That was fast

It seems that COMC has finally gotten their act together.

My first order of 2024 was requested on the first day of 2024. It arrived on the 25th.

Of March.

 

Then, because COMC is the only place with affordable mid-grade 1956 Topps singles (fvck you very much, 4 Sharp Corners) I placed another order in spring. Requested shipping on May 12, received cards July 13th. 

Better, but still godawful. Both orders took so long to fill that I got an apology email with a $5 voucher for shipping on my next order. And so, like the sucker that I am, I placed order #3 and requested shipping on August 28th. I was expecting it to arrive around Halloween.


It got here yesterday. 12 days - that's almost like a real business. I didn't pay for expedited shipping or anything. 

Perhaps if I knew their turnaround times had drastically improved I'd have bought more cards and waited another month. Alas, I have just 40 cards to show off today - starting with the aforementioned '56 singles:

The seller I usually buy these from had a 25% off sale, and posted something else I'd had on my wantlist for years - a vintage Walter Payton card.

I'd been shopping around for a 1977 Topps Payton but the prices and my profits from eBay sales were never in sync. Instead I bought back the oldest football card I had as a young teenager.(That one was an OC copy with at least one rough corner.)

Some thick boys and prospects. There was a blue parallel #d/99 of the Syndergaard relic for about $2.50, but I bought the base for $1.27 and picked up the Pedro with the balance. My prospecting days are over but the Lazaro Montes was mislabeled and the Jackson Chourio was priced way too low.

Cheaper shiny here. Almost all were 50 cents each or less. Rasmus Asplund is a fringe NHL player but a blue color-matching auto for under $1.50 is hard to pass up; I nearly bought a Casey Mittlestadt Blue Rainbow auto for about $5, but then I would have had to put back the Prizms.

More hockey here (yes, the top two cards are from a hockey set.) The Neighbors and Cuylle Young Guns were a package deal; I sent an offer which basically got me the Cuylle for free. The Hull completes my Lost Rookie Cards insert set and triggered this order in the first place, since no one else has this card for under $8.

Picked up what I thought would be among the final Arizona Coyotes cards - but then I saw 2024-25 Upper Deck MVP was released without any mention of Utah. The Game Dated Moments card is ridiculous; the caption reads "Coyotes players say goodbye to the 2023-24 season...." Umm, what?!?!?

Finally some PC teams here, including a Blue Diamond Dustin (not to be confused with Dustin Diamond) and Juke Box Heroes inserts of the Hughes brothers. I foolishly bought the Yoshida and Casas refractors for 35 cents each even though I have absolutely no more room for any Red Sox inserts or parallels of any kind. I had to take out all the mini cards, put those in a separate box, and then it was still a tight squeeze.

I've had to get very selective about buying Boston base cards, too, as I only have space for about 20 across all my binders. Once my incoming Sportlots order arrives, I'll have less than a dozen pockets available.

And, not to dunk on COMC after giving them their flowers, but I bet the Sportlots seller will ship faster than 12 days. Just sayin' ;P

I did make one more very minor purchase. Picked up a couple cheapies on eBay and...

.... got that 2,000th feedback ten minutes after paying the seller. Woo-hoo!!! 🥳

Thanks for reading!



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Everything Everywhere All At Once

Today is my wedding anniversary with Mrs. Collector. We have nothing planned, because:

• My mother in law might also have cancer and had to go to the hospital for tests today. No one else is around to take her and stay with her, so my wife did. And now she's tired.
  
• The relentless, oppressive "heat dome" was supposed to subside today. It has not. I saw the forecast and told my daughters that I would take them to the park and Friendly's after I got home from work today. LOL. LMAO, even.
• My wife had stomach issues this morning when I left for work, and she's having trouble keeping down most of her food, so an anniversary dinner would be a bad idea even if we could afford it. Which we can't because we just bought a couch to replace the one we bought 12 years ago and give her a comfortable place to rest. It's not here yet.
• I'm in a mood anyway because the only other person in my department has been out on vacation all month (she returns tomorrow -- I think?) and the customers have been especially annoying and dumb lately. I would really like to tell these idiots to pay electronically or kick rocks, but I can't get fired. Need the insurance because I'm giving myself diabetes and high blood pressure.
• Oh, and my wife asked my daughters which aunt/uncle they would stay with if something happened to both her and me... and they separately gave her the same answer. Awww hell no. I'm living forever ... was my response. But, given the rapidly declining health of my family, the planet, our country's politics, etc... it's a struggle.

And so, I take refuge in my own personal oasis. The thing that has acted as my safe space since my alcoholic father terrorized my mother 37 years ago. Cards. And that part of my life has gone fairly well.

