Duke Snider and Gary Carter autos to show off (+ more prize details)

I just wanted to show off shiny autos of a couple greats I've picked up recently.

I always keep an eye out for Retired refractors, as I work on my 2004 Retired auto set. When this Duke Snider from 2005 popped up with a great BIN price, I jumped at it. Great looking card! I just realized thanks to a Frankendodger post that this photo is recycled from his 1962 Topps card.

#'d /25 with glorious full career stats.. even those forgotten stints with the Mets and Giants.

This Gary Carter is a great addition to my Archives Reserve Master Set project.

It was neat to realize Duke and Gary suited up for the same organizations, with Carter spending a year each with the Dodgers and Giants at the end of his career. So that kinda ties this post together a little.

Duke never played for the Expos, but coached and broadcasted for them after his career wrapped up.

-  -- ---o

Ok, have you entered my big 800th Post contest yet? I'll probably keep the entry window open a few more days.

I want to sweeten the pot to reward loyal readers of the blog, so I'm throwing in a conditional bonus. If the grand prize winner has posted a comment on a non-contest post of mine in 2016 prior to this contest, included in the grand prize will be a set of "series one" of the 2016 Baseball Card Breakdown Hostess-style customs. I call it series one just because it's the cards I've made so far, but will probably make a few more ("series two") before the year is up.

Thanks for reading!

Buried Under a Mailday of Epic Proportions

My mailbox got inundated by cards this past Thursday, with three fat packages plus a postage-due orange slip for a fourth. While "a good problem to have," it's times like these that I dread whipping up the trade post(s), as it's pretty much impossible to properly recap everything without taking a few days off work to devote to it. And so I'll give myself the ol' "here are the highlights" out and keep the commentary to a minimum.

First up is CC aka Twitch, who has established himself as a guy you definitely want in your trade circle.

Giancarlo! That A&G is now the largest card in my Stanton PC (which will be getting several more additions by the end of this post).

Gwynn!

Wil Myers is probably best player currently on the Padres, and as such, I sure like getting his cards these days. This is a nice trio, highlighted by the mini diecut numbered /99. He seems to wear a lot of blue in his career, though I prefer him in the ol' brown and gold.

More nifty Padres cards from recent years.

Some Bowman Non-Pads.. well, Manuel Margot is now a Padre, likely to get the call to the bigs by the end of the season.

CC dropped some football cards on me, highlighted by a Christmas Card and a Michael Sam auto.

And that was just about half of what CC sent. Huge thanks, man! I dropped a package off to you the other day, so hopefully it arrives safely and can sufficiently pays you back for the awesome cards to sent my way.

-   -  -- ---o

Next up is Jason Carter. He's been a big force in the cardsphere for years, with his blog The Writer's Journey being among the oldest still-active card blogs, I think. But this was our first trade. He had some cards up for grabs on Twitter and I called dibs on 3 hits. I was able to convince him that I'd deliver with a quality return package of Reds, and I think he was happy with it.

Some excellent cards for my Pirate PCs, including some Stargells, an Al Oliver bat chip, and some McCutchen cards.

Stan the Man!

Yaz, McCovey, and a sweet Willie Horton auto. But that Vlad base relic might be my favorite here. I'd been wanting a game-used base card for a while (not a base card, a base card!), and Vlad is a great guy to get it of. He was a beast in his prime!

Goldschmidts and a blue Opening Day parallel of Mookie Betts.. love it!

Thanks for the trade, Jason! Hope to do it again sometime once I replenish my Reds tradeables a bit.

-   -  -- ----o

Now it's onto another old-school blogger whom I just traded with for the first time. It's Mark Kaz from This Way To The Clubhouse. He expressed interest in the Mets from my 2016 Stadium Club hobby box, and I was happy oblige with them plus some more Mets that had been loitering in my tradebox for too long. He returned a great bunch of cards for me.

Lots of needs of guys I collect!

More Giancarlo!

I believe Mark PCs Carlos Delgado and Pedro Martinez, and so he had some dupes to share with me. Very nice!

And another big name from Mets history, Tom Seaver.

While those other cards were all appreciated, it was this sweet Andrew McCutchen selection that really stole the show. The black bordered Heritage card is #'d /64, which made it my lowest-numbered McCutchen (for a few hours...)

Awesome cards.. Thanks, Mark! Let's do it again sometime!

- - --- -----o

Ok, that wraps up the cards I received on Thursday, but there was that postage due slip. Friday morning before work, I biked over to the post office to pay them $1.49 for them to release the package to me. Then later that day, another package from the same guy showed up.. this one successfully delivered.

Matt Scott is an amazing guy to trade with, though I guess my post office doesn't like him much! This is like the 3rd or 4th time they deemed a package from him to have insufficient postage. I think I heard that bubble mailers now all have to be considered "packages".. no more getting by with envelope rates.. and that might be where the problem comes from.

