Late Night PWE Round-Up

Another round of the small envelope delivers including stuff from @dimeboxman and more. 

 

I have to admit to still being a bit shell-shocked from the recent death of my only pathway to buying trading cards in person and I haven't quite figured out what that means for my collection and my blog in the future. That's probably a better topic for another time, though, so let's just dig into a few things I received in smaller packages from kind folks who have spent their time here recently.

First up is a bunch of stuff from Nick of Dime Boxes fame. I am looking towards going to a card show for the first time in about 18 months when June rolls around, but I'm not expecting there to be vast quantities of dime boxes. We'll see what happens. The first card that rolled out of the envelope (or out of this post, anyway) is one of those mysterious modern Leaf cards. All I can gather from looking at the card is that it's a 2020 Leaf card and it clearly pays tribute to the 1990 design that caused such a stir back in the day.

Here's Eli Marrero on a SkyBox Thunder "Rant" parallel. It has purple foil to stand out by itself.

This one was a huge surprise, as one of my all-time faves hasn't exactly been on this earth and available to sign autographs for nearly two decades. I'd be interested to know the story behind this card, if there actually is one.

I opened a blaster from 2003 Bowman Heritage set recently, so the set has been on my mind a bit lately. It's not the best looking set by any means, but it interests me a lot more than most of what new stuff Topps and Panini crank out these days.

Speaking of new stuff, this Yadi card is a Chrome-d up version of the 1952 "Redux" inserts from the latest flagship set. It shines in person, of course.

Longtime Rockies blogger hiflew from Cards from the Quarry has taken the "Free Stuff Friday" thing (so 2020), flipped it to Sundays and run with it. I've claimed a few cards over the past few months, and have gotten some fun envelopes as a result. Alex Reyes is firmly cemented as the closer on this year's version of the Cardinals, even if the announcers constantly mentions his aspirations to move on to bigger and brighter things (i.e. a starting rotation spot.)

A Blazer sneaks in here. CJ and his squad made the playoffs for the eighth consecutive season, good for the longest active streak in the NBA. Let's hope that they do some big damage this time around. I'm just glad they avoided that horrible play-in tournament that should be killed with fire and never spoken of again.

It's a numbered refractor. It's swaggy.

Jason Motte's Upper Deck rookie card is featured on this one-and-done set called Icons, which continued the weird '00s concept where most rookie cards needed to be serial numbered. Nowadays, they print tens of thousands of them (if not a hundred thousand) and they're not numbered and people pay crazy money for them.

This Waino is an orange parallel that's numbered to 199, although it scanned in more of a salmon color.

Last up is a one-off card from Chris, The Collector. Unbeknownst to Chris, before the first Blazers playoff game that I ever attended, I had a photo of my next to a life-sized photo of Gerald Henderson while I was ultra-excited to go watch the team I'd been following all my life. He wasn't with Portland for a ton of time and was mostly a role-player, but for whatever reason I sought out his picture for the photo opportunity first. In any case, it was really cool to get this patch card of Henderson's that's numbered to just 10 copies.

Big thanks once again to everyone who has mailed me cards over the past year or so. It's made the tedious days a lot less tedious.

A Four-Sport Blowout

I'm not worthy! 

One of the unfortunate things for me about the global health crisis we're still living through is that I've received a few extremely generous packages from regular trading partners that I just haven't been able to fully reciprocate just yet. I am still waiting until it's safe to go to the card shows. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this pales in comparison to almost literally anything everyone has suffered through, but it still bugs me. This latest example of generosity is one I've been sitting on for quite awhile: a big envelope stuffed full of eye-popping cards from buckstorecards. As usual, there was a generous share of stuff from all of the major sports.

Vladimir Tarasenko has had difficulty staying on the ice since his Blues won their championship. He returned to action for his first game of the season (and only fifth since 2019.) Apparently he has some serious shoulder issues that are threatening his career. This card is actually sort of a half-acetate look to it.

Next up is baseball and an Ozzie Smith card from the always classy Triple Threads - 2020 Edition. I should probably make more of a point of finding some of the singles from these sets of the players I collect.

Here's a strange case of a player who never appeared in a game with the Blazers (or any NBA team for that matter), and was undrafted, yet spent enough time on the roster to get his own card. Morgunov had a lengthy pro career, playing for more than two decades in Russian leagues and others.