I requested shipping on my latest COMC order in early May.
I placed a small order at Sportlots in late June.
I placed two orders at Cardbarrel the second week of July.

All of these orders arrived at the same time. That happened to be the same day that my daughter helped me assemble my brand new bookshelf.

..which I'd bought with a gift card earned from finishing 2nd (out of about 115 entrants) in a company town hall trivia contest. I considered buying some baseball cards with the free cash but the two blasters in my cart (2023 Stadium Club and 2024 Topps Heritage) totaled the same price. I chose the bookshelf over roughly 100 new cards because organizing my card room has been a nice distraction from all the personal and general despair.

Plus, I already had plenty of new cards coming my way.

I'd like to show them off, but my old printer/scanner finally bit the dust. The printer didn't print and the scanner kept scanning fuzzy. So I bought a new printer/scanner with a prior gift card:

I followed the instructions to install the printer, and that's when I encountered a problem. The software requires a modern version of Windows - something from the past dozen years or so.

My computer, which was purchased before my daughters were born, still runs fine. It also runs Windows 7.

Did I ever mention I went to school with that girl? Anyway.. to illustrate how old Windows 7 is, I first saw this commercial during Brett Favre's return to Green Bay as the Vikings QB. In 2009.

All of this is to say I will be borrowing a lot of TCDB scans for the foreseeable future - which is fine for the Athletics series or another round of All-Time Teams. It's not so great for showing off new purchases.

Here's a look at the first Cardbarrel order. These pictures were taken with my phone, it's the best I could do:

I loaded up on Red Sox commons to fill out some of my binders (now that I have more shelf space..)

Of course I picked out some non-Sox as well:

I have a bit of a Terry Francona PC and I enjoy picking up Expos/Blue Jays cards in O-Pee-Chee and ('80s)Leaf sets.

Some substitutions at the top of this one. I did not order a '94 Bowman Kenny Rogers; that was an unannounced replacement for a '94 Donruss Red Sox card. Same for the 1993 Fleer Tim Salmon, which replaced a 1993 Finest Mike Greenwell. :/

This order pushed my reward points past 2,000 so I had a gift code coming. Since the big order was still 'processing' I decided to spend the free cash quickly, in hopes that both orders would arrive at once.

Indeed they did. I made a list of the 'free' cards - before remembering my gift code was for slightly more than $20.

The Sportlots order took a couple weeks to arrive from Saskatchewan. The two cards at the bottom left arrived damaged, but I left the seller positive feedback anyway because I'd fallen so far behind on Sportlots orders that I copy/pasted "A+++ thank you very much!" for every purchase I made this year.

And then there's COMC. A day after receiving yet another $5 apology coupon my order shipped. It arrived two months after I used my prior apology coupon and requested shipment.

On top of that, they mislabeled one of the cards I purchased.

Here's a couple '56 Topps cards from the order. You'll notice the Tommy Carroll is a PSA 8. I definitely didn't buy a PSA 8. No way is there room in the budget for a high-grade Yankee; I had to settle for a PSA 4 with HOFer Early Wynn. 

See? I sensibly ordered an EX-MT 6 and... wait... zoom in on that scan...

COMC sent the right card, they just listed it wrong. Which I guess the seller didn't notice either, or they would have asked for 3-4x more. I only have a handful of PSA 8s in my 1956 Topps set build, and none are Yankees or Dodgers. Until now.

My CA ebay seller friend is sitting on $80 for me to spend, and I asked him to grab a Young Guns RC of a top-ten goal scorer in the NHL. He made an offer that was declined, then the seller ended the listing and reopened it at a significant markup. (This move is also known as "The JoelshitShow".) But now he feels bad I missed out on the card and he's making it his mission to secure the star RC for me.

If and when that happens I'll be sure to show it off here. If not, I don't think I'll have anything new coming in for a while because... one month from now, right after my birthday... there's a bigass card show about an hour away.

Thanks for reading!

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The Last Set Build?

For the past few months I've been trying to fill every last space in my boxes and binders with low-end base and insert cards. Many of my small Sportlots purchases have been assembled around picking up the last two or three cards I need to complete a set. In some cases (like 2023-24 Upper Deck hockey and 2018 Panini Classics football) I don't bother with the short-printed rookies. A complete base set will do.

These sets always seem to have a gremlin or two, and some singles arrive in such bad shape that I need to immediately order a replacement. That said, my full set building wantlist is once again under a dozen cards.

