Buzzin' Cardinals

A pack of Cardinals cards from @CardBuzz includes a buyback, a messy signature and more. 

 

With more and more news coming out about the Fanatics deal and what seems to be the imminent end of card collecting as we know it, it's nice to look back at some cards that were sent to me through the mail earlier this year. It's becoming increasingly doubtful that I'll continue to collect cards beyond next year (if that long), but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate what's right in front of us. This latest bunch came to me from Card Buzz back in May.

That is quite the autograph from the former infielder turned reliever Sam Tuivailala. He does have an interesting set of letters to work with in his last name, but that just looks a bit goofy.

Topps killed off the old Topps Total set a long time ago, before recently bringing it back in a more understated (and more expensive!) online-exclusive form. This, of course, removed insert cards from the equation. The inserts were never a big part of the set, but there were some interesting looking "Award Winner" cards.

I think the old Topps gold parallels look nicer than any Bowman Sapphire madness you want to throw at me.

There are a lot of memorabilia cards from the 2000s, so it's impossible to be familiar with every design. Still, this was one I'd never seen before. It's from the 2003 Flair set.

People sure seem to like their dufex technology, which made it intriguing when Panini briefly brought it back with their one-off Pinnacle set from 2013. It still doesn't scan well, though.

There's one glaring error with this manupatch card commemorating the 1967 World Series. Can anyone spot it?

I'm guessing Fanatics will focus more on creating card sets like Museum Collection and less on something like Topps Total, which is really too bad. High end cards look nice, but most people can't afford to have more than a few of them. I guess we'll all free up some space in our homes if we don't have piles of cards laying around anymore, though.

It's All About Me

Cards I purchased that you didn't send to me. 

The vast majority of my posts here show off cards that others send me. When it comes down to it, the point of this blog for me is to acquire new cards that I'm interested and trade off ones I'm not. It maintains the trading "circle of life" so to speak to always give a nod to whoever sends me stuff and some of the things they send, and I am sure that most people enjoy seeing their own efforts acknowledged in a public forum. But for whatever reason, I can never get myself fully on board with blogging about the stuff I buy for myself. I'm not a huge sports card shopper, but I occasionally splurge for a small pile of cards that fit into some of my various collections. When I hit up COMC earlier this month, for once I didn't immediately catalog and file away the stuff I bought for myself.

My card shopping mantra, which extends beyond just the online world, is that I'm up for buying pretty much anything if it's less than a buck. I'm not entirely sure what led me to this, but I plugged in "Topps Black" and "Cardinals" into the search engine and ended up with a whole pile of minis. Somehow, a Gypsy Queen sneaked in there among all of the Allen & Ginters.

These black parallels from last year's Stadium Club set supposedly have a print run of 201 cards according to the internet. Because they aren't actually numbered, they seem to be extremely affordable. I wonder what's going to happen to "Topps Now" cards in a year or three...

I can't remember where I first saw this card earlier this year, but I knew I had to have it. It's modeled after the original 1991 Fleer Ultra set and features a vibrant (colorized?) photo of Dan Fouts with the Ducks. If Oregon was smart, they'd roll out this kind of throw back someday. Just don't do it this season, because I don't want to remember anything about this season.

Another entry from the "Topps Black" search netted me one of these harder-than-you'd-think to find Walmart parallels from the 2011 Topps set. Certain Series One blasters from that year could be found containing nothing but the parallels making those an easy get, but starting with the next series, they became much more of a rarity on par with the shiny foil parallels from the past few sets.

I bought Blazers, too. Imagine that! Maurice Harkless is beginning to emerge as a much needed third scoring option in Portland's lineup after being acquired from Orlando for the proverbial bag of beans (a late 2nd round pick from 2020+).

More Topps Black. Beyond Matt Holliday, there is just a dark void. Similarly, entering a Walmart store is like disappearing into another plane of existence.

I usually hold back the Ducks cards for a weekend pep talk gameday post, but it might be time to clear the deck with everything I've been holding back and start something new next season. I like this card. I need more shiny non-airbrushed or Photoshopped Oregon cards.

This guy is becoming a media giant. Massive shoe contract, State Farm commercials, hip hop album... he's ticking all the boxes. Oh yeah, also, he plays basketball pretty well most of the time.

Mason Plumlee is kind of fun center to watch, if you're into watching a modern unconventional style of center. He's going to get a triple-double before this season is out, just mark my words. This is a fairly low numbered jersey card that was very affordable, although the back of the card revealed that his jersey bit came from his time with the Nets.

Noah Vonleh! He's shown some flashes of being an NBA player. I just felt like I needed something of his with the Blazers because he doesn't have a ton of cards at this point.

Thanks for bearing with me. Next time, it will be about you again.

