Ebay shenanigans! Darn it!

I'm not crazy about the 2010 version of Allen and Ginter. I like it, but I'm not gaga over it like last years set. So I have held off in really trying to finish that set and instead I have shifted my focus elsewhere. I'm chasin' the Chicles both football and baseball and I want to get as much A&G from any year as I can. As much as I complained about the '08 set it's sort of growing on me. There is some good in that years set and I wanted to do some collecting in a easy and quick way. So I grabbed the set on Ebay for not much more than a blaster. He even did the shipping for free.

Little did I know that the "complete set" was short a card.
You'll notice that technically he included card 209, but it's from the wrong year.


I could tell almost immediately that there was a difference. The card back had a little different design and also was a darker color.



So yeah, if anybody has card number 209 of Clete Thomas and could spare it, I could definitely use the help.

The good thing about the transaction is that he sent along a bunch of duplicate cards. So if anybody is looking to build the 2008 set or just needs a few cards let me know.


As you can see from the photo, I have a ton of these 2008 A&G cards that need a home. There are a few other cards in the box from the random pack or two that I've bought. I haven't even thought about the states cards so there is exactly one state card in the box.

I really should email the seller. Who knows, maybe he will find the card and send it over. Maybe he didn't really have that card and was trying to pull a fast one. If anybody out there has one let me know. I'll make it worth your while.

Thanks for reading.

Trade with BA Benny's Baseball Card Buffet

I completed my first trade with Mike over at BA Benny's Baseball Card Buffet the other day. He had a really nice card or two that he mentioned were up for grabs and I took him up on it. Turns out I had some stuff he needed as well so we made a trade.

He sent over a bunch of nice cards.


Yadda Yadda Yadda and I sent him some cards and that was about it.


Thanks for reading!




Hey wait a minute! You yadda yaddad over the best part!
You can't leave me hanging like that. I need some details.

Give me some details!

Alright! Alright. I've got somethin' that'll blow your mind. A pretty big assortment of Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Packers and a Giant. Get ready for this Georgie boy!


First up Mike sent over some Dodgers.
This is my one and only Orel Hershiser card and it's a good one. Really cool pose and photograph. Love the clouds in the background. Sort of a natural Obak look to it.



My one and only Nomo card. I wasn't into baseball much in those years, so I missed Nomomania.I still like this card though. One of the nicest 97 cards that I have in the collection.

The back photos are different than the front photo. I wish they would do that more these days.


I don't normally get all excited about preseason NFL, and I haven't had a chance to check out a complete Packers game yet and I was able to watch about 90 % of the game the other night against the Colts. It was quite a game too. I can't recall when a team laid 50+ points on another team in a while. I don't keep up with NFL like I do college football, but still I think it's a little rare these days to completely blow out the other team. Wow. Aaron Rodgers almost made me forget this guy.

This is one way I'd like to remember Favre. Horsing around with teammates on the field. Pretty cool card.




Upper Deck has/had some great photography on their cards.


This is a nice white jersey card of Brian Brohm which will go nicely with another Brian Brohm card that has a green swatch. Brohm used to play at Louisville I think. I recall watching him play, but I'm not that sure about the team he played for.

I didn't forget about the Yankee cards. I'm going to post up one that I was really excited to get. I didn't know he was going to send this card over.




A Sports Royalty Goudey insert. Pretty cool card of one of my childhood favorites.



This was the card that started the trade. He had this cool Lincecum card up for a trade and I love anything with cartoons and cards. I like the Heads Up cards a lot and I'm sort of collecting any cool cards of Timmy so this will go in the binder with his other cards. I didn't realize that the Heads Up cards from 2009 were a smaller size. Pretty cool. This is the only Heads Up card that I have that has smaller cartoons and captions on the front of the card.


I'm no that crazy about the When they Were Young cards, but I still wanted two of these cards. The other was the Daniel McCutchen card that I blogged about earlier and of course this cool David Wright card. Now I'm done with the When They Were Young set.


Definitely a cool first trade between me and Mike. Hopefully their will be many more trades in the future.