Not counting the 1956 Topps baseball set, that is. I consider this the Final Boss of my card collecting life. The latest addition is this Braves team card, purchased from the Baseball Card Exchange on eBay. My eBay sales - direct and through my California friend - are climbing back up to a level where I can cover these cards. I could have skipped the card show and just bought them with that cash, but where's the fun in that?

The journey to 75% completion is taking a few twists and turns. I actually sold a card, and tossed another in the discard pile - though technically it is still in my possession. My Jim Gilliam had a print line across the front, so I sold it along with some other slabbed singles. Probably a foolish move to upgrade now, years before the set is even complete. Regardless, I'm now at 73.5% completion.. or 73.1% completion.. or 73.97% completion. Let me explain.

There are 340 cards in the 1956 Topps set, plus two unnumbered checklists. I have two cards sitting in my COMC inventory yes, I still have to shop there, grrr.. and I still own the creased Frank Thomas card I mentioned in a previous post. Could I manipulate the numbers in such a way that it equals 75% completion?

	ct.	340-card set	342-card set
without Frank Thomas	250	73.53%	73.09%
with Frank Thomas	251	73.82%	73.39%
with COMC purchases	252	74.11%	73.68%
with Thomas & COMC	253	74.41%	73.97%

Can't quite get there yet. Guess I'll stick to discarding the Thomas and counting only what's in my possession toward the 342-card set. 

 

This set would be my magnum opus, and I've operated under the assumption that it would be my final set build. Perhaps the last card I need to complete the set will be the last card I ever purchase. Ever.


But... maybe not. Even though my budget has been streamlined and my collection space is nearly full, I have found ways to make room for a couple more boxes. And I'm getting the set building bug again.

While I've lost interest in modern baseball, I definitely want to complete the 1994 Leaf set through boxes and packs. 2001 Donruss Studio is calling to me (I have complete sets of 2003 and '04 Studio) and I'm tempted to fill in gaps of Topps factory sets with missing years 1989 blecch and 1992.

There's no room for any basketball or hockey sets at the moment, but I moved some things around and put those new binders to use for my latest football set project:

Got a nice stack of 2023 Score base cards from Johnny and decided to complete the 300-card veterans portion only. But the rookie cards are so cheap that I might go for the full 400 card set. Bryce Young was $2 at the card show. A-Rich I refuse to call him AR15  was $1.25 on COMC. The others were 20 cents each on Sportlots.

Initially I thought that Josh Allen (the QB) and Justin Jefferson were the last two base cards I needed, but after purchasing those from a slow but cheap eBay seller I found that two more were missing: Russell Wilson and Darren Waller. Those two, along with a few more 2023 Draft Picks, are on the way via Sportlots. Just in time for the 2024 Draft!

So much for my tidy 12-card wantlist

There's no chance that I'll finish 1956 Topps before I finish 2023 Score, but there is a chance that completing newer, cheaper sets rekindles my interest in building more sets. 1985 Topps (baseball or football)? 1993 Upper Deck (football or basketball)? 1983-84 O-Pee-Chee hockey?

Who knows, maybe the last set I complete will be the polar opposite of '56 Topps... like Pro Set:

Do you have a card collecting 'Final Boss' that would complete your collection enough to acquire and retire? 

 

 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

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Slabbed Single Sunday

I've added about a dozen new graded cards to the collection so far this year - not counting the 1956 Topps set build which is just a handful of cards away from 75% completion. The initial plan was to get three or four posts out of my recent COMC pickups and eBay flips but the mini-stories weren't substantial enough on their own. Instead you get a 4-in-1 post, starting with:

The most expensive card from my COMC order was this mid-grade sunset season food issue of the legendary Hank Aaron. I've had this on my wantlist for a while and didn't see anything else worth spending $29.99 on, so I grabbed it. I've now got three vintage graded singles (plus a bat relic) of Hammerin' Hank; I should have four but the 1962 Topps card I bought on COMC a few years back was rejected by PSA for 'recoloring' 😡


This won't make sense to most of you. but I'm working on a project to acquire at least one PSA-graded baseball card (in EX 5 or better) for every year from 1950 to 1980 and have every team represented within that mini-collection. So I would need one Senator pre-1961 and another one post-1961, one St. Louis Browns card and one Orioles card, one Brooklyn Dodger and one Los Angeles Dodger, and so on. [If I decided to seriously pursue this project, the 1956 Topps set would count toward years but not teams.]

I haven't had a PSA membership in several years, and I've missed the fun of picking up cheap vintage singles on COMC, sending them in to PSA, and stashing (or selling) the newly-slabbed and graded cards. Unfortunately, like a lot of companies, they jacked up their prices during Covid and priced out the working class collector like myself. And you don't get any free submissions with a basic membership anymore.

