A Nice Mailday - Topps from Before I was Born

I had an interesting mail day yesterday, receiving a big flat-rate box full of cardboard. The shipper was nice enough to stack everything in an orderly manner and label the piles for me.

Taking a shot more from the side might alert some readers to what the stacks contain.

Yes, I ordered a full set of 1975 Topps off of eBay. It's not in the greatest shape ever, but I'm not chasing the top of the PSA charts or anything, so it looks fine to me. Night Owl is looking at this picture and saying, "Lou Brock isn't the first card in the set! You got scammed, you noob!"

Some of the key cards from the set were in top loaders, although for the most part they weren't in great shape anyway and could have been included with the rest, as that creased Hank Aaron was.  I can understand the seller's point of view, though. I might have done the same thing in the name of presentation. It's important to show the buyer that you care enough to do little things like that.

There are plenty of off-center, miscut, dinged and folded cards here, and they are all beautiful. I started sorting through them, looking for some of my favorites to scan and show off, but I found the scan pile was getting bigger than the non-scan pile. I've got a paper to write and classes to pass, so I can't devote the proper time to this set yet. Soon, though, I will have it all put into pages and I will go through and take a good look at every card. Right now I am just glorying in the color of it all. And to think I got these for less than 28 cents a card...

The Die is Cast 7: Josh Wise 2011 Nationwide #7 We Salute You Impala

I added another die-cast car to my NASCAR collection recently, after doing an eBay search to see what all Josh Wise had available on the market. The last car I picked up was also a Josh Wise car, the Dogecoin-sponsored #98 car from 2014. This one goes back a little further, being an America-themed ride that Wise piloted in the Nationwide 5-Hour Energy 200 on May 14, 2011. He split time in the #7 that season with Danica Patrick.

I didn't really set out targeting this specific car, although I do like patriotic paint schemes. I wound up with this one because the seller was blowing it out at about half the price of anything else listed, pushing for a quick sale. I'm more than willing to purchase discount die-cast and there were 5 watchers on the listing already, so I added it to my cart and checked out hastily. Two days! later the car arrived in a Priority Mail box.

Inside the back window you can see the DIN printed on the plastic, which you can use to register the car on the Lionel Racing website. I told my wife while I was registering the number that for me one of the most satisfying parts of getting a new die-cast is going to the die-cast DMV to register my new vehicle. Hey, what's that on the windshield...

Yes, this is my first autographed die-cast car. Most of the JR Motorsports drivers used those holographic stickers on their autographs for a couple of seasons, and they can be found on a lot of Press Pass trading cards from that era, as well as die-cast cars and other merchandise. This isn't a particularly limited piece, being serially-numbered # 0491 / 1284, but it's a pretty cool piece and I couldn't argue with the price.

Just to be on the safe side the box also included this Certificate of Authenticity. More recent certificates actually have the serial number of the car written on them, and collector's get pretty anal about the quality of the handwriting and complain when the certificates are creased or dinged in packing/transit. Collectors are an odd lot.

Pack of the Day 86: 2015 Topps Series 1 Hobby Box: The Inserts

In my last post I showed the base cards and parallels I pulled from my Hobby box of 2015 Topps Series 1. This will probably be about all the packs I buy from Series 1, as I have a base set and a First Pitch insert set on the way from eBay-land. I may still pick up a few parallels of players I collect, but that's about it for me. Most of my PC guys have fallen out of favor with the masses, so they don't show up in insert sets anymore.

The Highlight of the Year set features various individual highlights by year. I don't know how big the checklist is, but I pulled more cards from this one than any other. I guess the card that really stands out from this group for me is the Verlander, featuring him with his No-Hitter newspaper in-hand.

I got six of these Archetypes inserts, featuring star players from various eras. I guess for me the highlights here are the Griffey and the Trout. If you like Catchers there are a couple of stars up there.

I also got six Inspired Play inserts which, as many have mentioned, is Topps' 'old guy-new guy' set for 2015. I guess that McGwire-Musial card is more of an 'old guy-older guy' card. Nothing here really does anything for me, ecept maybe for Smoltz' nasty Mustache Starter Kit.

I pulled five of the First Pitch cards. I already have a set of these on the way, but it was cool to see some of them first-hand. Biz Markie has got some good Ugly Pitching Face (UPF) going on here. He's halfway to being a Major League hurler. The Jeff Bridges card has been getting a lot of play on the blogs. I have a confession to make. I have never actually watch The Big Lebowski. I've almost watched it a few times and even quote it from time to time, but I've never seen the movie.

I also got Tom Morello and 50 Cent in this box. The back of 50 Cent's card stops short of calling his First Pitch the worst of all time, but it does mention that it went astray and nearly hit a photographer. Good thing Vladimir Guerrero was there to track it down. That dude could hit anything.

I am not sure that video will ever stop being funny to me. I guess I should thank Topps for giving me an excuse to use it again.

