Fitzgerald collection together is the cost efficient way that I'm acquiring new cards.  I've really focused on serial numbered cards to start the PC, so much so that I probably have more serial #'d cards than base cards.  I'm keeping it on the cheap, most everything has been less than a buck, a lot of them less than 75 cents.

The little victory that I mention in the blog title is the effort that I'm undertaking to clean off my desk.  This is day 1 of 12 in a row off, and instead of making the trek to Cleveland (sigh), I'm making the effort to clean up my collection.   That starts with cleaning off the desk. 

I had 2 100 count plastic cases full of PC cards come off the desk so far, and likely tonight I'm going to page the 150 or so Fitzgerald cards into his own binder. 

My wife's going to think a hurricane hit my card room when she comes home tomorrow and can actually see the top of the desk...

Thanks for reading, Robert