Heritage Surprises

Some unexpected surprises from recent purchases. 

I hit up the local card show a little over a week ago and spent most of my time with my head down at the quarter boxes, snagging some stuff for myself and a few people I owed stuff to. My theme for the year, hopefully, is to avoid unnecessary purchases whenever possible. However, there's no way I can pass up Retail Guy's table, which led me to buying two 2015 Heritage blasters at a deeply discounted rate of $12 apiece.

The first box I opened was a High Numbers box. It was easy to talk myself into these purchases because they're from sets I'm actively collecting. The High Numbers box was the most frustrating from a set collecting standpoint as I already had every single non-SP base card and insert card in each pack, instantly growing my pile of dupes past an already unacceptable level. This set is very small compared to most Topps sets configured this way, and with modern collation being what it is, once you see a familiar card in a pack you know that the whole thing is probably going to be Dupe City.

Still, I can't complain, because look at this thing! It's rare enough to snag a great hit for my personal collection randomly out of a pack, but considering Cepeda's relatively short time (3 seasons) with St. Louis versus the rest of his long career, it's a wonder that this exists at all. I love it. I also did get to knock off 3 short print cards from my want list, including the Kris Bryant card that essentially paid for the box itself.

Blaster number two was from the regular (low? series) Heritage set, where I was able to knock off a couple dozen needs from my list. Cool. Even better, I pulled an on-card autograph of an obscure pitcher from the '60s in Gordon Richardson. A quick Google search tells me that the original 1966 version of this card was Richardson's only MLB card. I usually hang on to any interesting Topps Heritage cards even if I don't actively go after stuff like this if it doesn't fit my mostly Cardinals-centric needs, but I could imagine trading this for another similar card if it made sense.

Finally, you may be wondering about the Nolan Ryan card at the top of the post, which uses the 1960 Topps design that was featured in the 2009 Topps Heritage product. It came to me out of another one of those $4.99 drug store repack boxes that I can't keep myself from buying even though they're mostly recycled Gary Pettis cards. This card, confusingly enough, sports a 2010 copyright... not to mention the fact that Ryan only turned 13 in 1960. It turns out that this is another National promo, similar to some Mantle stuff I found recently in the 2010 design. I am going to hang on to this as well, but I don't really have a good reason why.

Orlando Cepeda and the Seven Wizards

I just have a quick post tonight. As I mentioned previously, I hit the card shop about a week back. I scooped up a small stash of Ozzie Smith cards for my collection. I actually started my collection of Ozzie cards before I got serious about starting an all-Cardinals collection, and he remains one of the few Cardinals who I make a point of collecting the cards in other uniforms as well. All in all, I grabbed eight cards for about $3 or $4. There were actually two "legends" types of boxes sorted by player name next to each other, and both had sections for Ozzie Smith. I continue to be baffled and confused by the organization of places like this. Let's just say that I have some fairly basic ideas about how places should be organized and friendly to walk-in customers and most card shops I've been to fail in that aspect. Actually, I've been to a number of record stores that are that way as well.

I actually bought a pack from this set on one of my prior trips to this shop, so this 2002 Upper Deck World Series Heroes design was already familiar to me.

The foil on this is hard to read, but it is from Upper Deck and has a 2005 copyright on the back. It says something about Past Time and Pennants.

One of the more baffling things to me before I started getting sucked in to collecting cards again was the use of old designs or, in this case, just reprinting old cards themselves. It was one of the main things I thought I would always resist, but now I love stuff like this. I wish we could see another Topps set like Archives or Fan Favorites in the future, but they would probably have to contain 90 different Gordon Beckham cards and autographs of guys that haven't appeared in a major league ballgame since 2007 and likely won't again because they still have boxes of stickers laying around.

This is a pretty nice design (they don't call it "Legendary" for nothing) but there's something odd about Ozzie's beard.

This is some sort of offshoot of 2002 Upper Deck Sweet Spot Classics. There's nothing that clashes more than black & white photos of players (who clearly played in a color photograph era) aboard glossy UV coating and slabs of foil.

I got a huge kick out of this. I almost held this out for a future Airbrushed Fridays post, but I don't even know who to blame for this 1993 Duracell card that was licensed by the MLBPA and clearly not the MLB. On the back is just a copyright from the MLBPA and another one from something called MSA. Could a collector reasonably tell the difference between this an an MLB Properties-licensed set? I'd like to think so.

Finally, I really liked the design when I saw Ozzie's 2004 Legendary Cuts card, and this Orlando Cepeda looks even better. All in all, I was pretty pleased to knock off 7 cards from my boundless Ozzie Smith want list and pick up another Cardinal HOFer in the process. Support your local card shop and all that.