The State of Things

Lots of new cards are arriving at The Collector HQ. I've been making more purchases than I expected to under the circumstances. None of these are budget-busters, and I'm rationalizing them by reminding myself that I saved $500 to go to the National in Atlantic City this summer - and there ain't gonna be no National in Atlantic City this summer - so why not spend less than one-fifth of that on one of the few things I can still enjoy. 

not my cards :/

Two weeks ago I placed an order on the Beckett Marketplace for about $50 worth of singles. This was during their Customer Appreciation Week sale so I spent just under $40. 

I might have saved even more had I known about baseballstore.ca; their Anniversary sale seems to have had some of the cards I bought on Beckett. After seeing their name pop up on a couple blogs I placed an order there earlier this week. Another 120 cards are headed my way for the low, low price of $16. This is less than I paid for one PSA-graded single on eBay.. which is also due to arrive soon. 

And then there are trades. When I shipped out all of my Free Stuff Friday gifts I had a couple stamps left over, so I headed over to TCDB to make some deals. 

Before I get into that, please let me know if you have received your PWE because they should have arrived by now and I have only heard back from two bloggers. [Elliptical Man, I still need your address.]


I was just about to lose hope on a trade with GooseWayneX after nearly six weeks. He didn't reply to five direct messages or a forum post, and I kept telling myself to leave a negative feedback and give up on ever seeing the cards. I didn't do either.

Tuesday the cards showed up - almost all of them.

I had traded him 14 Dodgers cards (including the Jerry Sands auto I got in the eBay box o'randomness) and I had asked for 14 cards in return: the four scanned above and ten Brett Favre cards I didn't have.

Lee left out the 2001 Bowman's Best card. Grrr. The good news is, this increases my Favre count to 810. 

I still can't believe I have that many cards of #4. And once all of my trades/purchases come in (including my COMC inventory) I'll have over 825 unique Favre cards. 

In fact, once all of my transactions are completed I should have over 99,000 total cards in my collection. There are other milestones within my reach this summer:

I'm five cards away from 70% completion of all Peter Worrell cards. There are six Worrell singles in my COMC inventory, including one that I'd been hunting for 15 years.

I'm eleven cards away from 50% completion of the 1956 Topps baseball set. There are three singles in my COMC inventory. I doubt I'll pick up eight more before my 40th birthday in August but that was that plan (deep sigh..) Perhaps I'll get there by the end of this already godawful year. 

Crazie Joe stumbled into my Blue-and-White Whale, and has agreed to break his Toronto PC rule to help me finish a 16-year old hockey set! 

Also there are dozens of cards incoming for my All-Time Teams frankenset, as well as other (traditional) set builds. I haven't completed all of the team checklists yet, but I'm close to determining the greatest baseball players who are not in my collection. Stay tuned for that.

If you haven't perused my player PC page please check it out and let me know if you can spare any cards of these players. I'm planning to expand the list this summer to include:

I also plan to reduce my blogging output to once a week this summer - after a few show-and-tell posts. There's also a thought kicking around in my head to pause collecting once I acquire my 100,000th card. Something about turning 40 and re prioritizing.. I dunno. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.


Thanks for reading!



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