Nassir Little is starting to look like the next young Blazers player to start to make some gains on the court in his second year, a la Gary Trent in the latter portion of last season. It's really cool to this jersey swatch from last year's Court Kings set.

No one else sends me CFL cards besides buckstorecards. You can't really find CFL cards in the US, of course. I wouldn't have even known that Josh Huff was still playing football if it wasn't for this card. It's really cool.

Another Duck appears! Actually, it's no mere Duck, it's the NFL's offensive rookie of year, Justin Herbert... on a green parallel, no less. Herbert's cards are often expensive now, so I don't expect I'm always going to be successful in prying them away from other people.

It's back to baseball. This David Freese card from the very first Prizm set doesn't seem to be listed in TCDB. Is it "cracked ice" or something? I'll have to do some more research. (edit: It looks like it might be a National Convention exclusive with a 25 card print run? Wow!)

It's tough to tell the difference between Triple Threads and Museum Collection at times, although I feel like Museum Collection's design varies wildly from year to year (at least in baseball.)

Now that Jalen Hurts is apparently the Eagles #1 quarterback (until the draft, I guess?), it'll be interesting to see what happens. If he had a good group of veterans around him, I'd certainly think he has the talent to succeed, but it looks like the team is pretty much in full rebuild which doesn't bode well for a young, smaller QB.

The last one was too big to contain. I could have scanned this, but its hugeness wouldn't have translated. That fancy new card stand can barely hold it, even. It's basically an 8x10 signed photo with official Panini branding and all that.

Throughout the past year, I've tried to pay it forward as much as I can with some giveaways and PWEs. Hopefully we'll get back to a place where I can send out larger packages with better content on a regular basis soon.

All Over the Place

All of the sports in one post. 

Once again, buckstorecards has sent a whale of a package from across the northern border containing cards from pretty much all of the sports I follow. The only thing that nobody sends me at this point is Portland Timbers cards, but I barely know what those things look like. I am overdue to send a package back (aka "return fire"), so I am extra appreciatively of the generosity here.

I am not even attempting to organize this post by sports anymore. We go from baseball to more baseball, though, with this Yadi green parallel from 2019 Panini Chronicles, aka Panini Weird.

Blues! Man, with the lack of live sports going on right now, I would absolutely become a huge hockey fan if that was safely happening. Unfortunately, for the sake of humanity, I am pretty much in the "no sports in 2020" camp right now. We'll see what happens, but it's scary right now.

I have almost convinced myself that sorting and cataloging my Eagles cards would be a good thing to do while I am still working from home full time. If I end up doing this, I am thinking of throwing down some very specific parameters for people who want to continue to send me football cards. If the cards feature their classic "kelly green" uniforms like these, I am all about it.

A wild Duck has appeared! I usually save the swanky Ducks cards for certain days in the fall, but it seems pretty iffy that there is going to be a need for those posts this year. We'll see.

A trophy Goldy.

More Weird Panini, this time featuring ex-Duck hooper Jordan Bell on a Majestic design in black and white.

I think... no, I know that this is the first Russell Wilson card in my collection. It could be the last.

Extra chunky, thick and die cut. If I had a rhyme to go with that, I'd bust it out for you. This is a fancy card from a fancy set numbered to 25. If the Bubble Season truly gets going (aka Summer League w/ better players), I bet CJ McCollum will end up scoring a lot of points. That's what he does, after all.

This package had it all. And by having it all, I mean that it had an Ozzie Smith card with less than 200 copies in the world that I didn't own.

From less than 200 copies to the junkiest junk comes this card of QB Eagles. I didn't own this! Honestly, I should probably just confine my entire Eagles collection to Randall Cunningham cards, but I am too greedy.

Speaking of old-school Score, the 2019 Panini Score set aped this 1989 Score design. Here is the current Eagles QB (who is very excellent, even if he has a serious timing issue with his maladies.) Do you see the inferiority of the uniform colors, though. If the Eagles could only revert to their early-'90s uniformed ways, I would never say anything bad about the NFL again.

Just kidding. I loathe the NFL.

That's the Breaks!

Another fun batch of @bgmartin76 group break goods. 

I don't really use Facebook these days outside of a few groups that I'm, one being an excellent card breaking group that I've mentioned here before. The costs are kept very low by allowing you to have the cards shipped together whenever you want, rather than having to pay for shipping for each individual break. I had let a decent stack of Blazers and Cardinals cards pile up and decided to request a shipment recently.

