Trade with Chipp 'n' Dale blog

I came across a new blog Chipp 'n' Dale the other night. He has a nice trade bait page. One card in particular stuck out to me which is the Gale Sayers mini card at the top of this post.

It is one of those non advertised retail mini inserts that Allen and Ginter was known for. I hadn't been collecting for very long when 2009 A&G was released and these cards freaked me out a little because I thought they might be some sort of fake. I really do like the idea of football subjects in A&G at least in a subset.

I grabbed the Adrian Peterson a few years ago and now this Sayers card. I'm still thinking that it would be nice to try and finish this set along with the rest of the mini sets.

James also sent over a few Mets and Packers which were appreciated as I didn't have any of those cards.

I recognized the name Carl Everett, but I couldn't remember why. It wasn't for his play on the field; it was because of his odd comments about dinosaurs and the Opollo moon landing.



I don't have many of these Attax and Toppstown cards. I'm not actively collecting them, but with this trade I think I have enough for a page of these types of cards of David Wright.


And lastly a nice card of Bubba Franks evading fellow NFC north team the Vikings.

Thanks for the trade James. Thanks for reading.

Xerces Blue

Let's go back in the time machine or as I like to call it the Clock Defier and take a look at my Allen and Ginter collection.

That's right boys and girls, I've got another wonderful A&G post for everybody to enjoy.

I have slowly been putting together a huge part of the 2009 Allen and Ginter World Champions set.

Recently I have been focusing on the Extinct Creatures and the Future Inventions mini sets.


I was most excited about the Extinct Creatures set mainly for this one card.

The Xerces Blue Butterfly.

This would be the one card from the non-advertised subsets that I was really hoping to one day find. It took a while but I finally found one in my price range. I really love that these cards in the 2009 set have the same basic look as the base set.


The one problem I have with these two subsets is that they don't have an explanation of the subject on the card backs. Just a checklist. A nice looking back, but I need more than a nice looking card so I went to google.

Here's what I found out:

The Xerces Blue became extinct around 1941-43 and was mostly found in the San Francisco bay area. Scientists speculate that the butterfly's symbiotic relationship with ants was the cause of it's demise. Apparently as more people moved into the bay area they brought with them different types of ants and these ants replaced the ones that were common to the area.

Botanists are trying to re- inhabit a close cousin of the butterfly known as the Palos Verde Blue which is considered the LA equivalent to the Xerces Blue. Pretty exciting stuff.

I went through a butterfly period a few years ago in which I would try to paint little butterfly paintings. It's a little lame, but here is one of my attempts at painting a butterfly.
The reason for the interest in butterflies aside from the obvious reason of the colorfulness of their wings was also because of a Indonesian legend. I had a lot of friends at that time from Indonesia and they invited me over to watch the movie The Sixth Sense. That will tell you how long ago it was. After walking in to the house they pointed out a butterfly on the wall.

Apparently in Indonesia if you see a butterfly in your house it's an omen that you will have visitors soon. I haven't checked around to see if this is true or if maybe I misunderstood what she was saying. Her English wasn't the best and some of what she was saying may have been lost in the translation. Maybe she was just making a joke or something and I didn't catch it. Anyway, it always stuck with me and I started painting butterflies that summer. Seeing the entomology cards in Goodwin and also this Xerces Blue card reminds me of those days when I was enamored with painting butterflies. Kind of weird.

Thanks for reading. I hope you guys enjoy the cards.

What I don't like about the hobby.

I normally don't like to be negative on this blog. I have negative tendencies sometimes,but I try to hold them back when I write this blog so that I could keep the blog as positive as possible. Card collecting is a cool hobby and if it's not fun then I don't think it should be your hobby. It's still fun for me, but I haven't had much to write about lately.

I haven't had the time to comment much lately on the blogs either, but I still enjoy reading them. I'm not a very good commenter. I'm either too vague or I leave a long winded comment that should be reserved for it's own post.


Since reading a few posts by Brain at Play at the Plate, I have decided to weigh in on one of the reasons why lately I'm disenchanted with this hobby.

When I first got into blogging/trading I was mostly interested in Mets, some Yankees and I really wanted to get as much 2009 Allen and Ginter that I could get my hands on.

(Don't worry this won't be a Gintercentric post; only a mild Gintering will follow.)

As I mentioned earlier, Brian has posed a few questions about the state of the hobby and blogging in general. I decided to use his post as a jumping off point on a very important (to me) part of card production that I think people haven't complained about enough and that's the use and reuse of the same stock photo for different sets.

I first noticed it when I went Ginter crazy last year when 2009 Ginter came out. I liked all the cards, but I put a little more time and effort in examining the cards of my beloved Mets. One of the cards I pulled was this pedestrian card of pitcher Francisco Rodriquez. You might remember him recently for his semi-Oedipal outburst after one of his losses.

