Tradus Strigiformes

Night Owl is up next on the Big Spill Trade Wheel du Jour. Once again, Big Spill rules apply: I'm not entirely sure that Night Owl sent me every card in this post, but I am pretty confident about certain ones. Two packages I received from him actually hit the deck, so at least this way I'm pushed into posting about both at once.

I've spent a bit of time flapping my arms up and down wildly about the retail black parallels in this year's Heritage set, but I'll say it again: these ones seem like they could be more difficult to collect than the past two years. Previously, Topps stuck to using the 100 cards (with a C prefix) that they also made various Chrome parallels out of. This time around, there's no special numbering which means that theoretically there's a non-Chrome black parallel of every single card in the set. They still come three-to-a-blister pack at finer big box stores near you, and I've found it hard enough to get the parallel versions from the last two sets. So, in other words, yikes.

1975 Minis are Night Owl's big thing, so it stands to reason that he'd accumulate some extras. This is good news for me, because until recently the only Cardinals 1975 Mini that I owned was a mint copy of Bob Forsch's rookie card. It's criminally underpriced at $1.00 "book value". You might want to pick yourself up one.

Kenny Reitz! Reitz is pronounced "reetz", kinda like beets or tweets. Yes, you can see that I don't have a ton  to say about '70s Cardinals. The only person who has much to say about that decade of Cardinaldom is Al Hrabosky, but if you've ever watched an FSN Midwest broadcast you wouldn't find that the least bit surprising.

Night Owl warned me about the condition of this card, but Sonny doesn't look too torn up about it.

A couple of years ago, Topps did a bit of a tribute to the whole '75 Minis thing with some inserts in their Topps Lineage product. That set was strange and a little bit of a flop, but it morphed itself into Topps Archives (for better or for worse) while the retro Mini concept was absorbed into the flagship product. As you can see, they missed the mark a bit on this design (and the size as Night Owl has pointed out before.) Still, I need a ton of Lineage inserts and parallels and still haven't found the time to sort that all out.

I've stalled a bit on my 2003 Topps set project, but it's always nice to get a few of these thin blue cards. I need to bite the bullet and buy a bunch of the traded cards one way or another.

Speaking of blue, I'm glad to see that Topps Opening Day has strayed from the shade of what they seem to think is blue that they use for the Walmart parallels. I don't know if I agree with all of the sparkly bits, though, but what do I know? I mean, I can't even keep my little stacks of cards straight.