Boom! Here's the big one that needed the extra postage. That's a heck of a card right there! Giancarlo and Cutch dual patch #'d 9/10. And to be sent this by a Pirates supercollector can't be understated! Plus he's mentioned that Stanton is probably his favorite non-Bucco these days.
Thanks so much, Matt! Now I have the dilemma of which PC to store this card in, as I collect these two guys with equal enthusiasm. I guess I'll just display it out for a while rather than make the call just yet.

And here's the card from the second package, a kickass acetate parallel of the Padres team card, #'d 5/10. Awesome!


Thanks again to Matt, Mark, Jason, and CC for the great cards!

And for today's bonus 800th Post contest entry chance: be the first in the comments below to correctly identify the player Matt Kemp is excitedly nestling to his bosom on the above 2016 Topps Padres team card.

WHAT HAVE I DONE?! A discounted blaster of 2012 Goodwin Champions

The grocery store had a few discounted blasters today, and I kinda wanted something to rip. There were no discounted baseball blasters, though. The closest they had was 2012 Goodwin Champions.. featuring a few random baseball players in suits or playing golf. How wretched, right? But I was like, screw it, let's throw caution to the wind and grab this abomination of a sportscard product.

Here are some decent names. But the pictures are so creepy! Gah! Who thought this was a good idea? These are among the better looking cards.

Hey, I pulled a hit! Not a sick megamojo hit, but a hit nonetheless. Decent 2-colored swatch of a hockey guy named Ron Francis. Does anybody want to trade me for this???

Minis! That probably didn't warrant an exclamation point. Greg Maddux is a guy I collect, at least. It's apparently a photo of him playing wiffle ball?? The Larry Bird is also almost kinda cool.

One nice thing with a box of Goodwin Champions is that you can pull cards of ladies. Hello, ladies.

Ooooh, look, a redemption type thing! It's so faded I can't even read what it says. The big question: Does Upper Deck honor expired redemptions?? Panini usually does (yay!), Topps usually does not (boo!), but I'm not sure about UD. I guess I'll scratch it and give it a shot.. assuming I can read the code. **scratch scratch** Nope, it looks like faded hieroglyphics. I think I can make out the word "AUTOGRAPH" and the name "JOEY" in there. Joey Chestnut, maybe? Oh well, at least it wasn't Michael Jordan.. that'd have me crying.

As for the remainder of this stack of garbage, I guess I'll throw it in with the grand prize of my 800th post contest. But don't let that dissuade you from entering! I'm thinking I'll do a flat-rate priority box full of cards (assuming the winner is located in the US), hopefully leaning to the tastes of the winner, with a couple nice cards ($$) to crown the package. Also some other neat potential bonus stuff which I'll mention in posts this coming week. I'll also throw in "bonus entry" possibilities because those are fun.

In fact, for a bonus entry, be the first to comment below calling me by the name "Matilda" and also telling me about Ron Francis.

Incredible ♥800th Post♥ Extravaganza Spectacular Contest Explosive Amazingness Event!!!

It's my 800th post.

Comment on this post for a chance to win a prize. Details to follow.

Thanks.

UPDATE: it's closed now. Thanks to all who entered.

My first Blowout Cards order (is a good one)

Not that I'm a stickler for store loyalty, but when I buy a box of cards online, it's pretty much always from eBay or occasionally Dave & Adam's Card World. But a week or so ago, somebody in my feed retweeted about a good deal Blowout Cards had going for the July 4th weekend and I took a look and ended up getting in on the action.

I had been wanting to pick up a few magnetic cases, particularly for some fat cards that I didn't have good storage for. So I threw a bunch of various sized magnetic cases into my cart until I had enough to make the shipping fee worth it, plus get me to the threshold for using a $5 off coupon code I found with a quick google search.

Ah, that's better.. some old cards of mine in nice new cases befitting cards of their stature.

But the catalyst for the order was a price I found hard to resist on a hobby box of 2015 Panini Prizm, about half off of what you'd find elsewhere. While I'm pretty burnt out on the metallic chrome overload that this product shows up with every year, I hadn't ripped any of the 2015 version, and it was cheap for 2 promised autos, plus the usual pretty and/or numbered parallels. (That said, I kinda hope the fact that Blowout was blowing out these boxes means they haven't been selling well and hopefully Panini mercifully lets the product line die after this year.)

But as for this box... would my recent hot hand busting boxes continue? Let's check it out..

Well, it was a Barry Bonds hot box, with a base card, a refractor, and a tie-dye parallel. Serial numbered 10/50, that crazy hippy-looking card is now the scarcest item in my modest Bonds PC.

