Green Cards

 

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

In honor of the day, here are a few selected green cards I've acquired over the last six months or so. One or two of these may have already made an appearance here. I am not keeping track of these things!

Watching the Blazers lately has made their fans turn a particular shade of green.

Mmm, this one is kind of minty.

The Mosaic patterns, when scanned, always look like the card is sitting in the shadow of some beaded curtains.

Here are those beads again.

Mmm, green donuts.

Flaherty is an Irish name, if I'm not mistaken.

This would have been better if Duarte was in a green Ducks uniform.

Boosh!

Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

Contest Reminder and More Feathered Friends

Eagles goodies and more from @forgotaboutblay plus a contest reminder. 

 

Do you like filling out brackets? I find that most people enjoy this weird process. Some people spend more time on this than actually watching the games. Everyone likes to come across as smarter than your fellow human, even when it turns out that you're really picking team names out of a hat. If this sounds like you and you also happen to like free sports cards, you should check out our latest March Radness contest!

If you're here to see cards, I've got some good ones for you. Dennis from Too Many Verlanders sent along a really nice Christmas gift that included a bunch of fancy Eagles cards (and more!) Let's check out a few of them.

I have to admit to being pretty excited about Jordan Matthews when he first came to the team. I'm not any kind of NFL talent evaluator, however. I seem to recall him getting off to a decent start, but he eventually found himself out of a job before resurfacing in 2018 as an emergency option for the Eagles.

There's a lot of jersey on this one! I'm not always a big fan of jumbo swatch cards because they tend to minimize the focus of the player, but this one was set up nicely.

Bryce Brown backed up LeSean McCoy for a couple of years. Those days already seem like a lifetime ago. I do like the hashmarks on the card border.

This Jason Avant card probably came from Dennis's stash of Michigan dupes. I doubt I have very many chunks of footballs in my collection.

Marvin McNutt was another Big Ten star, but he didn't make much of an impact at the pro level.

Dennis always manages to find some really cool Oregon Ducks cards, and this Kenjon Barner is certainly no exception. I don't think I've heard of this Quantum brand before, but I can't say that I pay any attention to what Upper Deck is doing since they lost their baseball license many years ago.

 

Last up is actually a basketball card. Due to the nature of NBA cards, at least in the Panini era, I never would have ended up with a Jared Jeffries Trail Blazers card if it wasn't for this Signatures card. Since any given set usually only includes a couple of a team's star players plus their current crop of rookies, role players and end-of-bench types usually end up getting shut out unless they find their way into an autographed checklist. Of course, this is likely due to Panini having a stockpile of signed stickers in their storage facilities. In any case, we got at least part of a photo of Jeffries, who made 38 appearances with Portland in his final NBA season.

Contest Time! March Radness XIV

 

It's Year 14 of our annual contest! Pick all of the NCAA tournament games for a shot at a prize! #MarchRadness

 

It's back! Pick the best NCAA bracket and you can win a cool prize. There are also runner-up prizes. I will also select one game for anyone, including those who don't want to fill out a bracket, to predict the final score of (game TBD.)

Rules for 2023: 

• Selection Sunday is March 12th, which means that is the earliest the brackets can be filled out. The games that actually count for the contest will start on March 16th.
• Default ESPN scoring rules apply. You must fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game. There's some disclaimers in there about the possible cancellation of games and/or the tournament itself. I didn't read it, and hopefully it won't need to be addressed.
• First place wins a brand new blaster box of sports cards (subject to availability!) I will email the winner shortly after the final game to make the prize selection among the available products at the time.
• Second and third place prizes will consist of some team bags of cards from your favorite MLB and/or NBA teams.
• As always, the worst (honest) bracket will get something, too.
• Click here now to join, and follow the "Create a Bracket Now" link. Make sure to fill out your entire bracket prior to March 16th!

A Flock of Group Breaks

 

The latest batch of @flywheels box break goods shows off some interesting parallels. 

 

More fun stuff from Cardboard Collections Affordable Group Breaks hit the mailbox awhile back. This time around, I did pretty well in the parallel department with my chosen Cardinals selections. I also added a few more cards to my collection that represented another bird team.

The 2003 Fleer Box Score set features actual newspaper box scores as a background motif, although these games have nothing to do with the actual team represented on the cards. I snagged two of the 1st Edition parallels from the set, which feature an all-silver background and are numbered to just 150 copies.

Switching over to a much newer set, this final (?) offering of Panini Absolute baseball came with all sorts of parallels because, well, it's Panini. I'm told this is a Lava parallel, although I'm not seeing any indication of heat or fire here.

In the times following 9/11, the American flag was seemingly everywhere, and that included baseball cards. I landed a sizeable chunk of needed cards from the 2003 Upper Deck 40-Man set and also wound up with this patriotic parallel of one of the top players that I collect.

More parallel madness? Check out this Holo Silver card numbered 99/99 from the '99 Pacific Paramount set. I'm going to throw this up on eBay as true "eBay 1 of 1" and sell it for 99 thousand dollars. It will work. Trust me!

A couple of the football breaks were right within my sweet spot for the green bird team ('90s, pre uniform-change.) SkyBox made a lot of fun looking NFL sets right out of the gate, none of which I could really afford back in the day.

I still don't even really know what Collector's Edge was or why they felt like serial numbering every single card, even though they were printing them by the truckload like everyone else. I do know that these look cool as hell, comic book style font notwithstanding.

An Old Pack of Cards: Repacked

 

Assorted cards, vintage? 

 

From the Clearing off the Desk Dept. comes this pack of cards I purchased at a card show last summer. There was a table with a box of these "Repacked Wax" cards along with some stacks of sample cards that were supposedly pulled. The samples produced better results than my packs did. I bought two packs, and you can find the other one that I posted here.

