Night Owl Cards

  So I grabbed a blaster of 2025 Heritage when I was at Dave and Adam's last week. I know they're not called "blasters" anymore but it's still the word I use when I want people to know what I am talking about.   Buying Heritage is instinct at this point. We're at the designs during my first years of collecting. While I could pick-and-choose whether I was going to collect Heritage 10-15 years ago (1966 design? Pass), these designs mean so much to me that every year I think seriously "am I trying to complete the set this year?"   This thought would seem ridiculous a few years ago -- it took me more than a decade to finish 2008 Heritage. But in the last two years, I have completed 2023 Heritage (1974 design) and 2024 Heritage (1975 design) within the year. It can be done. Should I go for the trifecta?   It's tricky. Because Heritage is tricky. Here are the pros and cons to attempting a third straight completion:   PROS   1. I love the 1976 design. A...

  It's almost nothing to own cards of retired players, so-called "legends cards," these days. Thanks to the MLB-Topps agreement, legends are included in virtually every current set. They're ubiquitous in inserts and in sets like Archives and Allen & Ginter. You can find cards of them for a quarter, which just doesn't seem right.   Maybe that's because I knew a different time. As a youngster collecting cards, my focus was solely on the players of the day. This was the 1970s and 1980s, and virtually all sets available, year after year, offered nothing but current players.   Cards of legends were mostly confined to past releases. Want a card of Willie Mays? Find someone dumb enough to trade you a card from the 1960s, because that's the only way you were going to get him.   Eventually I became aware of card issues from TCMA and Galasso and Laughlin. These were all oddball sets, not available at your store down the road, but they contained retired players. ...