A Cardinals Bounty

The motherlode of Cardinals cards from @ShaneSalmonson hit my mailbox this spring. 

About 90% of my trading card wheelings and dealings happen through this blog, but occasionally I'll venture out into some other sort of website or social media platform and roll the dice. In late April, Shane Salmonson -- who does the weekly Cheap Wax Wednesdays feature for Beckett, mentioned that he had a bunch of team lots to dispose of in an attempt to reduce inventory. (We've all been there.) I reached out and sent back some Red Sox cards (though not nearly as many!)

This was, to put things lightly, a very quality bunch of cards. I ended up with around 1500 Cardinals cards packed tightly away boxes inside a larger box, and it took me several days to go through them all. It was, as you can probably imagine for a team collector, a ton of fun. While I ended up with only around 100+ cards to add to my own collection (this is what happens when you have around 20,000 cards in your team collection), I was able to find good homes for some of the excess extras.

The sheer variety of the cards was very impressive. I'm only showing a dozen or so cards here that were "randomly" selected, but it was quite an adventurous group. Any chance to add a 2008 Upper Deck Documentary Gold card to my binders is a rare one, so that was certainly nice.

I complain about my scanner somewhat regularly around here, but this is just funny. This card is actually supposed to be a glow-in-the-dark orange color. Instead, it looks like an early spring cherry blossom border.

The scanner does handle gold bordered cards much better, fortunately. The annual numbered parallel from the flagship Topps set has changed a bit over the years, and in 2001 it was quite a bit shinier. This is a good looking card of Matty Mo.

I could make a comment about this buyback Reggie Cleveland card and playing in mostly empty stands these days, but I'm not... well, crap, I guess I already did.

His name is T.J. Mathews. I can't really complain about my scanner here, because no scanners seem to like these kinds of foil cards.

Minis are great, but this is just an ordinary Felipe Lopez mini card from the 2010 Allen & Ginter set, right?

Ha! It's a no numbered version! So sneaky.

You could still blow people's minds in 1998 when you told them you were online. Dude, I was online tonight. For several hours!

I'm not sure why this particular year's Gold Label design had to use so much of the card space for the player's name, but it still looks nice. I sometimes wish that all cards were Gold Label, but if they were... would we really appreciate them, or would we take them for granted?

I hate to end things on a down note considering all of the great cards I received in this box of boxes, but this card of the ill-fated Oscar Taveras is at least impressively die-cut. You could probably hurt yourself if you did something ill-advised with this card is what I'm saying.