From tie-dye to die-cut, Panini delivers with oddly shaped cards. Looks like established players get a badge shape, while up-and-coming kids get a pillar thing.

More inserts. Looks like Passion is the insert set where Panini snuck in some interesting photos (as all the rest of the cards in the product are boring shots you'd expect). The Fireworks cards are a bit of a head-scratcher, but hey, a couple guys I collect, so I'm happy with them.

Shiny parallels. Love the trippy effect on the Polanco. It's #'d /99 and will likely walk the plank to Bob Walk one of these days. The Greinke is #'d /10, which would be a pretty nice pull, but I don't collect him, and pretty much nobody else does either. He's among the best pitchers of recent memory, but he hops teams too much and seems like kind of a jerk, so his cards don't have many collectors out there.

A couple St. Louis parallels. I think the Lackey is /149(?) and the Carpenter /75.

More refractors and another insert.

Some base cards of dudes I collect. While I'm still not crazy about the base cards in this product, I'll give them credit that they seem to get a little better looking every year. (ie, the first set was the worst.)

And grand finale:

The autos. Jay Buhner #'d /99 and Carlos Gomez /25. Not bad! Buhner had a very nice career. Gomez had a couple impressive years for the Brewers. I don't collect either of these guys and chances are they won't stick in my collection longterm, but at least I have trader buddies who could give them good homes.

So yeah, decent box. Non-PC guys available for trade, so let me know if anything caught your eye.
That's it for this time. Thanks for reading!

Christmas in July

I got 2 packages of cards in the mail yesterday, and they both had a heavy holiday vibe to them. The first contained a Gavin LaValley orange refractor, seen here blinking away like a Christmas tree light.

And yep, it's numbered 12/25! I've completed this rainbow (save for some one-of-ones), though I don't think I've actually posted about it yet. (Truth be told, I was waiting for Mr. LaValley to return my TTM request, and then just do a big combined post.. but I haven't had much luck getting that return yet. *sadface*). So while I already had one of these /25 orange refractors, I was happy to "upgrade" to the Christmas Card for a few bucks off eBay.

The eBay seller even threw in a couple bonus cards as stocking stuffers. Not sure why he sent White Sox cards, but hey, free cards are always appreciated.


But then the other package was from The Lost Collector, marking the first completed swapping of cards for us. He included a note wishing me a Merry Christmas in July. (Always nice when a fellow blogger provides a theme for you. I didn't have to spend any time thinking about what to title this post.)

Haha, AJ had some fun with my whole "Christmas Card" minicollection, even including a relic that has "CHRISTMAS CARDS" in big letters on the top. But flipping it over..

Hey now, that's no 12/25 card! But it does say that the swatch was from a uniform worn during a game on Christmas Day, 2009, so that's pretty cool.

I'm not sure if these literal Christmas cards will stick in my collection longterm (is that really a can of worms I want to open? To end up chasing Santa cards and various holiday-themed relic cards? That could get out of hand!), but I definitely got a kick out of them.

Here we go! This card of Jrue Holiday is #'d 12/25 and gets bonus points thanks to his name being Holiday.

LOL, while it's true that I've taken to scribbling sketch cards on the back of fake credit/gift cards from my junk mail, I hope trader buddies don't get into the habit of saving theirs for me. I was kinda bummed to turn it over and not find a drawing from AJ, as I know he's whipped up several solid sketchcards himself over the years.

That Frank Thomas The Franchise card is of the  glow-in-the-dark  variety, which are always very appreciated.

As for the Yankee TTM auto? Well, AJ mentioned on twitter that Drew Finley signed and returned a bunch of cards (though the extras were offered to him to keep). I volunteered to take one of the extras off AJ's hands, and he kindly obliged. I don't know much about Drew Finley, but hey, he's a San Diego boy like myself, so that's cool. And he's obviously generous with the fans, evidenced by the TTM return, so seems like a good guy.

Thanks a lot, AJ! These cards really helped to make the season bright.

A rare Sunday mailday (blaster of 2014 Topps Chrome)

That's right, I was delivered cards on a Sunday! What a time to be alive!

Amazon currently has some discounted 2014 Topps Chrome blasters so I figured I'd pick one up. We have Amazon Prime, so shipping is free and sometimes they'll even deliver on Sunday.

It was a decent blaster for me, too.

Got one of those purple refractor packs. Nobody here I collect, unfortunately, so those are up for trade.

This would've been a nice blaster for a Dodgers fan. But lucky for me I collect these dudes.

Shiny Kershaw and Puig additions to those PCs for me.

More refractors, including a light blue Napoli (/199) and a Yadier xfractor. Pujols is a PC guy for me, but the other 3 are available.

And some of the more notable base cards.

So yeah, no autos but that was a fun little box to break at a decent price. And it still impresses me to get mail on a Sunday!