COMC haul misc

Happy Opening Day, everybody. I recently got another shipment from COMC and I've been meaning to show off some highlights.

Some refractors that caught my eye. I sorted Juan Soto refractors cheapest-first and grabbed that Béisbol one. I wanted an All-Etch logofractor, and ended up with Austin Riley, whom I've kinda fell into PCing, I guess. The blue 2008 Adrian Gonzalez pickup was inspired by a gcrl post. I haven't logged my Brian Giles PC yet, but I probably needed at least most of this trio of Bowman refractors.

Grabbed a few parallel Gavins. (Not pictured, but I'm happy to see that Gavin Sheets secured a spot on the Padres' OD roster! The first Padre named Gavin!) Gavin Sawchuk, a gridiron Gavin, is a new name for my collection. I don't have much use for modern football cards these days, having detached myself from the NFL over the past 15 years (and never really getting into college sports), but I guess I don't mind an excuse to sample some of the new designs and parallels Fanatics uses for football products, but I won't go trying to "rainbow" any of his cards or go nuts with building a PC (The previous notable Gavin football player, Gavin Escobar, I collected a lot, but he had the added connection of being a fellow SDSU alum). Sawchuk is still a running back for the Oklahoma Sooners-- oh yeah, Bowman U is for college kids; kind of a weird thing to get used to-- so we'll see if he eventually goes pro.

I'm not feeling too optimistic about my Padres this season, but hoping Jackson Merrill continues developing into a star.

Dick Allen PC got kicked up with this four. The Kmart card is a blank-front, so it's an oddity that doesn't count in my quest to hit 100 cards in the TCDb-leading PC.

Unrelated to my latest COMC haul, but here's a photo from the other day when I rounded up all my Dick Allen cards that featured the 1972 Topps design.. including Topps, OPC, customs, and a couple Topps Vault pieces. Dick's card seems to have usually been the last one packaged into the '82 Kmart box set, touching the gum, so it's very common to find with a gum stain on the back. If the stain is raunchy enough, I consider it somewhat of an unofficial variation and add it to the keepers.

Also grabbed some additions for my glowing card collection.

The Harry Potter one and all the Upper Deck Space Patches were new sets to me, and I've since updated my Glow-In-The-Dark Cards page to include them.

Found a couple cheap Project 2020 cards for the Big Hurt PC. This is where COMC's flat shipping comes in handy, since those bulky plastic cases otherwise ratchet up postage. Flippers went nuts back then, so now some of those cards with high print runs can be snagged on COMC for less than they'd cost to ship alone. The artists are Naturel (left) and Matt Taylor (right). Matt Taylor's version of the Rickey rookie is the only Project 2020 card I actually bought "live". I also ended up with his Gwynn thanks to Rod a couple years later. So it seems I've got myself a little Matt Taylor art collection going. But as far as 1990 Topps Frank Thomas, I think I prefer Naturel's colorful rendition here.

I'm embarrassed to admit but when I first saw 1992 Leaf black gold cards come out of the package, I was like, "WTF, I thought I already completed this set last year!?" But duh, I momentarily forgot I'm now trying to complement that set with the tougher "of 33" preview cards. This lot helps get me to 21 of 33.

1964 and 1972 needs, including some notable names and a pair of '72 Cubs variations (green under the "C" and "S" instead of yellow).

And I've now completed 1980 Kellogg's thanks to Garv and Yaz here. Probably. I still need to sort through my set to confirm, but it's tricky because I sort my Kellogg's cards by curvaceousness, not card number. lol

Thanks for reading and best of luck to your favorite team this MLB season.

A little Bush and some Big Hurt

Happy for Reggie Bush getting his Heisman back. Got a small PC going for him because he’s a "local kid" for me; went to a rival high school in my district a few years after I graduated. Some highlights of what I've got:

In other news, the one "random card" in my COMC order (ie, not for a specific hobby project but just because I thought it was cool) was this die-cut Frank Thomas:

This was an example of "music on cards" I didn't have, and yeah I thought it was cool.

Frank Thomas CD collection is now up to a robust 2.25 discs. Actually that die-cut isn't quite a quarter of a CD. And they had to fudge the size:

Here lined up with a standard-sized CD.

In more Frank Thomas content, my rotating cardroom display is currently featuring my variety of his 1990 Topps card. Nothing here cost me over a buck! I don't have an original NNOF, but I do have the 2010 Topps "Cards Your Mom Threw Out" reprint in both standard and tough original back variation (...lucky cardshow finds).

But technically the rarest of the cards in this display is the "white border" card that no one else has:

Yeah ok, so it's just "cardart" I made by bleaching the borders for a year or two, and so therefore no "value" there, but I love it and consider it one of my top Big Hurt cards.

Here's another shot in late-afternoon sun where you can really check out the texture of the card. It's a little sloppy around the inner border, but man, it was a big sense of accomplishment when I finally got the last of the gnarly 90s border to finally disappear.  One could make a case that this is also a "partial NNOF" because of the "M" imperfection. LOL. 

Thanks for reading and follow your dreams.

