Night Owl Cards

  I have barely acquired any cards this year. Adding the grand total of my three 2022 purchases it comes to around 36 bucks and $16 of that was that stupid 2021 Optic rack pack I bought that I should return because of false advertising that there were actual baseball cards inside.   Money just isn't there right now for cards, which is why I'm grateful for every envelope that comes to my door, from bloggers or just plain readers. I'm lucky in that I seldom have to trade to generate card flow. I do need to do that sometimes, but not often enough where I need to depend on something like TCDB's trading function.   Today I received a whale of a gift mail day -- from four different people. I'll show that off some other time, but right now I have a couple envelopes from two different readers. ... Well, it's actually four envelopes from two different readers. You see, each of them sent an envelope and then after a few days, each of them sent another one!   Am I seeing d...

  When I receive a card package that contains Dodger cards from a fellow collector, there is a 95 percent chance that some of those Dodger cards will be dupes. That's just a fact of life that I made peace with a long time ago. I have more than 23,000 Dodger cards, you aren't going to get every card past me. It's just not happening. But if you are going to attempt to make sure that every last Dodger card that you send is a need, then you must do what Robert of $30 A Week Habit did when he sent an envelope to me recently. Every last Dodger card that he sent was new to my collection. How did he do that? A) He got lucky. With one of the cards anyway. The above Cody Bellinger insert from 2018 Stadium Club had eluded me. But that's what you need as a fellow trader, luck. I don't know how many of the messages I scrawl that accompany my trade packages contain the word "hope," but it's got to be most of them. But that is just one card from the envelope Robert ...

I just wrapped up my first notable card purchase of 2020. It was an online order -- from three of every collector's favorite card-buying sites -- and with the exception of three inserts from 2019 and a stray card from 1989, every single card I ordered was made prior to 1980. That feels good. That feels tremendously good. I'm starting off 2020 in the right frame of mind. It's also a good way to put a cork in the 2019 collecting season. There are various ways you can say you're done with the cards from the previous year, call it degrees of doneness, if you will (I order steaks "medium" or "medium well," I don't need anything crawling off my plate). 1. You can be done with collectin g sets from 2019. I'm certainly done with that. I didn't try to collect many sets from that year anyway. The 2019 Topps Holiday set and a third of the 2019 Topps Archives set are finished and that's everything I plan to do. 2. You can be done...

If you can create an established blog with a little bit of readership, certain perks come along with that. One is a few trade partners that are somewhat exclusive to your own well-read blog. I have a handful of them that trade with just my blog, basically, and I am quite grateful for that. I consider it a reward for trying to get some content out there. I've noticed that I'm not the only card blog with that perk. There are a few others who enjoy exclusive relationships with traders. I've seen on Dime Boxes that there's this guy named Bob who sends Nick cards from time-to-time. My question when I read these posts is usually, "Hey I like cards and have a blog, too. Where are my cards?" Well, Bob must have heard my thoughts because a week or so ago I received an email from him offering to send me some cards. Bob's also started a card blog, called the best bubble . You can't beat that! Cards from a new trader and a new blog to read! My goodnes...