Night Owl Cards

(Greetings on Memorial Day. I hope you're enjoying your long weekend. I have to work tonight because kids have to keep playing sports. But at least I'm still functioning on this planet. Time for Cardboard Appreciation, this is the 339th in a series):   My first sportlots order of the year has been trickling in over the last few days and will be for a few days more.   It's a fairly modest order this time but it's an important one because it completes at least three sets from the 1980s that were overdue to be finished. I'll focus on one of them right now, which is 1986 Topps Traded. It's now complete!   Billy Hatcher was the last card I needed, it was a little bit elusive, kind of like I expected the Bo Jackson card to be. But that's the fun mystery that comes with being a set-builder: you never really know what the last card will be to finish the set. To many collectors the 1986 Traded set is the big four and not much more: But I was raised as a set collector...

  There is a full cart over at sportlots that is just waiting for me to have time and money. Veteran readers know that this is not a great period for spending cash on cards for me, but the wallet loosens by mid-March.   One of the first things I will do when that time comes is click that ship button. The majority of my sportlots order is set needs and in a couple cases will finish off sets I've been chasing the last few years. Happy, happy, joy, joy!   I've mentioned before that set collecting makes the most sense to me, even in this age of Topps playing head games with the few set collectors who remain. While other kinds of collecting feels a little disjointed or scattered, collecting a set comes with a goal: finish the set. There is a defined end. And I've gotta have goals.   This brings me the most peace in collecting and even if that sportlots order feels like it's stagnating, I'm still working on those sets. Not too long ago I finished a TCDB trade with Mokola...

  I've been teasing the big box Johnny's Trading Spot sent for a couple of posts now, but now it's time to get everything out of the way. There is so much here that it will still take me a couple of weeks to get it all into my collection -- or into the dupes pile where half of it will go. Here are the two stacks of mostly needs after all the dupes had been filtered. The Dodgers and a few random baseball cards are on the left, the Bills are on the right. As I've mentioned before, I don't really collect Bills cards anymore, save for the ones when I was covering the team (junk wax era, basically) and earlier stuff from '70s and '60s. I've even stopped with the current Bills cards, there are just too much and pro football cards' obsession with shiny is just not doing it for me. So who knows what I'll do with that stack on the right. But let's focus on WHAT I NEED.   Non-Dodgers stuff first. These are all the 2023 Allen & Ginter cards I neede...

  Sorry about the intermittent posting, work decided to act up the last three days. But it's Saturday now, the perfect time for mindless wonderings of the card kind. I received a nice assortment of 1986 Topps Traded from Cards On Cards a couple weeks ago. He'd obviously jumped at my want list, I know he's always appreciated the '86 set. And he knocked out a decent chunk of my needs. This latest selection got me down to the final 15-20 cards I need for the set (then another arrival today from John whittled that down to the final seven). I don't need to tell you that '80s Traded sets are enormously fun for catching known players in unusual uniforms. But they're also fun because of the airbrushing tricks executed in '80s sets. Airbrushing was still a thing in this decade and not confined to Traded sets either. But for the most part, you can find a greater percentage of painted hats in the Traded set than the regular set. Also, 1986 sort of marks a turning...