I'll forgive a lot for 10-cent cards

All right, it seems the blog will look its normal self unless I feel like spending 48 hours straight finding a Blogger set-up that will accommodate a graphic element. Seems my only choices for the new Night Owl Cards logo my daughter made are "monstrously huge" or "banish it to the sidebar."

So right now it greets you when you go to the sidebar. You all know where the sidebar is right? Just click on those three little horizontal lines in the top right corner and it'll drop down for ya.

Meanwhile, I'm determined to make that logo mine and spread its love throughout the blogosphere! Expect to see business cards in your trade envelopes and sporadic appearances of the logo in posts. Expect T-shirts and calendars and gym bags, as I shake my fist at Blogger!

Anyway, a few weeks ago a bunch of bloggers discovered an online cards-for-sale site called Baseballcardstore.ca. I guess it's been around for a little bit, offering cards up for 25 cents apiece. But I didn't hear about it until the cards were reduced to 10 cents apiece. Funny how that discount news gets around.

I hopped on the site after hearing good things and immediately met confusion. I could barely decipher how to search what I wanted. Mostly I was looking for Dodgers but Dodgers for 10 cents usually means a bunch of cards from between 1986-1993, of which I have much too much. Filtering that down to more specific titles was clunky. I kept coming up with "your search did not reveal any results."

In fact, I gave up a couple of different times. The plodding through was much too tedious. But finally, I found some time to dedicate to the weirdness. For 10 cents, I'll forgive a lot.

It seemed easier to search for sets or specific players or people. Once I shifted my brain away from my usual Dodgers MO, I found a few things. But my selections were very unorganized and scattered across a wide spectrum, only touching baseball on occasion.

But I did end up with 200-plus cards and it's a hoot to be able to buy that many for $24.99 (including shipping).

Then came the confusion about my payment. This isn't on the Baseballcardstore at all, I apparently didn't enter something correctly. But the order took forever to process. After some back and forth with the site's customer service, I was finally able to pay and get my cards.

Phew! Good thing they were all 10 cents!

I'm not going to show them all (some are reserved for specific posts and a few are for trade partners). But here are some:

This was probably the highlight of my purchase, a bunch of 1981 Fleer Star Stickers.

I never saw these when I was collecting cards in 1981 or I would have owned a bunch already. And I was unaware until very recently that the set is 128 cards! I thought it was around 50 or so.

These are great fun and I enjoy the unique pictures on many of them.

When I realized that I would be looking for sets on this site, I started thinking about what sets I could get for 10 cents a card. There aren't a lot I'm interested in that are that cheap.

But I knew I could finally do some damage on the 1993 Select set, a set I've paid homage to several times on this blog but have never taken action on it. However, for 10 cents a card, I grabbed 55 cards from the set. (Yes, I know, I can probably buy the whole set for 10 cents a card -- you people are no fun).

Here are a few:

The last photo turned out a bit blurry, sorry. But those cards look great. I think the last time I mentioned '93 Select someone said they disliked the set a lot. I don't know how that's possible.

I didn't expect to find my favorite Finest set ever, from 2004, marked down to 10 cents apiece, but these three cards were.

I don't enjoy Panini's Golden Age designs. The insertion of non-sports folks seems a little too random for me as well.

But the baseball subject matter is too good to pass up so I found some guys that were interesting to me, all for a dime.

I started a binder a little while ago of Retro Sets I'm Not Trying To Complete. These will fit nicely.

Oh, and here's a mini.

The rest of the baseball purchases were quite disjointed, obtained when I didn't really know how to run the search engine. But for 10 cents, you're not going to screw up too badly. It's like dime boxes at the card show. If I get a dupe, I ain't crying.

Except for one Lesean McCoy Bills card, my only non-baseball sports card picks were Olympic-related and a series of Dominik Hasek Sabres cards.

Lots of good stuff in there. Very fancy and very Dominator-ish.

One more that scans like garbage.

Because I had limited interest in the available sports sets for 10 cents a card (sorry, I'm never going to build 1990 Donruss), I traveled to the Nonsports tab to see what I could find.

I ended up discovering a lot of sets I never knew existed.

An Andy Griffith Show card set was created in 1991 by Pacific. Not a clue that this existed.

Not to bring down the room, but this show has come to mean a great deal to me as it's the one show that I watched with my mom over and over again during her terrible bout with ALS. Restricted to a chair and with her mental faculties waning, she still enjoyed The Andy Griffith Show and we watched it on MeTV over and over. It was a rare pleasant moment. Much like when young parents turn on Nickelodeon for their toddlers to get 22 minutes of peace.

This 1992 Collect-A-Card Country Classic sets escaped my radar, too, probably because I'm not much of a fan of country music.

But I have a soft spot for '70s female crossover singers of the Hee Haw era.

That is the famed album cover of Linda Ronstadt's "Silk Purse" album from 1970. Cool card. Musicians adore Linda Ronstadt and so do I.

I wasn't much of a fan of the American Pie set that Topps issued in 2011. But certain cards do speak to me. All of the above are either from my teenage days, my childhood or a bikini card.

I never had any intention of collecting any of the revived Wacky Packages sets, preferring to stick to the vintage versions from the '70s. But 10 cents makes you take a chance. These are OK.

They're from the "All New Series" reboot that started in 2004 and continued through around 2014 or 2015. These are all from Series 6, issued in 2007.

Still fun.

OK, back to sports. The Panini Americana Heroes & Legends set escaped my attention. It was issued in 2012 and, man, does the Baseballcardstore have a ton of these things. I selected a few key items. I would like to say, even with black-and-white photos, Panini does a better job of presentation than some of these same athletes on Allen & Ginter cards.

So, I started out my adventure at the new site with the intention of nabbing some Dodgers cards for cheap. And you have yet to see a Dodger card.

Didn't I get any?

I did.

A few.

These were all needs and for 10 cents each that makes me very happy (That Kemp Select card should be free). I actually picked up three others, but they turned out to be dupes, and for 10 cents each, who cares?

When the delivery finally made it to my house, I checked out the return address. It was delivered from a place in Niagara Falls, N.Y. I used to work in Niagara Falls and I know that location, it's right next to the Niagara Falls airport, which I would drive past on my way to work when I was going the long way.

Despite all of the hassles and struggles with the site, and the fact that their inventory doesn't seem that robust (I noticed upon returning that due to my purchases, many of those same cards were sold out), I decided to give it another spin.

I wanted to prove to myself I could find more Dodgers on this site, and I did. Another order of 100 or so cards for $12.95 is on the way.

But I think we bloggers might clear out that site in no time.