Night Owl Cards

  Near the end of October I bought three cards in one of those Twitter/X stack sales that I like to frequent. It was just three because I was trying to scale back a little bit on card costs. I can show the cards I got but there's only two because honestly I don't remember what the third one was. I just know it was a Dodger. The two of them are so fancy I don't even need to show three. People go ape over the Trophy Hunters cards (or the original '90s versions anyway). It's a little too over-the-top for me, but I need my snazzy cards of Mookie. Also I need every parallel of Kershaw. I got these cards from KellysKards . I've bought from him before. Kelly's a pleasant, happy guy and he sells some cards to fund his collecting but he also raises money for worthy causes sometimes, too. So I waited for my cards to arrive and then waited and waited some more. I started to wonder whether I sent the money to him -- I'm that scatter-brained. But I wasn't too con...

  At the end of each year I publish a wrap-up of my card-collection experiences for the previous 12 months. In that annual review, I list "sets I will complete in (fill in year)" as a friendly jab at both new year's "goals" and my inability/refusal to set new year's goals. I don't have any concrete plan to complete the listed sets in my review. For a lot of reasons -- even more now than ever -- I keep my expectations low. One of those reasons is I'm working on so many sets already that I could travel through the entire upcoming year just working on those without adding anything else onto my plate. But a card-collector's eyes are bigger than his stomach -- despite what you see of the clientele at card shows. I can't help but add more set stuff to chase. In the coming year, I'm quite sure I'll be adding 1987 Fleer and 1992 Topps to my "officially chasing" lists, just because they're key (and easy-to-chase) outliers in the ...

  My post titles have been terribly generic lately, I must be in a funk, or more likely, too busy. I'll snap out of it, but it may not be til January. By the end of next month they'll all say "got some cards." Anyway, I got some cards -- from a couple of veteran bloggers. The blog-to-blog swap is getting rare. and even rarer, I've already sent return packages to both of them, they just went out in the mail yesterday!   The first cards are from Jeremy of Topps Cards That Never Were . He was asking me about my 2023 Topps Heritage want list. This is super-appreciated because even though I'm steadily picking off high-numbers, I'm not sure if I'm going to meet my goal of getting it completed by the end of the year. People need their holiday gifts, you know.   Jeremy sent me these two key highs -- seems like Kelly is always in the high numbers -- but that wasn't all. (Yes, those Angels cards will appear on my year-end post, in the "Topps screw-ups...

  I've done very well this year keeping myself from splurging on 2023 card product. I've kept to a schedule of only what I know I'm going to like, or to longstanding traditions. I've bought only a couple hangers of Topps flagship at the start of the year and a blaster of Allen & Ginter. Yeah, I've gone nuts on Heritage this year, but the vast majority of retail buys have been with gift cards. That's unlike me. But it helps that Topps has pushed back products like Archives and Stadium Club to the end of the year when I've either lost interest/am too busy/don't have the cash to blow. And it helps that Topps has plain cut back on the number of products. But there was a return to the old days for me the other day. It was just one time. It won't happen again. I promise. I was at Target for some Christmas shopping reconnaissance. I picked a mid-day, mid-week time, yet the parking lot was too full (only when I returned to my car and counted all the Onta...

  Happy Halloween to those who celebrate, and that's a whole bunch, as I've never seen more Halloween lights displays in my entire life. Somebody is making a lot of money. I've posted off-and-on for the holiday, depending on my schedule (and whether I'm fending off kiddies at the front door). In the early days of this blog, myself and others might try to dig up an orange baseball card for the occasion. You remember when all you could find to represent the night of ghouls and goblins was a lousy 1988 Donruss Baseball's Best or some random orange parallel? Heck, it's all I could find last year . Well, Topps has you covered this year. For its Update set, which often comes out around Halloween (but not always), Topps has issued Panini-like parallels with Halloween themes. The background for individual players' cards have been replaced by dancing ghosts , Jack-o-Lanterns , black cats and other spookies. (They remind me of the Peanuts special ). There are also pl...

  OK, I'm back to the big box of cards-and-such from Johnny's Trading Spot . This is the baseball portion of the box. I'm still not done sorting through it. He sent two long boxes packed with Dodger cards. Apparently one box used to house a 1985 Fleer set? I just completed that set a couple months ago, I'd still rather complete it traditionally than buy the whole thing at once, although for what I want that's left from the '80s, I may be done with traditional means. So with all those Dodgers -- a lot of them from the '90s and early '00s -- I'm on round two of going through the boxes because you miss those dumb parallels and other things. It's actually quite fun finding stuff the second time. There are a bunch of parallel needs now. The color parallels like the Gypsy Queen Jansen jump right out at me, but stuff like the '96 Stadium Club Martinez and the '96 Fleer glossy thingies (there was a lot of '96 in those boxes) got past me until...