Joy of a completed insert set: 2004 Topps Chrome-Town Heroes

Pretty sure this is the first memorabilia set I've ever completed. I don't often chase relic cards, but I went after these as part of my quest for a black refractor parallel set of 2004 Topps Chrome. While they're not technically included in that base black refractor set.. well, they're black and they're refractors and they're from the same product, so I added them to my needs spreadsheet. Overall, I'm at 37% complete with my parallel setbuild, but it feels good to get all the relic cards taken care of, at least.

From what I can tell, Chrome-Town Heroes (a clunky play on "Hometown Heroes" in case you didn't catch it) was not a regular insert set that popped up year to year, rather appearing only here in 2004 Topps Chrome as far as baseball goes... though there were also Chrome-Town Heroes in 2004-05 Topps Chrome Basketball, where they were all relic cards, but the similarities end there as those have a much different design and are all horizontal. The basketball versions have refractor parallels that are #/25 (and many of the base are also numbered, from as low as 206 to as high as 1000). But lucky for me, the baseball version has no parallels (not even "non-refractor" versions) and none of the cards are numbered.

So let's check out these 21 cards.

 

My only real complaint about this set? Team distribution! How can the A's have so many damn cards?! FIVE of the 21 cards are Oakland players. Cubs aren't too far behind, with 3 cards. Zero of my Padres, or several other teams for that matter. Would have liked to see more variety in team selection, but I guess those were just the stars they had plentiful jerseys/bats from available to cut up.

Many different sources were utilized putting the set together, and I've searched my email archives to refresh my memory. The A-Rod card was picked up on Listia, which is kind of a trip for me because it feels like forever ago that I was active on that trainwreck of a site. Semi-retired cardblogger SpastikMooss traded me five of the cards (which he had picked up with me in mind on COMC). COMC was also my source for many of these, though at least a couple were won on eBay, including the final card I needed, Albert Pujols. My cheapest purchase was Palmeiro ($2) and the most expensive was Frank Thomas ($7.75), both via COMC.

So there you have it. My first completed memorabilia insert set. Thanks for stopping by.

No Name on Front

No Name on Front cards are some of the coolest error cards out there, I'd say.

There was recently some talk on Twitter of an eBay seller with a nice selection of 1992 Topps cards with no names on the front. I thought the cards looked great.. a fresh spin on an old classic. Just a simple, elegant frame around a photo. They were just a buck each plus flat $3 shipping, so I grabbed a few guys I collect. If you don't recognize him out of his Red Sox uni, that's Dwight Evans above.

Caminiti, Joyner, Templeton, and Maas here. What these cards are are Gold parallels missing the gold foil. Turns out this is the same seller from whom I bought a few proof cards back in 2017.. she must have either worked at Topps in the 90s (or perhaps at the print shop Topps used?) or have a close associate who did. She has thousands of backdoored stuff like this in her eBay store. (In fact, I just placed another order of stuff from her while working on this post!)

They have regular backs. You can tell they're Gold parallels by the logo in the background of the stats box.

While I'm talking about NNOF cards, I figured I'd include a couple others I've got, such as this 2014 Bowman Draft card of Gavin LaValley that's missing the foil, and therefore the name. Nice unofficial variation for that rainbow.

Of course the best known example of a no-name error is the 1990 Topps Frank Thomas. I'd love to pick one up someday when I've got 4-figures to burn on a baseball card, but for now I'm content with official reprints. These are both from 2010 Topps.

One is the standard Cards Your Mom Threw Out insert, and the other is the more scarce original back reprint. The latter is probably my favorite reprint in my collection... love it!

That's it for today. Thanks for swinging by.

Anything Goes (nickelboxing)

Most of the time at the card show, you gotta be discerning with what you put on your stack, but when it comes to nickelboxing, anything goes! Plucked out a nice score this past weekend, which technically came to 4¢ per card with the dealer's 25-for-a-buck deal, scooping up 50 cards for $2. I thought that deal was pretty...

...Cool, indeed. I don't have many of these kooky Emotion cards, but this is a welcome addition to the Crime Dog PC.

I only really started collecting Jim Thome like a year ago, so I don't have that many of his cards. Great to bulk up the PC a bit with 6 cards that ran me under a quarter combined.

Grouping this pair of Auburn standouts together. A trio of Big Hurts and a couple Bo oddballs ("Boddballs?").

A couple Conforto cards from 2017 Update.

Klesko gold parallel, Julio Franco LL, and former community college classmate of mine, Mike Jacobs.

I've been thinkin' 'bout
Thinkin' 'bout sets
Always hungry for somethin'
That I haven't completed yet

Being right on the cusp of completing '80 Topps and '83 Topps (and '84 Fleer), I'm thinking about future setbuilds, and while '74 Topps isn't at the top of my list, it's scratching at my "maybe someday" list (with a broad '73 thru '85 Topps run in the back of my mind). So I couldn't resist nabbing a nice little lot for the cost of a pack of gum, as I'm quietly building a little starter stack in anticipation of one day going after the set.

Flipping through a nickelbox, a couple types of cards I'll blindly throw on my stack regardless of team/player: refractors and serial-numbered cards. Even if it's just some Bowman prospect from years ago who never got out of A-ball, they're nice to add some shine to a trade package. The Denard Span rookie might be the best one in this lot.

Well, that pretty much wraps up the nickelbox dig, with a few additional cards not pictured because they're already set aside for trader buds.

Thanks for reading.