Tons o' Card Fun

A high volume exchange of needed cards. 

As part of a surge of trades this year, I had the opportunity to send card to (and receive from) people I'd never traded with before. The biggest one of these I'd done in quite some time was worked out with Mike of A Life Shaped by Baseball. Mike's player collections are numerous and far reaching, so if you've got some extra cards I'd encourage you to check out his blog.

I have to say that when I get such a large volume of cards in the mail, I often struggle to choose some things to share here. I decided to go with a slightly different format than usual, in hopes that I can sneak in a few more pictures of cards on a time budget.

The Cardinals are going to be a bit slighted here, as Mike sent stuff from all corners of my interests. I really liked this nearly borderless Sweet Spot design from 2003 (might be new to me?) and the gold framed Gallery cards are always welcome. I decided to throw in a Bowman's Best card because, as mentioned recently, they always scan so well for me.

Here's a few baseball cards from the non-Cardinals section of my collection. Rookie year Carp, a gold parallel to match Jimmy's golden hair, and that wonderful idea that Upper Deck had to actually date their photos are on display here.

We're in the thick of basketball season now, and the Blazers are trying to remember how to be a good team. Here's a few cards from some eras where they were actually a good team. Brian Grant's card is a "silver signature" parallel.

Here are some Ducks alums in their pro uniforms. Miller was best known in his earlier Falcons uniform, Graziani took over at QB for Danny O'Neil while I was still in school, and Cota was from my own college days as well.

Here are more basketball guys. Sheed's card is very bootleg looking. The Drexler Z-Force is terrible in many ways ("Zupermen", that uniform...) but I have nothing bad to say about the former Duck Terrell Brandon or his card.

Randall Cunningham gets his own trio to himself, with the legendary Randy Moss worming his way into my card collection.

Mike also set over a bunch of set needs from the past two decades. Nice! The middle card is a late career Shawon Dunston.

The Eagles may have gotten the short shrift here, but this card is awesome and shiny and features that really good Eagles uniform and not their very unremarkable one that they've been running out there for years and years.