Night Owl Cards

  It's growing more and more difficult for set collectors in this hobby. Let's review:   1. Flagship. You must contend with inserts and parallels filling spots that were once the domain of "base cards," i.e., the cards that complete the set.   2. Heritage (and other spin-off brands). You'll come across inserts and parallels here, too, but also short-printed base cards.   3. Vintage. The demand grew once more people entered the hobby six years ago and the increased cost is fueled by the gem-mint crowd.   When it comes to sets I desire, it seems like no set is immune to the changes of the last 20, 30 years.   No set, that is, except for sets from one particular era: 1986-93. The overproduction era. Junk wax. Nothing about modern day collecting has affected these sets (stuff like collecting copyright and asterisk variations on the back has grown over time but that's easily ignored if you're not into it).   I was reminded of this again when I wrote about m...

  As a set-collector I have written many times about needing the final card to complete a set.   It's almost an ongoing issue for our collecting type -- I always seem to have three or four sets that are getting close to being finished and I either know what that final card is or I am speculating on what it might be.   Longtime readers may remember the One-Card Challenge, which I set up 13 years ago in a bid to help collectors find that one card that they need to finish a set. It was pretty popular for a few months before fading out. No coincidence, that was right around the time collectors were flocking to Twitter.   Today, I am one card away from finishing the 2024 Topps Update set. Finishing Update is usually not a big feat in the year in which it's issued, it's a smaller set and a lot of collectors are so done with the design by that time, plus it's known for being crammed with filler and plucked for rookies.   But finishing 2024 Update would be notable for m...

  Whenever I finish off an old vintage set, it takes a little while to get serious about another one. I have to work up the energy to go through what it takes to tackle another one. It's a time-and-money investment. It's a project, really, not a work project, but a fun one. But, as always, projects take dedication, drive and stamina. It's not for the weak. Take that however you want.   Often it isn't until I purchase a certain card do I feel like I'm really in the right mind-set and I'm on my way to pursuing another set.   The 1969 Topps set, coming after I finished the 1970 Topps set, has been a goal for the last four or five years but casual-like as I focused on more pressing card needs. It's always been in the background even as I added '69 Topps cards to my collection.   But with 1970 and other stuff out of the way, it's not in the background. In fact it's staring me in the face, waiting for me to commit.   You may think that with 624 of the ...

  I've been working on some sets from the 1980s that I thought would be fairly easy to complete and a nice respite from trying to finish stuff like 1967 and 1970 Topps. It'd balance things out and keep set-collecting fun. I set as my target the '80s Fleer sets and then eventually the early '80s Donruss sets. I chose these because all these sets still contain the players I followed as a kid. I finished the Fleer sets from '82, '83, '88 and '89. I already had the ones from '81 and '84 done. I've barely touched the 1987 set but that's because I wanted to get '85 and '86 done before adding another one. Well it's been a few years now and '85 and '86 Fleer are still not finished. What the heck. This is not as easy as I wanted it to be. Part of the problem is that I care about other cards a lot more than mid-1980s Fleer. I can't get myself fired up to add a SuperStar Special card from 1985 when there are cool Coke cards a...

This may have been one of the most tedious blog posts to put together in the history of this blog, but I think it's for a good cause. The reason I'm not entirely sure is because I didn't have time to carry it out for a few more attempts, got to shovel that 7 inches of heavy wet snow plopped on my estate on Nov. 12th. Anyway, a couple of days ago, Colbey from Cardboard Collections was sorting his Topps Holiday set by card number and asked a very common question that I've seen come up many times during my blogging career:  This is always a satisfying question because this is how I organize my sets when I'm organizing by card number. At the top of the post I showed cards from the 2019 Topps flagship set being sorted in that manner -- stacks separated by hundreds first, then you create separate stacks by 10s within each hundreds stack, then finally order each of the 10s by card number. I've done this since I was a kid and first knew the card numbers ...

I've been closing in, working on and completing a bunch of different sets lately. This makes me happy because I consider this very productive baseball-card-collecting behavior. I'm a set collector at heart and sometimes I let all the other kinds of collecting get in the way of my set-collecting. I enjoy the other kinds of collecting but the other kinds also feel terribly scattered to me. A lot of it doesn't seem to have any direction, I don't feel like I'm getting a lot accomplished and I really don't feel as if I'm being productive in my hobby. But sets? When I'm zeroing in on sets, I feel like I'm reaching my GOALS! I'm pretty thrilled trying to complete those sets all by myself. I couldn't be happier. You know, laughter, joy and loneliness and ... sets, sets, sets, sets!!!! That's what the Stones were singing about , right? Anyway, one of those set-completion missions is trying to get the 1991 Score baseball set finished o...

It's one of the pure joys of being a set collector. Sometimes -- and it doesn't happen often -- someone will send you a whole bunch of cards that are all from a set you are building. Then you spend the entire day surrounded by cards from that set. Every card with the same theme. It's glorious. Set-collecting goes back longer than player-collecting so the chances are greater of inheriting a whole bunch of set needs all at once. People back in the day always grouped their cards in sets so there are just stashes of sets lying around. All you have to do is say you're collecting 1990 Donruss and there will be a line of people, toting boxes emanating a strange red light, at your door. This probably won't be the case years from now as player collectors have taken a greater piece of the pie. In the future, collectors will be desperate to off-load their several thousand Albert Pujols cards on someone, and we'll be avoiding them like they said, "Hey I have s...