The first card out of the pack is decided not vintage. It's from the 2019 Topps GQ set.

Lonnie Smith, former Cardinals champion, makes an appearance on the familiar 1991 Upper Deck design.

I don't know that anyone would say that the 2023 Topps set draws a lot of inspiration from 1983, but it doesn't have the headshot in the lower left thing going on.

This is quite a lousy photo. I'm curious to know why Lamar Johnson is wearing a helmet and a jacket, or why it appears that he's standing in front of a huge fog on this 1980 Topps card. He did do a bit of DH'ing in his career, so maybe he was trying to keep warm in between at-bats but was also trying to stay mentally prepared with the helmet... or something? It's a bit of a reach, I know.

Ehh... 2020 Topps.

This is a 1974 Topps card, as you might have guessed. It's what the 2023 Heritage set will be based on. I'm not sure I'm all that excited about this. It's a quality design, don't get me wrong, but this might be the breaking point where I feel like Heritage has caught up with Archives and isn't anything special anymore.

Mike Armstrong brings the '80s glasses (and beard) to this 1984 Fleer card. Mid-'80s Fleer cards are my jam.

I don't remember this player, but the photo (from 1993 Topps) looks pretty familiar.

I liked the 1982 and 1983 (the one with the glove instead of the ball) Donruss sets quite a bit when I was younger as well. I think it's because their packs were, for a time at least, more affordable a lot of other older sets.

I'm sure I must have owned this card at one point, because I think I had an opened 1990 Fleer Update set for no apparent reason. Nevertheless, I don't remember this card or Wally Backman as a Pirate at all.

I remember there being a bit of hype locally about Erik Hanson, or at least this card. Maybe because it's an '89 Upper Deck card, or maybe it was just people propping up any young Mariner that displayed some level of competence on the field. He was no Griffey, of course.

We advance forward slightly to the 1992 Topps set. Nice shades.

Card companies in 1986 were seemingly afraid to use Utility (or UT) as a position on their cards. What else would an OF/IF type be, though?

The only set hyped as much (or more?) than 1989 Upper Deck when I was in my young collecting years was 1987 Fleer. And if you pulled a star player like Kirby Puckett in one of those Fleer packs? That was money.

Last one out of the pack is this Mets pitcher from 1985 Topps. I could never afford packs of this because of the McGwire card and other "key rookies", but a friend of mine happened to gift me the whole set... minus those key rookies, of course. Pouring through the bulk of the set made me never really that interested in buying the packs.

Each pack has a sticker or two at the end to take the bullet and keep the real cards wax-free.

I'm not sure I'll seek these out again considering how underwhelming my packs were, but it's not going to keep me completely off repacks.

Quick Hitter

Five Cardinals cards on a Friday. 

 

Here's a "quick hitter" trade post featuring cards from cards as i see them. This probably could have fit into a PWE (and thus, a PWE round-up post) were it not for the chunky style card at the end of this post.

If I recall, Nolan Arenado ended up skipping the All-Star festivities so he could rest or something, so his card is one of the few in the set where he's not in his (ugly) jersey. I remember Jose Altuve not participating as well, but his card has him holding up his jersey in front of the Houston home crowd on another day.

Joe Kelly has probably been one of the more meme-able players to come out of the league in the last decade. He's mostly been a pretty good reliever over the course of his career, although he's coming off of a rough 2022 campaign with the White Sox.

This tribute to 1989 Topps came in the form of a slightly smaller die cut card as an insert in the 2014 set. This is before they decided to roll with the 35th Anniversary celebration cards each year.

At last, we've arrived at the chunky card. I'm sure that in some households, Triple Threads cards are piled high to the ceiling, but here at Cards on Cards central these things get special treatment!

The Night Owl Express

Another smooth @nightowlcards delivery. 

 

Hall of Fame blogger Night Owl Cards has sent me many, many envelopes of things over the years. The cards we're looking at today came over here back in November, as I slowly but surely catch up on a few stacks of cards that have been sitting around somewhat neglected.

The number of Topps Sapphire cards in my collection is very low, since I don't usually go after fancy versions of base cards that tend to cost more than a pack itself. I do seriously appreciate getting these in trades, though, since they're not something I'm typically going to find in a quarter box at a card show.

A whole Cardinals set with pink borders would be an interesting looking thing. The team would need to be decked out in red to really make it pop, of course.

This sure is vibrant! I am willing to bet that I have more Dylan Carlson cards with an RC logo on them than cards of many of the team's stars from the '80s. Of course, I still probably need hundreds more of them.

Noooooooooooooot! That is all.

There were a couple of cards of the retired Cardinals legend. I've always had a weird affinity towards the 2002 Victory set. I wouldn't mind opening a box someday, if that's even possible. It feels like most older unopened stuff either ended up some hoarder's basement or was opened during the pandemic.

The rainbow foil effect gives this All-Star flashback card from 2020 Topps Update a bit of a shine.

Night Owl also sent a pile of Allen & Ginter needs, as is customary. Here's a couple of non-baseball athletes on the mini black border design from way back in 2010.

The bulk of the rest of the cards came from the 2021 Ginter set. I've relied heavily on others to put together this set as well as the 2022 set. For some reason, when it's not released in summer, my enthusiasm for opening A&G blasters really tends to wane. Will this be the year that the manufacturing delays finally start to subside?

Like most baseball fans, my first recollection of Edgar Renteria was his heroic performance in the Florida Marlins first championship season. He'd later, of course, become a key player for the Cardinals.

Thanks again to the Night Owl!