A few weeks later I pulled this card:

Same set, different verse.

I like both cards. I just don't like the recycled photo, but I didn't think much of it because it's from the same year and product (2009 A&G) so I let it go. I mean, it still has a different border and a completely different back so I thought it wasn't a big deal.

Around that same time a trade came in the mailbox. I'm pretty sure it was from Mike at JD's Wild Cardz. (sorry if it was from another blogger, but it's been like a year and a half. Forgive me).

Notice anything similar?

Obviously the same pose. Same lighting. Same last year at the Shea Stadium logo thingy on the hat. Except there is one big difference: this is from a different company Upper Deck.

I'm guessing that the stars get different cards each year, but I haven't done enough research on that. I know that Jose Reyes and David Wright usually have a different photo in the same A&G set and I'm almost sure they have different cards from different companies.


I realize that it's hard to mass produce these cards sets year after year, and even more so when you have like 30 sets a year.

If you're going to do a set why not make a flagship, retro and high end product. Maybe an entry level product like Opening Day or Kickoff and leave it at that.

Flag ship could be inexpensive but with a huge checklist and smallish price with a COMPLETELY NEW PHOTO for the retro set and then a nice card stock for the high end product with.... and wait for it: A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PHOTO for each card. Don't rehash the same photo year to year and product to product.

I realize as I write this that I haven't done a huge research to find all the examples of Topps and Upper Deck regurgitating the same photos, but I don't have to. You guys have all experienced this much more often than I have. We just all except just like we except miscut cards, missing hits and bad collation because we are all addicted to card collecting and we hope that things will get better. I've got to think that the card companies have a pretty decent library of photos of different guys to include in their sets.

I'm almost certain that I've seen this happen with other players, not just F-Rod. It's a laziness and more importantly a factory system approach to producing sets.

I'll leave you with this:
Some gratuitous minis of F-Rod.

The reason why I'm showing these off is that I'm sooo close to finishing off the 2009 mini set and maybe 1/3 of the way from finishing the black bordered mini set. This is the part of the hobby that I've been focusing on these past few months; which is the all the different Allen and Ginter sets.

I couldn't do a rant without at least posting up a few cool cards from my collection.

Thanks for reading and feel free to vent your feelings, comments and frustration with the hobby.

Yet another Ginter post! Avert your eyes if you're tired of the Ginter!

I'm a little uninterested in the new stuff that's out there so I thought I'd show off some cool stuff that I purchased quite a while ago, but haven't gotten around to talk about.

I know that some people don't like Ginter and some people love it. I'm assuming at this point most everybody is sick of it and are looking for something else to collect, but I still have a few more A&G posts in me, so hopefully it'll be worth it for ya'll to go down the Allen and Ginter path with me one more time.

This is a little different in that it's from last years release so maybe that'll be more interesting.

When I started collecting last year, one of the products I was most excited about was Allen and Ginter. I really like the original stuff from the 1800's and I sort of liked the individual years from 2006-08. I really loved the overall feel of the sets. The minis, N43 cards, the weird non-baseball and non-sports people included in the set. I was even interested in the odd sized cabinet cards.


Up to that point I had always assumed that all cards were basically 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 size and that was it.

I once found a few uncut 1985 topps cards that I'm still not sure where they came from. (the backs have no info or stats on them.) but that was it. I didn't know much about tobacco cards except for the reprint of the Honus Wagner card that I owned when I was a kid.


So when last years A&G came out I went nuts. I bought every variation that was available.


Retail, hobby packs 12 card blister packs, blasters and lastly a hobby box.
In my one lone hobby box I pulled an N43 card.


At some point in my quest to finish the black border and regular minis I came across a huge lot of cards that included, among other things, a 3 card lot of cabinet cards.

That was all it took for me to consider trying to finish all ten of the cabinet cards.

I kept at it and eventually finished off the cabinet cards around the same time I finished ripping the packs of my 2010 hobby box.

It's a pretty nice part of my overall 2009 Allen and Ginter collection. I have them all in binder pages in the front of my binder before the base set starts.


I have thought about framing them. Normally I wouldn't think of doing that because I'd like to look at the backs from time to time, but these cabinet cards really don't have much in the way of info on the backs. Just a partial checklist, so it's still on the table as far as possibly framing them and putting them on the wall. Has anybody else done this with any current releases?


The ironic thing is that I got CB1 last. It took forever for the seller to send it over. With the cabinet cards in place I feel like I'm really on my way to having a really nice somewhat complete master set of 2009 Allen and Ginter. Now all I need are about 20 more relics. 30 more autos and some cut signatures! Ha! That ain't happening. But I'm happy with what I've got so far. I'm really not that keen on having a master set, but a few more N43's and those pesky minis would be nice to have in the collection.

Thanks for reading!