Night Owl Cards

  Twelve years ago I wrote a post about the return of the Topps Future Star(s) label and my lack of appreciation for it when Topps first broke it out in the late 1980s (although it also used "Future Stars" to describe its three-player prospect cards at the start of the decade).   Since first returning in 2014 -- actually its second return as the Future Stars went on hiatus for 1992 and 1993 before coming back in 1994 -- the Future Star has continued strong for every Topps flagship set except for one. It's so much a standard part of the base set now that I don't think anyone even notices it anymore, at least certainly not like collectors did in the late 1980s.   There's a reason for that, I think, outside of showing up every year. I went through the last 12 years and broke down the Future Stars for each. The idea for this post began as a dissection of the Future Star(s) logo, but I found totaling Future Stars for each year more interesting.   Let's start with ...

  The internet has a great way of providing something you have always wanted, or never even imagined possible ... and then eventually ruining it.   I experienced this great disappointment in duplicate in 2025. Two sites, so entrenched in my entertainment preferences for so many years, had evolved so far away from what I had valued them for that I could no longer ignore it.   I am struggling now to separate myself from one of them, which is Spotify. I have used the streaming site daily for the last four or five years, it has been where I discover new music and how I determine my favorite songs and albums of the year. So getting away from that and finding a new option (I'm trying Tidal right now but it is not cooperating with me) is going to take awhile.   The other site I hope is more of a clean break. In fact, I have already declared in multiple places that I have made my final order on COMC. I hope that remains true.   I have been ordering from COMC since late ...

  My Black Friday COMC order came in yesterday. I'm pleased to say that it showed up more than two weeks earlier than was originally forecast. This order was not as grand as I wanted it to be. When it got time to request shipment, money was a little tighter than I expected, I had to let some cards go. But I didn't let go of the oddball cards, which actually was a good portion of the order. I gravitate toward oddballs -- I think readers know this about me -- and since I've completed so many of the main sets from the '70s and '80s, oddballs are almost all that's left. That's fine with me, because the more I think of it, I like hanging out with the oddballs. When I think of what's the opposite of those kinds of cards, high-end grade specimens of superstars and hot rookies, I know that those cards can bring out my least favorite kind of behavior in collectors, just about the rudest people I've seen in the hobby. But I rarely see that among collectors who...

When you've been blogging as long as I have, collecting as long as I have, you come across milestones every year. For example, this year is the 45th anniversary of the first time I opened a pack of cards (1974 Topps). It's also the 10th anniversary of the first time I evaluated Topps flagship on this blog. That happened with the 2009 set. That means I have evaluated an entire decade of flagship. And therefore, I can rank the flagship sets from an entire span of 10 years -- 2010-19 -- which I will do for you now. The best part of this exercise is I can go back into the archives and find what I said when I was looking at the set for the first time ... because I've been doing this for 10 years. So, the rankings for Topps flagship from 2010-19: 10. 2016 This set will always be remembered as the first Topps flagship set without borders. That is not a point in its favor. However, I"m more disturbed by the way they went about the set. The "smoke" e...