bountiful trades for which to be thankful

Here's a Thanksgiving Day trade roundup with some cards friendly folks on the cardsphere have sent my way over the past week or so— and one that was actually sent several months ago but just finally made its way to me recently.

First up is a nice package from Paul from Scribbled Ink, a brand new trade partner for me. My latest trade bait post lured him into getting in touch, and we quickly had our first trade completed. The package took a detour to Honolulu for some reason, but it eventually arrived safely.

Those shiny Topps Fire cards look great, even if overall the product doesn't do much for me. The Hercules mini gets me to halfway complete with the glow-in-the-dark Constellations insert set from 2017 Ginter; 5 down, 5 to go.

Nice Donaldson lot here. As the writing on the penny sleeve indicates, the Bowman card is #'d /499, though you'd never suspect it was a parallel by the looks of it. Guess they ran out of colors for the border, so they just greyed it down a bit. Silly Bowman!

A couple Pucketts, a couple 1980 Topps (wantlist coming soon), plus a footballer and a hockeyer. (huh, apparently "hockeyer" is a real word according to my spellcheck! Gretzky is hockeyer than thou.)

It's a Vladvalanche! I'll bet this lot finally gets me over the 100-card hump with this PC.

Shiny Lindor highlights this trio of hot, young infielders.

Marquis! I've been saying, "I should probably do an update post for my Marquis Mania project one of these days" for the past few years now, but hey, good news! I actually started drafting up such a post the other day. Expect that soon.

And the highlights of Paul's generous package wrap up with a random auto (P-town Tim?!?) and a stack of 2017 Update. I'm not going after that set, but was able to pull out a bunch of keepers.

Big thanks, Paul! Hopefully that was the first of many trades for us. I feel like my return didn't quite measure up to your end, so I'll do my best to balance the scales next time.

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Next up is my prize from the BFG: Basement Fun Game, run by Matt at Summer of '74.

I lucked out by ending up with a prize of a guy I actually collect, Junior Seau. Sweet! It's an extravagant promo thing that was originally sent by the card manufacturer to a card shop, with an acetate President's Reserve Seau card as the focal point.

Matt threw in a bunch of bonus cards of guys I collect, too. Thanks a lot, man! I should send you a little thank-you soon.

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And now here's a nice little "just because" PWE from Sport Card Collectors. I was crushed when I lost his big season-long pick-em contest last month after surprisingly making it into the finals. It'll take me a while to recover from that, if I ever truly do. I think it's better to do a few smaller contests rather than one big-ass one— you know, to help spread around the goodies—but I get that that means more money on postage, which sucks.

Lots of shiny here, with 3 Hunter Renfroe cards. Very nice. Thanks, man! I sent you a return PWE; hopefully you need some of them. Do you still have that Clearly Authentic Renfroe? If so, I might have to scrape up something together to swap with you for that.

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Next up is The Lost Collector hitting me back for a Ty Hensley refractor I ended up with that he needed for his supercollection a while ago.

It'd be great if these 2 guys could return to San Diego someday (Strasburg an SDSU alum, and Trea a Padres draftee). But hey, best of luck to them over in the undrained swamp that is Washington DC.

Some more dudes I collect.

Nothing wrong with a little overproduction-era stuff to bulk up a package. I think I needed some of these, too. The Hojo is a "Rediscover Topps" buyback. While I'm happy to get this, I'm really hoping Topps lays off the buybacks in 2018. Wouldn't that be refreshing?

TLC's package wraps up with a couple autos. Andy Benes seems to be a great TTM signer, though I haven't tried him. This Collector's Choice card looks great. Slap hands!

And of course look at that, a Ty Hensley auto! Fingers crossed that Ty gets healthy and back on his career path to the bigs soon. If/when he does, having this auto will easy the regret of trading that parallel to the Lost Collector. Big thanks!

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Last one. Strap in for this! This one is a wayward PWE that was originally sent way back on April 7th, 2017... but to the wrong person. See Matt from Summer of '74 posted about an item and offered it up for grabs in trade. I was lucky enough to be the first one to comment on the post, calling dibs. But then a couple days later, Matt posted saying he would be soon sending it out to Dayf of Cardboard Junkie fame. I didn't think much of it, just assuming Dave offered a specific/better trade offer to best my vague offer. But it turns out, no, it was just a mixup. Matt can be forgiven, since he was a relatively new cardblogger at the time, and Dayf and Defgav are somewhat similar usernames. Matt eventually realized his mistake after a couple months and made it known. I then contacted Dayf over the summer about it, explaining the situation, and he graciously offered to forward the cards my way. A few months went by with nothing, then I nudged him about it again, and it seems he was under the impression he sent them out, but alas they had hidden themselves in a laptop bag or something. So like 7 months later, the PWE finally made it to its intended recipient!

Another '90 UD Marquis! Always appreciated. Also a Gavin, Stewart Gavin.
But the real highlight...

Prepare to have your mind blow. What you see above is an authentic Warren Spahn autograph. And yes, that's a 2015 Topps Archives card. And yes, Spahn passed away November 24, 2003.

Buuut... h'howww?

Did you figured it out?

Young Matt sent a TTM request to Warren back in the day. Warren went ahead and signed the penny sleeve instead of the card within it. And so, an autographed Warren Spahn penny sleeve was created. And all you have to do to have an "autographed" Warren Spahn card is slip any card into the penny sleeve, as I've done here with the 2015 Archives card. Perhaps one of these days I'll whip up a special custom to reside in the sleeve. But for now, this'll do.

Huge thanks to Matt (and also to Dayf [@CardJunk] for the kind assist). I'll round up some good Brewers or whatnot soon to finally complete this extended trade.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading, everybody. Hope you have/had a wonderful Thanksgiving!