Another Four-Sport Winner

A sportsball trade package. 

The always excellent buckstorecards found another way to smuggle cards across the northern border and into my collection, sending a bounty of Cardinals, Trail Blazers, (American) footballers and even some hockey guys my way. I haven't really figured how how to incorporate hockey cards into the blog yet (or my life, really), but I have a nice little collection of St. Louis Blues cards brewing. They narrowly missed the playoffs this season and narrowly missed the cut for this post.

Minor league baseball cards are always high on the list of stuff I like to see in these sorts of swaps. I even like the new stuff Topps puts out. I just wish the packs were a bit cheaper and more accessible.

Former Cardinals rotation stalwart Jaime Garcia made his last appearances in a Cardinals uniform in last year's flagship Series 1. This is the gold parallel of his Cardinals send off. I miss the old gold borders from past sets.

Marcus Mariota RC Alert! I don't actually recognize what set this is from, but it's a little more substantial than your average set.

Oh, the perils of being a team collector. As I occasionally have to explain, not only do I collect this type of transitional card (player shown with old team, labeled as a Cardinal), but I also collect the reverse of this. If a card depicts a player in a Cardinals uniform, even if he's labeled with his new team, it goes in my collection. (Same rules apply to my Blazers cards.) Does everyone else do this, or am I just weird?

Speaking of the Trail Blazers, it's former big lug of a center Robin Lopez on some sort of red parallel from the 2014-15 Panini Threads set. I bet you already knew that, though, since it says THREADS in huge letters.

The scanner doesn't ever do a good job at showing this, but you can see right through this Nic Batum card. Cool stuff!

Finally, this is a jersey card from Panini's annual "Black Friday" promotion. At the time Black Friday rolled around, it didn't look like Zach Collins would have much of an impact on this year's Blazers team, but he started logging enough key minutes that they eventually sent former lottery pick/project Noah Vonleh packing. (Actually, it's more complicated than that, and Vonleh likely would have stuck around if the team's financial situation wasn't all screwed up right now.)