AHH!! You just blew my mind!


Thanks for the cards Mike!

Thanks for reading.

Trade with Drew of Drew's Cards

In the blogging world there are at least two truths about posting: Almost all cards look better than the scans and almost everybody is behind in their trade posts. I have several packages needing to be reported on so in fairness I'll start with the one received first and work my way up.

Here is a trade that was completed at least a week ago, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. Drew of Drew's cards has already posted his half of the trade so that shows how much of a procrastinator that I am.

For me the sad truth about trade posts is that I have a hard time putting into words the excitement that I get when I receive a trade package in the mail. I know that a few of the cards are going to be included in the package, but it's the extra cards that bloggers always throw in that are a pleasant surprise. I'm a little vague when telling people what I collect. I don't want to be too much of a bother and honestly I really just like getting cards. So much the better if those cards happen to be off Packers, Mets, Dodgers and to a lesser degree Yankees.

So lets start off with the non-sports cards.


Shen Kou is a scientist who wrote Dream Pool Essays, which first described the compass. WGWS7 is of course a much needed card for the Worlds Greatest Wordsmiths mini set. This set has influenced me to get out and buy some of these books mentioned on the back of these cards. I'm more into older literature anyway so it isn't too much of a jump to search out older stuff. I guess I should be frank and mention that these books probably won't get bought/read until winter time. I hate the cold and I need good reading material in the dismal cold winter months. Hopefully by then I will have finished this set.


With this card I have both Holliday minis cards. I don't care so much about the different backs. I've got a nice start to a Matt Holliday collection and this will go nicely with the other 2010 minis.



Aaron Kampman chrome. Who doesn't love chrome? I do. It's great. Nice to get a card of a lineman in action. He's actually with the Jaguars now, but the card is still cool.

This is a great shot of Donald Driver against division foes Detroit Lions. Foe isn't much of a description. The Lions almost always seem to be last in the NFC North.

A.J. Hawk returning an interception against the Chiefs in 2007. I did a little sleuthing and the Pack only played in Kansas City one time in A.J.'s career and he had an interception in that game that he returned for ten yards. Or at least I think so based on a quick scan of his stats in 5 seasons. The game was played on Nov. 4th and the Packers won 33-22.



I haven't seen much of the Packers this preseason and I have yet to watch Ryan Grant play. He's one of my favorite RBs to watch.

I don't have any of these UD Spectrum cards. They're nice and shiny and look good juxtaposed together.


Finally the always photogenic Jose Reyes.

... and yes, even though I shouldn't have to say it, the cards look way better in person than they do in the scans. This was only a small sampling of the cards that Drew sent over.

The cards were much appreciated. Thanks for the cards Drew!

Thanks for reading!

Finally, I'm having a contest.

So I wanted to do a cool contest post commemorating my 1 year anniversary of card blogging. Like with most things that I do I didn't really have a chance to do it right, so I didn't do it at all.
Like most of you I have a job, friends, social life and other interests outside of blogging and card collecting. Those outside forces kept me from focusing on doing the contest in the right way.

One big problem I had with hosting a contest was coming up with something original. A lot of contests on the blogs consist of making a comment, pimping the contest on the contestants blog and/or following the host's blog.

Other contest are pretty creative and ask for entrants to answer a trivia question or give their opinions of HOF ballots, etc.

I think all of those ideas are great, but I was trying to do something different. So finally I gave up and I decided to give in and make my contest a combination of all of those ideas. That's sort of original in a plagiarist sort of way, right?

The only obvious change that I made was that I wanted the contest to not just be all about me, I wanted some info on the other bloggers out there. One of the requirements of the contest is to tell me about your collecting.


So if you're game here's the rules and regulations:

1. Post a comment on this blog post stating what's your most favorite collecting memory. It could be blogging, your first online trade. A trade you completed when you were younger. Pulling your favorite player from a pack of cards for the first time or just a random memory. It seems pretty broad and that's what I like about it; it doesn't have to be about any collection or part of your collection specifically, just a specific memory you have of collecting. (Hopefully a good memory).

