An Icy PWE Round-Up

 

Envelopes galore from @nightowlcardz.bsky.social and @thorzul.bsky.social and more!

 

Well, it's very icy here in Portland and it's taking its sweet time thawing out. There hasn't been any mail delivery all week, but we can still look at some cards I got back in November. Let's check it.

Night Owl Cards probably deserves his own tag here considering how many times he's sent cards over the years. This time it was a twin set of envelopes stuffed with Cardinals and set needs. Ryan Helsley came with his own fancy serial number stamped on the back (177/199). 

This one commemorates the rare and long impossible all St. Louis World Series. I believe it's from one of those early '70s Fleer World Series sets featuring artwork by the mysterious R.G. Laughlin.

When Panini makes pink and purple (and sometimes blue) parallel cards, I occasionally have a hard time distinguishing the difference and often have to result to comparing images online. That's not the case with Topps Chrome. There's no disputing that this is pink, unless you only see in monochrome like an old '60s television set.

Occasionally I have been gifted a special All-Star Game stamped Cardinals team set, but that wasn't the case this past year. I can cross DC off my list, though!

Here are some of the aforementioned set needs. I am now done with all of the non-SP base cards (including the High series!) from 2023 Topps Heritage.

I think I "completed" this set in record time, folks. Of course, I had to modify that statement with quotation marks because no Heritage set is ever truly complete, at least not by my standards.

Death Stare Cards aka THORZUL had his annual Trade Me Anything event a couple of months back, and I took it upon myself to snag a couple of cards from his freshly opened Topps Update box as per tradition. I have become less adventurous over the years at finding "anything" to send and have mostly stuck to want lists, but one of these days I'm going to find something weird with his name on it and send it on over to Milwaukee.

The other card I claimed was an Adley Rutschman foil parallel. I'm not overly fond of these checklist cards with the dumb captions, but my secret Adley stash is very small you see. One of these days, I might have to add an "unofficial collections" list to the menu.

The last group of cards was sent over from Jeremy of Topps Cards That Never Were.

Fortunately, Jeremy has been very patient with me, well, forgetting to mail the vintage-y cards that he claimed over the summer, but they're in the mail now (or at least will be when the streets thaw out.)

I was thrilled to land not one, but two mid-00's Jim Edmonds parallels for one of my highest priority player collections.

Oh Panini. We're going to miss your silly little "camo" parallels that just look like a failed pixel-based art project.

Topps isn't without blame here. I'm not entirely sure why they are so in love with foilboard "ice" parallels that just look like they have random shape patterns when scanned. I feel like Bowman Platinum is always made on a small budget, however, even if the "Platinum" branding would suggest otherwise.

I know that no one really misses Opening Day, but I don't really think they've found a suitable low budget replacement for it, either. I have not been a fan of Big League at all, even though for some reason I buy a box or two of it every year. (Probably because it's cheap?)

We end things here with another mid-00's Jim Edmonds card: a weird contest card doubling as an insert. I don't feel like the card companies really intended for collector's to actually hang on to stuff like this, but here we are nearly 20 years later and I'm still looking at it and talking about it.