Cardinals and Ducks, Ducks and Cardinals

Both are birds. 

Well, we're well into March and I'm still cleaning up last year's mess. Dennis from Too Many Verlanders / Manninghams has been sending me great stuff for years, and I'm always excited about what he sends. What I'm not always excited about is scanning cards, but you know the drill.

Dion Jordan came back last season to play his first meaningful football in a really long time. He's had a lot of off-field battles to get back to football. While he's likely never going to live up to his lofty draft selection (3rd overall), I'm excited about his future. (Also, these triangular quasi-3D cards are weird. If it was orange, it would almost be a traffic cone!

I'm a hypocrite. I'm always leading the call for preserving the sanctity of old card designs and card stock, and I think things like the Topps Heritage Chrome parallels are pointless and unnecessary. And yet, why do Topps Archives Reserve cards look so good to me?

Fleer/Flair Showcase was one of those fancy multi-tiered products, and as you can see by the serial number, this isn't your run of the mill base card. (The base cards generally look great, too.)

Speaking of shiny and fancy, this is a refractor parallel of a Haloti Ngata rookie year card that I already owned. I mean, I didn't own this particular card, just the non-refractor version of it. Now I have the shiny version. Clear? Good.

As I continue to catalog my entire Cardinals collection on TCDB, I am starting to realize that I will probably end up with more Pujols cards than any other player. I was already disappointed in Mark McGwire's status as the (temporary) No. 1 in my collection, but now that I realize I think I have enough unique Pujols cards to fill an entire standard binder without even going through all of the fancy/serial-numbered/whatever cards of his in shoeboxes, I am betting that he's going to end up on top over Ozzie. And yet, I've never really made much of an effort to collect him. In any case, this is just a simple base card but it filled a need. I just can't wait until I have two dedicated Albert Pujols binders...