World Headquarters Edition

Green football and loads of baseball. 

 

Awhile back, Dennis from Too Many Verlanders came into a bunch of cards and was generous to share some of the spoils with yours truly. As is often the case, the package came with an excellent selection of football guys I collect. You know, the guys in green! Nick Foles is near the top of my list of modern Eagles to collect as he led the team to the promised land not too long ago, so it's always great to pick up something fun like this rookie patch thing.

Green means Ducks as well (mallard green!) DAT was a fun player to watch, always a complete blur on the field. (Didn't they call the offense "the blur offense" at one point?) Many of my favorite looking Oregon cards were made by Upper Deck for some reason.

Patriots rookie (well, last season) Christian Gonzalez looks especially good here in a green parallel version. I'm glad this is from the draft set where Gonzalez is wearing his college gear, although I'm sure I'll eventually have a bunch of his cards where he's wearing that dastardly Patriots garb.

Marcus Mariota may not be wearing green here, but it's alright by me.

These playing card-themed inserts are pretty silly. I don't know that I've seen any other ones besides Gonzalez.

DAT is back again, this time on another Upper Deck card in acetate.

I don't think I have a clue about this brand. Pro Picks? It blends in with Wild Card and Leaf and Sage and whatever other small potatoes college brands are out there. I never really see this kind of stuff on shelves.

Akili Smith's son, also a quarterback, is set to join the Ducks next year. I wonder how much influence Smith Sr. had on his son's recruiting decision, considering how different things are at UO now than they were in the late '90s.

It's back to Eagles territory we go with a few more former Birds. The current team is set to open their season with the Packers in Brazil shortly.

I always thought Mack Hollins would make a much better name for a lineman, or at least not a skill position guy.

Jalen not-Hurts looks absolutely thrilled to be stuck inside this Christmas ornament. Does Panini release a holiday-themed version of their Donruss football set like they do with NBA Hoops, or was this just part of the regular set?

After all of those football guys to get your football weekend started (FOOTBALL!), here's a former Trail Blazer basketball pro. The backdrop of these cards looks like some cheesy computer generated graphic pattern that you could find in a Google image search or something.

The red bird baseball team can't avoid the green either.

Looks like mojo!

Elite Extra Edition is a weird and fairly janky looking product every year. It looks like this year, Panini got bored with their usual pink parallels and decided to unleash whatever the heck this is to the collecting world.

There needs to be a prominent set of round cards (or discs!) every year. It should be baked into every contract. I would actually order Slurpees if 7-11 ever decided to bring back their discs, and I never drink that kind of stuff.

We go from the circular to this die cut gem. I think these inserts are fairly tough to come by.

Speaking of tough to come by, I've run across these '90s Sportscenter themed inserts a bunch of times, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen a World Headquarters Edition parallel before. Nice!

Last, but certainly not least, is this huge pile of Topps Heritage cards (mostly short prints!) and Allen & Ginter minis that all checked off various needs from my various wants. One fuzzy picture from my phone can't possibly do this justice, but suffice it to say that I was very pleased with this overall.

Cardinals! Blazers! Football Guys!

Three PWEs from @collec_sport run the gamut of the big three sports. 

 

I'm back from an unplanned layoff... nah, let's just call it a short period of inactivity for the blog. I hadn't intended to take the entire holiday week off, but that's how things played out. I may have had a different title for this post if life had gone differently (I'm Thankful for PWEs?) Tonight I'm taking a look at three envelopes of the plain and white kind sent from The Coffee Card Guy (aka Sport Card Collectors aka Cards Over Coffee.) These were some seriously loaded envelopes as you'll see shortly.

If 2019 was a lost season for Jordan Hicks, 2020 was... well, it was kind of lost for everyone. Hicks was one of the first names to officially opt out of the season, but he was unlikely to pitch regardless of his status considering the combination of factors including his young age, his incredible velocity, and his long road to recovery from Tommy John surgery. I sincerely hope we're talking about him a lot in coming springtime, because he was fun to watch.

I do not have many (if any?) gold Chrome refractors, so it was really cool to land this Marcell Ozuna version from the 2018 Topps Chrome Update set. I haven't heard anything about there being a Chrome Update set for 2020, but considering how underwhelming the regular Update set is, that's probably for the best.

It's Big City time! I actually really like the way these Stat Line parallels scan, compared to some card that have a primarily foil finish.

Closing out the run of Cardinals cards is this Trevor Rosenthal gold parallel from 2015 Topps, the last year that Topps truly created a gold bordered parallel. These parallels have looked pretty unimpressive lately.
 

Each envelope had a theme, and the second one featured Trail Blazers cards. I really like some of the basketball designs that Panini used in the years where they were still figuring things out before they settled in to the mess that they are today. (Granted, it's a mess that clearly makes them tons and tons of cash.)

LaMarcus Aldridge went full Beast Mode in the first two games of the 2014 NBA Playoffs opening round, setting a tone for the Blazers to pull off their first series win in fourteen years. I owned the card from Game 2 of that series against the Rockets and now have a copy of Game 1. Even if we hate how Aldridge left the team, Blazers fans will always have fond memories of him for this.

Ah, more Aldridge. I think I said my piece already. Moving on...

It's back to one of the present stars of the team with this CJ McCollum "Lord" parallel from the 2016-17 Panini Excalibur set. It wasn't too long ago that you could find stuff from this set cheaply, including repack packs. Now, of course, you can't find anything basketball card-related cheaply anymore. (If you can, please tell me about it... and don't tell anyone else! Shh!)

This is a nice card of Sabas, one of my all-time favorites. It's a blue parallel from the 2017-18 Donruss Optic set (powered by Panini!)

Last up is the envelope from the Eagles/football guys envelope. De'Anthony Thomas was never an Eagle, of course, but he is a big part of my Oregon Ducks collection. In case you wondered about my football collecting hierarchy, it goes something like this: 

Oregon Ducks cards ---> Oregon Ducks alums in pro football uniforms ---> pineapple on pizza* ---> certain Eagles cards ---> getting run over by a bus ---> Michael Vick Eagles cards

I'm actually finally organizing my Eagles cards and adding them to my collection on TCDB, so I will have an updated Eagles trading page here shortly. I'm going to keep all of the cards in boxes, though, but at least they will be in some sort of order with the dupes filtered out. Speaking of dupes, let me know if someone out there wants any of my excess Eagles cards. I really don't have room for a lot of football cards in my life.

And speaking of uninspiring Topps gold parallels (I did... really, I did!), these football gold parallels from 2014 are sort of oddly colored. They strike me as more of a yellow/beige than a true gold. Both of these numbered cards are of players (Ertz and Foles) from the Super Bowl winning team, though, so that's a big positive for me. Again, watch this space for more on my NFL collecting quirks if you're interested.

If you had asked me who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018, I would have said, "who?" And if you had said "Jordan Howard", I would have said, "oh, that's weird, I forgot about him." But you would have been wrong, because he didn't lead the Eagles in rushing in 2018. He led the Bears in rushing that year. And now I still don't know who led the Eagles in rushing in 2018. It probably wasn't Darren Sproles because he was a myth.

Kenjon Barner was actually an Eagle for several seasons, but this holds a loftier place in my collection because it's a Ducks card. In fact, it's a Ducks card featuring a throwback uniform from the '90s, giving it several more cool points. Cool points are all that matters in cards. They're way more important to me than "slabs" and "grades" and "pop" and all that nonsense.

I may seem pretty ambivalent about Eagles cards at times, but I definitely need to get my hands on all of the The Champ Is Here inserts from that Super Bowl winning team. That was a fun team and a fun game.