Night Owl Cards

  I've been part of a lot of Nachos Grande group breaks over the years. It's an easy way to get cards of my team without suffering through blasters that insist on adding White Sox and Marlins, as well as landing some cards from those years when I was in a dark place (i.e. not collecting). I don't have the funds all the time so sometimes I leave and then come back and I came back recently for another one of his Breakers Club breaks through Discord. I always have fun with the breaks. Chris is great, he finds great sets to open and everything is done on the collectors' terms, they get the cards when they want them, Chris isn't making any money off of the whole thing, he's just trying to pay for the boxes. So it was a surprise when I ordered up my cards a week or so ago and discovered maybe a day later that not all the cards were there. I tore the house apart looking for them, I even went through the garbage -- the messy, icky garbage -- in search of them, I've...

  Well, I didn't listen to my OCD and went ahead and finally acquired the 2023 Allen & Ginter Clayton Kershaw mini. Until the 2023 arrival, I could display a complete page of A&G Kershaw minis from the start of his career. It looks like this: Ain't that pretty? That's very nice. (It also illustrates how less-interesting Kershaw's cards have gotten over the years). I could have stopped right there. That's most of his career, really. It's all the most valuable minis, too. One page to sum it all up. But I've never really been a less-is-more collector. So ... There's this situation. A new Kershaw mini, a new page, a card all alone by itself and my OCD running around the room screaming with sirens going off. I couldn't leave well enough alone. All in the pursuit of more, more, more. But I had to do it. Kershaw still pitched in 2023. He's supposed to pitch in 2024. I need cards to represent those years. Hell, I just need all the Kershaw cards. ...

  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...

  Set completion seems to have gotten more and more challenging over the years, so I like to celebrate every instance I can, big or small.   I finished off a long-neglected project this past weekend when I received an envelope from Max of Starting Nine . Inside was a card from the 2002 Upper Deck Vintage Night-Gamers insert set, which was the Pudge Rodriguez you see here. It's the last card I needed to finish it. It's a 12-card set, which does not fit at all in a nine-pocket page, unless you double-book like I often do and then it fits, but it's awkward. Here they all are neatly. It amazes me that the Jeter card wasn't the final one I needed. It was second-to-last. I didn't know this set existed before I discovered card blogs. In fact, I didn't know that Upper Deck Vintage existed or even that UD made cards at that time, outside of the 2001 UD Decade '70s set that I discovered at a Fay's Drugs in town, probably in 2002. This was the dark period for my co...

  As far as card-opening experiences go, my Christmas this year wasn't as great as last year . Last year was tough to beat for sure. This year, my sister-in-law did not come through with the complete set of 2023 flagship after doing so the previous two years. She's amazingly consistent with her gift-giving so I'm assuming she couldn't find it at her nearby big box.  Instead, along with the binder and pages she always gets me, she got a hanger of 2023 Heritage. That's right up my alley, but I'm down to the final three cards I need, so all that produced was a Daylight Savings Time insert. That brings me to the dueling Allen & Ginter blasters, one from my daughter and one from her boyfriend. I put A&G on my Christmas list. Unfortunately, it was the only brand of cards I put on my list. I am required to get my list out in October due to a certain early shopper and at the time A&G was the desired product. But in the weeks that followed, I lost my interest...

  Sorry, sports fans, I'm carrying out on my threat to compare Allen & Ginter owl cards. If I don't do it, who will? Owls have been a traditional A&G subject since the original sets in the 1880s. The card above is from the 1888 A&G Birds of America set (no, it's not mine, yes, I should look into collecting these). A&G, I think, was the first card set to feature owls, at least according to TCDB. There was a Beautiful Birds of America set in 1886 but they didn't consider owls beautiful apparently . Since the A&G reboot in 2006, an owl hasn't appeared on a base card but keeps popping up in insert sets. This is owlie's first arrival in the 2010 A&G set, as part of the National Animals mini insert theme. It flew in all the way from the Dominican Republic for an appearance. The next time owls appeared in A&G was five years later in the Birds of Prey mini insert set. I made certain I found those owls. There are three of them. There are 10 ca...