So, when COMC offered a PSA grading special right around the holidays, I cashed out my Christmas bonus and submitted some cards. Here are some of my favorites:

All of these were COMC pickups, and came back at grades I was pleased with (though I was hoping for higher on the Sheldon Jones.) The Boyer and Dryden are modest upgrades over the amount invested, but I planned to keep both regardless. Apparently I have a good eye for 1953 Bowman Color cards; years after picking up a Billy Loes that graded out a Near Mint 8, another sight unseen purchase graded high: 

This was probably the best ROI of any single in my PSA-via-COMC order; it's probably worth twice the total of the card + grading fee.

I also had a 1953 Bowman Color Gus Zernial that graded a 6 - but I sold it on the site and bought these:

$18 for a high-grade vintage single of a well-known baseball lifer, and $13 for an old friend...

..though I didn't notice until scanning this that the bottom left corner of the case (top left in this scan) is a bit cracked. Still, I'm happy with this "trade".

Not everything I submitted was a winner, however. A 1933 Goudey single that I thought would be a 2-3 graded out at a 1.5. The Johnny Mize 1948 Bowman I bought on a whim was nowhere close to mid-grade (got a 3 on that one) and the other Gus Zernial I submitted came back a 5:

If I do another blog series this year it will be on the history of the Philadelphia/KC/Oakland Athletics, but I've got to get my audience back first. A lot of my regulars have been busy, or are no longer blogging.

BGS slabs seem to have fallen out of favor with graded card collectors. I haven't bought any in a while but I always like the way modern cards looked in their holders. There was one COMC seller practically giving away dozens of former Boston Red Sox prospects who never stuck, and I was tempted to grab a couple at these prices:

For the price of two Red Sox I instead opted for a low-numbered refractor of an active pitcher/DH who has missed significant time recovering from Tommy John surgery:

Brendan McKay probably won't make much of a major league impact but I couldn't resist adding this to my Blue Rays mini-collecion for well under $10. It pairs nicely with the pack-pulled Evan Longoria I sent to BGS about 15 years ago.

Can you tell it's time for me to get a new scanner? The McKay scan makes the gold BGS label look silver, and the more recent scan of this Longo (on the left) is far worse than the scan from my Sports Card Tour post six years ago (on the right).

My phone isn't much better, as I will demonstrate shortly. Not sure if it's the lighting in my card room or the camera itself, but card photos from my phone often come out blurry.

Here's a Michael Jordan All-Star card I picked up for my 1988-89 Fleer set. Scan on the left, phone pic on the right:

This classic card didn't cost me a dime out of pocket; the $65+ shipping was paid for by my eBay flipper friend. I'd sent him a bunch of cards to sell on his store page (okay, I did have to pay shipping for that) and he spent the proceeds on this at my request. He's the reason I plan to attend a card show next weekend; some of the cards he's sold for me were pickups from his local shows and I'm planning to return the favor. If I find some vintage singles - slabbed or unslabbed - for my PC, that's a bonus.


If I go, I'll have at least a couple post-show blogs to cover my pickups. If I don't, then perhaps I'll start that Athletics series a little sooner.

Thanks for reading!



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Ermagersh Ehprilh Fewlsh Yeww Gaissh

It's been a crappy winter, nothing has gone right for me, my vacation is over, and it's raining for the 73rd time this year. And yet I'm feeling less stressed and kind of hopeful today. Maybe the prospect of going to a fairly big card show is tricking me into optimism, or maybe it's because I'm finally getting some feedback on my short story (not good feedback, necessarily...but it's getting read at least.)

I definitely needed to vent about COMC, but I chose to hold it until 4/1 so I could reserve the right to say "April Fools! I'm never quitting cards, or sports, or blogging." But I've learned to never say never - at least on any day other than 4/1.

So here's an idea for a blog post: I'm going to use the exact same scans from the previous post (plus a couple more) but this time instead of sounding like a disgruntled customer I'll show some appreciation for the cards in question. Here we go...

I've got a couple extra 2-pocket pages so I shopped for some box toppers to complete a mini-binder of oversized cards. This Tim Wakefield (purchased after he died of cancer but before his wife did) cost $2.25, and it's one of the nicer images from the set. The Danny Tartabull, Rick Sutcliffe, and Joe Oliver master photos are neat non-star singles, but Wake stood out to me as a Sox fan. Selling cards of recently deceased players is kind of gross, but buying cards of them is a way of paying tribute. Weird, huh?