If you've already blogged about this, then just leave a link to your blog post in the comment section below. It doesn't have to be really detailed either.

2. Mention this contest on your blog.

Now for the good part: the prizes. It occurred to me after I won one of the prizes in Big D's contest a month ago that I could do something similar. I really like using Photoshop, but I pretty much suck at it. So I thought that instead of doing a custom card that way, I would do a custom sketch card instead. Plus, their aint' no way I'm going to be able to do as good a job as some of the bloggers out there with their cool custom cards.


I'm not a great artist, but I can do okay sometimes with likenesses.

It's actually a little selfish of me to do a contest like this as I would like the opportunity to practice my art. I can't guarantee a perfect likeness of the player/person that you want me to sketch, but I'll do my best. Doing a specific person for the winners will be sort of like a school assignment and will force me to do something or someone that I ordinarily wouldn't draw.

Like in Big D's contest I'm going to have 5 winners. I think contests with multiple winners are the best. If there weren't contests with multiple winners I would have never won anything. The only negative to having multiple winners is that maybe their is only one or two entrants. That would be a little depressing!!

So if you're interested please check it out.

I'll leave the contest open until I think they're enough entrants.

Then I'll randomize to find the five winners and then the winners can tell me what they would like sketched as a prize. They will all receive a sketch card of a player/person of their choosing as well as some random packs of current and past products. I'm not sure exactly what I'll include, but I'll try to round up some cards from their favorite team(s) as well as the custom sketch card and the packs.

Here's some examples of my drawing prowess. Not the best examples, but at least an indication of my style.

I'll start with the most recent drawing.

I wanted to do a Roberto Clemente drawing for a while now. I only have one card of his; the 1989 Pacific card shown below.



You can see how I tried a few different sketches before coming up with the final drawing. The sketch in the bottom right makes Clemente look a little bit like a hobo.


The finished product.

Here he is without the cropping. You can see a faint pencil line where I drew the border. I always draw outside the lines and then crop later. I've never tried to draw on a pre-cropped card. That will be interesting to try sometime when I'm more comfortable doing these types of cards.



The card above is an example of a Roberto gone wrong. I like it, but it ain't him. It sort of looks like what he might look like if he had a chance to age.




Here are a few studies of David Wright.

This is me trying to do a somewhat realistic portrait of him.


.. and this is me going a little more cartoony with his facial features trying to capture something that looks like him.

And finally a colorized version of him swinging a bat. Still a little off in the face, but oh well.

I'm not a heavily political guy, but I like to draw people in the public eye from time to time.




I thought that Glenn Beck would be easier to draw what with his over the top weirdness. I had to try and do a somewhat subdued drawing of him just to get the shape of his face right. It's still a work in progress.

I think the drawing above sort of captures his features a little bit better, but still not where I want it.
Larry King.


This is supposed to be Bill Murray. Seems like an easy guy to draw, but I could never get it quite right.



This is the only card that I've done so far in watercolor. I need to do more of these. I like the look, but it takes a little more effort. I took this from the scene in Shaun of the Dead where all the zombies were attacking Shaun in front of the Winchester bar. I really regret not drawing the zombie hands in the foreground attacking him.




Some random Office workers. I don't know where my Jim sketch ran off to, but here are some of the cast from the show. I'm not sure why Meredith is in color, I guess I was trying to figure out her hair color?

Alright, so their you go. Don't laugh too hard at my crappy artwork.

My stupidity astounds me sometimes.

Like many people I pride myself on my intelligence. I realize that I'm not the most intelligent person on Earth, but I feel like I'm not the stupidest either.

I do have a tendency to make stupid comments on blog posts. I don't try to offend or be vague, but I feel like I'm not the best at make lucid comments especially on the fly. I don't think I have offended anybody yet so that's good. If the subject is something I feel strongly about I have a tendency to jump right in and comment without thinking.

One subject that gets me excited is Allen and Ginter. Specifically 2009 Allen and Ginter. That was one of the first sets that I tried to complete and after one year I'm still looking for a few select cards. I am also going after the black border and regular minis which has not been as easy as the rest of the set.