Panini Revolution is crazy, so it's hard to tell that this is a special green parallel that's numbered to only 88 copies. These were pulled from a Chinese New Year box, which means many of the cards are their own special parallels (same pattern, but the red foil instead of green, I believe.)

Rookies (and LeBron and Jordan) seem to be the only thing basketball card collectors care about, so it's always nice to add another Nassir Little card to my collection. There are a ton of basketball breakers out there who won't even ship base cards of non-rookies, which is a weird concept to me.

I finally finished off a 2017-18 Donruss team set, and with it came this chunky style CJ McCollum jersey.

Swapping over to baseball, any time I see a spot in a Heritage break that's open, I am going to try to snag it. I did pretty well with the Cardinals here, as I wound up with two purple-ish refractors.

Purple(ish) Tyler.

And here's regular refractor Tyler. This one is numbered to 599.

2013 Select has been a popular thing to break lately, most likely because it's affordable -- unlike the 2020 stuff. I have all of the non-short printed team by now, but was happy to snag this Yadi insert. Good stuff all around.

On the Brink of Elimination

What happened to the Trail Blazers? 

I don't... get it. Game 4 is in a couple of hours, which means the Blazers long offseason may begin as soon as tonight.

This card was a recent Listia win, for the real world value of just a couple of bucks. I am not sure what's going on with the jersey swatch, as I don't remember any of their Adidas jerseys looking quite like this. This set was produced relatively early in the season, so it's doubtful this cut-up is from the current year. It'll be interesting to see who is still on the team next season.

Basketball Cards for You (and Me)

Time to renew your free membership for free cards. 

It's been awhile since I've taken a look at the list of Guilt-Free Basketball Card Club members. I have scores and scores of cards to send out to people and am planning on a pretty serious purge of any unclaimed teams or players in the near future. If I haven't heard from you in awhile, please contact me and let me know if you want some basketball cards for pretty much nothing (that's why it's "Guilt Free"). All I ask is that if you run across some Blazers cards you think I might like, or really anything else from any of my collecting interests, just keep me in mind. No strict trades, no details, no guilt.

Please also let me know if you've signed up before and are interested in other players/teams not listed or are no longer interested in certain things. Just visit the page, and let me know.

Here are some members who I am considering for deletion if I don't hear from soon. It's not that you've been bad, I just haven't heard from you in a long time or don't have your mailing address (that last bit eventually becomes important.)

• Catching Up With Collecting (Ryan H)
• Henry M
• View From The Skybox
• Mariner1
• Potch (Darren W)

Here's just one example of a card that would get sent to the Great Auction Site in The Sky if no one signed up for the Warriors (seriously, no one likes the team that won 2 out of the last 3 championships?)

One Basketball Card Club member in great standing is Twitch, who is responsible for sending me the sweet CJ rookie jersey card and many other great cards of late. Let's take a look at what else he sent recently.

Hey, it's an original sketch from the man himself. Nic Batum was one of my favorite Blazers, so much that he was the first player of any sport whose shersey I decided to purchase. (50% Adidas employee store discounts help.) I still wear it on occasion, especially during basketball season/

Twitch sent Cards cards, and since this is a Cards blog first and foremost you were probably expecting that. Someone at Panini who gets to crop old photos and digitally remove logos really needs to do a Reddit AMA one of these days.

The Matt Carpenter backlash this year has been tremendous, and tremendously stupid. No, he isn't having an All-Star season at the plate like he usually does. Yes, all those walks are good for him. You'd think with all of the progress we've made as baseball fans with advanced stats and whatnot, no one would be overlooking Carpenter's contributions in getting on base with frequency despite not taking bases with contact as often as normal.

The once and current Cardinals closer: now in pink flavor!

Twitch also remembered that I like the Eagles, which is something that comes up on occasion. Brent Celek is one of my favorite Eagles. He's one of the only links to the Donovan McNabb era and he's an old school fundamentals-over-athletics tight end that just happens to have caught a ton of passes in his career. He's a great "bail me out" option in the passing game, which just so happens to be my go to move in every football video game I've ever played.

Shady, from a Panini Black Friday promo, numbered to just 25. I think this is some sort of "Black Ice" card?

Finally, it's Press Proof Rated Rookie parallel of new and current QB Carson Wentz. If things go the way of the hype train for Wentz, this card could be worth a pretty good chunk of change. On the other hand, it could also end up as exciting as a Bobby Hoying rookie Press Proof card. I suppose we'll wait and see.