Colorful chromey cards, including a couple color matches. I don't think I've seen De'Aaron Fox play but I've scooped up a couple of his cards anyhow. I'm a sucker for those Kings throwbacks. The Kris Bryant Cosmic is a Blue Moon refractor (#d/99) that cost me twice as much as the purple refractor. And the Nikita Kucherov was the cheapest of the half-dozen, at just 36 cents (yay ePack!) Collectors must have caught on to his 125+ point season; the cheapest copies are nearly twice that now.

This Clyde Drexler Topps Stars reprint sat on my watch list for over 2 years. The price finally came down to a number I was comfortable with (under $3 after years of sitting above $5). I would have ripped so much 2023 Score if my local Target ever had any in stock, and my LCS didn't charge $40+ for a damn blaster. Maybe that's why Target didn't have any in stock? 1994 Leaf might be the last modern baseball set I build, and I want to rip boxes so I can pull those glorious Gold Stars. Longo isn't a PC per se, but I've picked up a small handful of his Rays issues in blue parallel form over the years.

Pristine (and a Prizm), starting with some set fillers. I just need Marc-Andre Fleury and Jordin Tooto to complete the uncommon ring of 2003-04 Topps Pristine hockey. It's getting tougher to find cheap refractors from 2002 Pristine. Jake Plummer was the most notable name under $2.50; most of the others are either already in my collection or rookies that didn't interest me. The base Kenny Lofton was on my want list for a while; I finally tracked it down for a tough-but-fair price of $1.44.
 

2018 Panini Classics is nearly complete (veteran portion only). The Josh Gordon is sitting in my Sportlots box waiting for me to request shipment. I lied about having three boxes in three months. Only had two :/

Game Dated moments for "all sports" would be a neat concept - if it weren't so watered down with Team Canada, spring football, and golf. Luckily Upper Deck did include a couple Mikaela cards. This is my 21st different Shiffy, and they'd better make more for me (and Matt over at Cards over Coffee)

I wasn't familiar with Josephine Skriver before. Apparently she is Dutch, and she's a 1993 baby. Real ones know the deal.

It is customary for me to pluck some puck from the shallow end of the COMC-ePack pool. Yegor Sharangovich has more goals for Calgary this year(29) than Jersey got out of Tyler Toffoli before turning around and shipping him off to Winterpeg. Brilliant trades all around. Charlie McAvoy and the Alex Ovechkin cards were the only ones over 28 cents in this group. While I dislike the distracting EVOLVE inserts I couldn't pass on Primeau for 26 cents. I'll always appreciate him for actually accepting the trade to Hartford - unlike those a-holes Brendan Shanahan and Paul Coffey.

The two biggest non-graded pickups in this order were the Blue Prizm Filip Forsberg RC and the Ralph Kiner auto. (I really should isolate them but I'm lazy) Kiner cost just $17.99, and fits right in with my other autos from 2000 Fleer Greats. I might give them their own post one day. Forsberg was exactly what I was looking for - a color matching Prizm RC of a significant active player. And, because he's a Swedish dude who plays pro hockey in Nashville, I was able to snag this superstar for $9.25. Try finding an equivalent Prism parallel of the 15th-best football or basketball player for that price.

Picked up a couple cheap autos to fill my autographed card box (including a 76 cent single of a CT guy!), another $3 Steven Stamkos relic, and a 1953-style Ernie Banks from a 5-card VIP giveaway set. Also the Khris Middleton was a nice PC pickup, especially since he was the cheapest of any single from that set on the site. I'd buy these for $1.75 all day, especially when sellers are asking $5+ for guys like Kyle Kuzma and Miles Bridges.

Picked up some nice Packers during this past football season, especially the Aaron Jones and AJ Dillon singles. This is how long my order was held up: when I bought the Jones Prizm rookie (for $2.25) he was injured and Green Bay looked lost without him. When I requested shipment he had just kept the Pack's playoff hopes alive with a 120-yard game against the Vikings. When I received it... he had already joined the Vikes 😢

There's very little room left in my Devils and Red Sox boxes but I managed to pick up some cheapies. Well, the Exquisite Brodeur wasn't cheap; that thick boi was $12.50. But it's numbered to 99 and I was at that game :)

Bonus content!

In my original post I mentioned a card with three creases and no condition note from COMC. Also Jon mentioned my 1956 Topps set build, so... here's a scan of the Frank Thomas card:

Now, here's the card in my hand:

How do you not notice that? WTF, COMC? 

This is why I buy graded cards. Perhaps I'll show off my slabbed pickups from this order (about 10 cards) in my next post. And perhaps I'll have a card show to blog about in the near future...



Thanks for reading!




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