'Tis the Season (For a Trade Post)

Happy holidays! I hope you're all watching the Holiday Bowl right now. No? Okay, well, settle in for some light reading instead. Jeff from 2 x 3 Heroes is giving away some cards to celebrate the season and he also recently sent me a nice box of cards as part of a big swap.

The retail exclusive Heritage cards have been hard to come by, for me at least, so it was nice to see several in this trade. I am trying not to get the sense of dread I usually get about completing every Heritage set, but here it is almost 2013 and I have so many more cards to go for this one.

This one is headed for my Cardinals binders instead of my (yet to be assembled) 2012 Heritage binder.

Oh, look at those fluffy little clouds.

Between Heritage and Archives, this was the year of the floating head revival. I wonder if we'll see more floating heads in 2013. I don't know how I feel about this. Apparently, neither does Dustin.

Also included in the box were plenty of Ginter goodies, like Marie Curie here.

It's an oft-injured short print. No, make that a short print of an oft-injured player.

I wonder where this treaty would fall in the All-Time Treaty Power Rankings. Perhaps some website somewhere has a slideshow I could refer to.

Oh, and there were Cardinal goodies in the box as well. Were there ever! A bunch of minis were to be had, and I picked my favorite one: this Chris Carpenter from the Ginter revival debut set in 2006.

The Topps base Matt Holliday card was one of my favorite cards of 2012, so it was exciting to get the Opening Day blue parallel version. Serial numbered with the good foil stuff.

I am not sure what happened to the rest of this card, but I swear it's really there. K-Mac is a man without a team right now after he spent most of 2012 on the DL.

Most McGwire Cardinals cards look hilariously dated. Not dated in a good way, like '50s Topps cards.

Finally, there were a couple of cards for the Jim Edmonds collection thrown in, including this 1995 Leaf thing.

And there was also this Metal thing. So metal.

Merry Christmas! It was quite a year for this blog (and trade posts).