Night Owl Cards

Boy, that's a heavy post title for a Monday, right? I assure you all the title refers to is the fact that I am back to work after a week of vacation. I'd love to buy back my vacation (without giving up any of my salary, of course). But that's as deep as I'm going with this post. This is yet another example of being able to do something with cards that you can't do in real life. You get to buy back cards from the past. Or Topps does anyway. Then Topps goes and plasters a stamp on the thing, proving that nothing in life is the way it should be. But we collectors adjust. And I'm getting a great amount of fun in my attempt to "complete" a buyback version of the 1975 Topps set. I recently received the above Glenn Borgmann card from Shane of Shoebox Legends . It's one of his rejects from his buyback frankenset. I like pestering Shane for his '75 buybacks because I MUST HAVE THEM ALL. Shane added another one, too. This is one of my favor

All right, you've read at least two posts from me documenting how 2015 Allen and Ginter hasn't impressed me, how I've slowly grown disinterested in it the last couple of years, and, oh, won't I just stop whining and collect what I want to collect. OK, this is me whining one last time. With one last statement. I'm out. After 2015, I'm not collecting Allen & Ginter anymore. I can't do it. I've realized that with my budget, if I want to complete a set from a particular year, I have to pick one set and that's it. That's all the money I have. If I also want to continue to pursue cards from past sets and vintage interests then I have to cut it off at one set per year. This year, A&G is running a distant third in terms of sets that I like behind flagship and Stadium Club. There's no way I can collect all three, and even attempting to complete two is causing me to collect both flagship and Stadium Club very inefficiently. I need

OK, it's been one heck of a busy day with major work and family goings-on all over the place, so let's take a look at the remainder of two of the card packages that I mentioned last night. Each of them featured something interesting that I think I'm going to start doing. First the non-2015 Topps from Kerry from Cards On Cards . This is a four-year-old shiny Kershaw that I didn't have. You don't know how much I appreciate getting Kershaw cards I don't have from years ago. It's as if I beat time itself. See, stupid clock? You may speed by so fast that I don't know what day it is anymore, but I got a parallel from a four-year-old set that nobody bought! HA! Us card collectors remember everything . Da future. You can tell because of all the metal, robot machine imagery in the background. Julio Urias better get on the mound quick before the robot pitchers that can throw 300 mph take over. P.S.: This card is mini, mini and shiny, shiny. I

When I announced that I was going to try to complete the 2015 Topps set I could hear the sound of fellow collectors breathing a sigh of relief. Or maybe they were applauding. "Finally," they said, "something I can send him. No more searching for some obscure Dodger oddball or a card from a 45-year-old set." I hadn't collected a Topps base set since 2010 and I knew this was going to happen. The 2015 cards would show up soon and in droves. And here they are. Three fellow bloggers sent me 2015 Topps and their packages arrived all within a matter of days of each other. When you are deluged with cards from the same series, there is bound to be some overlap, and I got curious: Would all three bloggers send me the same card? Let's see: The first person to send me cards was Kerry from Cards on Cards . This is what he sent: That's a whole bunch of arms cocked and faces grimaced. I enjoyed crossing off numbers with this lot, but no

I have this insanely unscientific method of determining whether people are buying sets on any given year: I check to see how quickly I complete the Dodgers team for the given set. Then I compare it to how quickly I completed other team sets for that year and for past years and I have my answer. I told you it was unscientific. For example, the year that we're wrapping up right now, off the top of my head, I know that I've completed two Dodgers team sets. The most recent one was Stadium Club. I received the last two Dodgers that I needed for that set from Shane of Shoebox Legends . Here they are: Add those to the rest: ... and Stadium Club is complete. (Completed without me buying a pack, I might add, since it'd be too much trouble for a card shop around here to stock actual cards ). My guess is that I completed it so quickly because Stadium Club was so popular with collectors. People bought this stuff. The other Dodger team set from 2