About a month ago Duane at Democratic Roadkill posted up a want/trade list on his blog and I thought it was just a trade list. Immediately after posting that I wanted some cards I realized that it wasn't just a trade list. My reading comprehension was lacking that day and I thought he was trading away the Pujols N43. He wasn't trading it away, he was looking for it. After a few emails and some apologies we came up with a trade for some minis and some random 09/10 A&G stuff. He mentioned he had some cool stuff for me, but he didn't mention how much.




As you can tell from the photo, avalanche is the perfect description of the amount of cards that he sent over. Every one of the cards was a new card to me. Literally no doubles at all.

He mentioned having some stuff to send over that might help me out with my quest to finish the regular border and black border minis from 2009 A&G. He sent over a good chunk to get me back on track to finish that set.

I don't have enough time to go over every card, which for me is a good thing. Having a bunch of cards to go through and collate is great. Collate is great is a nice slogan. I wish I had more free time to scan every one of these cards to show them off.

They look really good in a binder don't they? I don't have any one page finished so I just took a quick picture to show off the minis. You can tell there are some holes to be filled, but that's okay. I'll finish this thing off one of these days.



I pulled one Celestial Star of Mark Teixiera out of my box, but I wasn't really into that card. I liked the set, but I knew it would be a hard one to finish. I was just interested in the Johan and Wright cards. He traded me his Johan for my Teixeira! Definitely a good trade for me. Puts me halfway to finishing my goal for this subset.

Here are some of the cool Mets minis he sent over:


A nice Ruben Tejada. Rookie Short stop. The rookie card logo looks nice this year. I think it blends in with the design of these cards better than last years rookie logo. It's still a little weird for a new 21st century logo on a retro design.

The always photogenic Reyes.




... and a couple of Wright minis. Last year David Wright was depicted in a game action shot vertically, this year horizontally. Pretty cool even if the picture on the card is a little small.


I'm not doing the entire set in mini form this year, I'm just looking for a few sports and non-sports minis.


Sacagawea is one of two must haves for the non-sports subjects. The other would be a Leonardo Da Vinci black border card to go with the regular mini that I already pulled.


Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.
Appropriate Confucius quote considering how much falling (and failing) I've done in regards to finishing that black border mini set.

Reading the back of this card reminds me that I've always wanted to read Don Quixote. I always get that mixed up with the Cisco Kid.

The Water Buffalo peeking up from the bottom of the card is funny. I guess they designed it that way to make sure that the yellow star was visible. It looks good.


When I first saw this card I thought of Diplo. I didn't realize until now that the DJ Diplo took his name from the Diplodocus. Apparently he has a huge interest in dinosaurs.


Which would explain this album cover.

If you are so inclined, here is a song of his that is pretty repetitive, but it's catchy. Not one of his best, but I like it.




Duane didn't just send over the Ginter, he had some Mets for me.

I like these Unique cards. They look a little like 2010 Topps at first glance, but if you look a little closer they resemble 2002 Topps Post a little bit more.



Night Owl had a great post about the Post set. I found a two card pack of these recently when I was looking for a screwdriver. The pack was in a kitchen drawer. Pretty cool to find mint cards laying around your house.


The "wave" and the player are glossy, but the background has a matte finish just like in the Topps Post cards. It's a really nice look on these Topps Unique cards especially with the black border. I haven't seen any of these for sale locally. I need to search out some packs.

He sent over two Ticket to Stardom cards. I have had a few bloggers send me a few cards, but not these two. If it's not noticeable from the scan this card is the perforated parallel of the base card. This makes 5 cards of the Mets team set that I own without buying a pack. They're not as people made them out to be, but I'm still not buying. The nice thing about these cards is that Topps put the card number on the back and front. That would make collating the set easier for people chasing the set.

I don't know if this has to be said, but this was a great trade. Thanks again Duane. If anyone is still reading this go check out his blog. He's so close to finishing up 2008 Masterpieces and 2010 A&G. I'm sure he'll help you out with some cards.