Barter trade with a former Topps employee

I recently swapped a pair of CDs for a box of various cards. I love those rare times when I can swing a barter trade, as they just seem more special or whatever than a purchase or straight cards-for-cards deal.

The story of this one is a guy on a FB group for an old band I like was looking to buy some bootleg live CDs he owned back in the day. His popup profile thing said he worked as a designer at Topps, which got my attention so I reached out about the possibility of a cards-for-CDs swap. Turns out he was no longer at Topps, and that they were "crazy stingy" during most of his tenure, but he had a small box of hits from pack rips a decade ago before things got too bad at the company. He shared blurry overview photos of the cards, and nothing jumped out at me in particular (sadly no Ohtani or Judge autos to choose from), but there were a few nice cards and a good variety of stuff I could have fun sorting through, with plenty of stuff that would slide nicely into my collection. Since he wasn't too attached to the cards and I wasn't too attached to the couple of rare CDs I had from his wantlist, we were able to work out a deal where I got the whole lot of cards.

Kicking off with these big three. There were a few baseball autos in the lot, but funny enough the best of them is a mascot. Clark's 2016 Opening Day auto is especially neato considering that was the year the Cubs finally broke the curse. The Abe Vigoda ginter relic is pretty great too, for those of us old enough to remember him (or at least his funny later appearances on Conan). But the Sting relic/auto #'d 26/50 might be the top card of the lot. I'm not even a big wrestling guy, but I know he's a good name to pull there.

Highlights from the several relics, including a couple pinstripes. The former Topps guy I traded with is a Mets fan, so that might explain why they have more representation in the lot than other teams. (Yankees and Dodgers were both conspicuously absent.)

I'll show the rest of the baseball stuff at the end, but now strap in for some Star Warin'.

A pair of sketch cards with cool original artwork of fan favorites from the classic trilogy: the rancor and Boba Fett. Love these.

 
Figured I should show the backs in case anyone is interested in the artists, though I'm not going to take a stab at deciphering the names. I thought it was funny to see a stickergraph on the back of a sketch card, but I suppose since it's a Chrome product, they wanted to throw a plasticy border on it so it could count as a Chrome card (because of course Chrome surface wouldn't work for most types of sketching.) Pretty sure it's my first embedded sketch like that.

Some parallel/insert SW stuff. The Luke Skywalker is /50 on the back.
 

A couple manurelics, including a numbered Han Solo, plus a pair of "authentic film cel relic" cards that you can hold up to the light...

..to peep a still from space. Neat!

This trio of Star Wars autos aren't big names but still cool to add. Ralph Brown had a minor role in The Phantom Menace (with Alien³ and Wayne's World 2 among his other credits), with Phil Eason also working on Episode I. Turns out Yaddle is a female of the same green species as Yoda and Baby Yoda. Eason (d. 2021) also did puppetry work on Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). Rajia Baroudi was a voice on a couple episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. (Yours if you want it, Zippy!) She's done lots of other voice acting over the years and appeared on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back in the day. That card is a parallel numbered /10 on the back, so that's cool. Oh, and Lady Yoda is /25.

 

Walking Dead hits don't do much for me, never having watched the show, but still cool to beef up my non-sport collection or possibly use as trade bait (Specifically, I would love to get that creepy zombie sketch card out of my house! lol). Katelyn Nacon and Corey Brill (#'d 10/10) are the autos. The dual relic (#'d 10/50) confused me because those people look familiar but it's the characters' names, not giving the actors' real names anywhere on the card. But I looked them up and the guy is Steven Yeun (most familiar to me from season one of Beef) and the lady is Lauren Cohan (who I've seen pop up in various TV shows over the years). Sonequa Martin-Green is less familiar to me, but she played a main character on the show Star Trek: Discovery and was on a couple episodes of New Girl.
 

Some more solid pro wrestling cards.

UFC. I don't know any of these guys, but I looked up the Frank Mir 10/10 red parallel, and there's one on COMC for $50, for whatever that's worth (Less than $50, one would assume). Like with the Walking Dead cards, I'd be down to trade these burly dudes for cards that better suited my interests, and may eventually put them on my TCDB for-tradelist.

Michelle Waterson here will probably stick in my collection, however, because she's kinda cute and has a cool looking signature.
 

We're getting close to the end now, with this group of misc. cards, including a Candace Parker commemorative flag patch (numbered to 19/99), a layered Emmitt Smith card (075/194), and a James Taylor "First Pitch" orange refractor. My face lit up when I noticed the serial number...

Christmas Card! I've seen fire and I've seen rain, but I never thought I'd see a James Taylor card among my 12/25's. There were 2 or 3 other /25 cards in the lot.. and I've always got my fingers crossed for lucky #12 in the run, but rarely score them organically like this.

And the rest! A few PC guys in here. The Luke Weaver RC auto might be ok if it wasn't from that ugly-ass Topps Gallery set. Brandon Finnegan is the one non-blue ink auto (17/25). A couple Yadi's. Abe Vigoda base card to go along with the relic from before. Clive Walford is the Raiders auto at the bottom. 

So yeah, this was a pretty sweet lot that I got for not much effort on my part. Not like I've listened to those CDs in years (and have them ripped to a hard drive for when I do want to hear them), but I can appreciate the guy's quest and glad I could help him out.. especially since it resulted in a nice boost to my card collection. Also neat to do a trade with somebody who worked at Topps.

Oh, and the same day I got this package, I also received my haul from The Collector's anniversary celebration extravaganza, so that's another fun "rip" on deck. I'll try to post about that stuff on his blog's special day (8/21), per his request.