This set pairs up moments in world history that match up approximately from moments in baseball history. I went back to look at the pack odds, and apparently the set is called Baseball History. The cards I got didn't match up with each other, but in the scan you can see how they are in matched pairs so the design forms a butt-ugly two-card puzzle.

I like the Free Agent 40 set a little bit. My opinion is probably swayed by the fact that I pulled a Nolan Ryan in an Astros rainbow uniform. Dawson looks like a beast in that picture. I think his quads are about to rip his pants.

I pulled two Gallery of Greats inserts and one Gallery of Greats Gold parallel. The Gold parallels are a 1:974 pack hit, or about 1 in 2.25 Hobby cases. That makes this a pretty decent box, especially after pulling a 1 per case card in the Pink parallel I posted about yesterday. The Cal Ripken Jr. is numbered # 98 / 99. Rivera and Clemens are good players, too, but I do like that Ripken card. I might know of someone who is collecting this set, so I will probably be shipping the base cards out at some point.

I thought I did all right with the buyback cards. Fred Whitfield comes from 1966 Topps, the set design that will be highlighted in this year's Heritage set. I am not sure, but it might be my oldest sports card, although technically with that stamp on it the card has been reborn as a 2015 issue. I love getting cards featuring the Astros' rainbow uniforms, and this 1977 Ken Forsch is certainly quite colorful. These cards were in much better shape than the buybacks I've pulled from previous years. They weren't Gem Mint, but the corners were pretty sharp and the cards were free of massive defects. I guess the Forsch card has some pretty bad centering, but that's about it.

The final card from the box is a Career High relic card of Josh Donaldson. There's not a lot to say about it, I guess. He's a pretty good player who was traded from a team I like to another team I like, so at least I got a card that fits pretty well in my collection. I also got a couple of those Babe Ruth Call Your Shot scratch-off code cards, but I didn't win anything when I put the codes into the site.

And that's it for the box. I did pretty well odds-wise, so as far as flagship Topps boxes go it was a pretty good box. I would have liked to pull something epic like one of those Coin & Stamp cards or an autograph, but if all I wanted were hits I'd go and buy Topps Dynasty. I got a pretty good overview of this year's design and scratched the pack-busting itch for a while. If I do wind up putting together a Master Set of something this year it will probably be Opening Day.

Pack of the Day 85: 2015 Topps Series 1 Hobby Box: Base Cards and Parallels

I am ending my streak of non-sports posts, mostly because I ran out of stuff to post. I've also got a huge backlog of sports stuff in my post queue and my scan folder, even stuff going back to November. Just about anyone who blogs about baseball cards knows that 2015 Topps Series 1 came out last week. I bought a base set and the First Pitch insert from an eBay seller, and so I don't really 'need' anything else from Series 1. I considered going out and buying some retail packs from Target, but I got to thinking that by the time I buy three blasters at retail I might as well buy a Hobby box. So that's what I did. After work on Thursday I went over to the local card shop and grabbed a Hobby box. I considered a Jumbo box, but I couldn't justify the extra $30 it would have cost me just to get a manu-relic and an extra autograph or relic card. Most of the relics and autos I've seen coming out of this stuff aren't worth $15 apiece.

This post takes a look at some of the base cards and parallels I pulled from this box. In all I pulled 305 base cards, with 9 of those being doubles. So I got 296 different base cards, or 84.6% of the set.

I like the card design well enough. My main complaint is that the photographs chosen are largely generic torso shots, and even a lot of the action shots are zoomed-in too close. I feel like the 2014 set was a little more open to using dugout shots, silly shots, celebration photos, and things of that nature. I chose some of my PC players and a few cards featuring better photos to show here. I omitted some of the cards that I know everyone has already seen, like the Jeter card that leads the set off.

The group features a few beards, PC guy Josh Reddick, a couple of camo uniforms, and a couple of decent fielding shots (I'd like that Pearce card 5x more if it showed his feet).

I've seen a couple of mentions already of the Navarro card, which might achieve cult favorite status like Coco Crisp's afro card last year. It just looks like something bad is about to happen. Also the guy in the background might be scratching his junk. R.A. Dickey gets the nod because he's a PC guy. Arias gets into this post because he's got a case of extreme Ugly Pitching Face (UPF) going on. I think he might have learned that trick from Madison Bumgarner.

A couple of horizontal A's cards made the cut, although I'd like both of those cards better if I could just see the players' feet. Ethier and Kipnis have better cards because they are mostly all within the frame (Ethier is missing part of his hand). I especially like how the ball is hanging out in the background of Ethier's card.

Here are a few more horizontal cards that stood out to me while sorting through the stacks. I guess I don't have anything more to say about these. They're nice photos, but I wish Topps had included the whole picture.

I got four Gold parallels and four Rainbow Foil parallels. Both of these are seeded 1:10 packs, which I believe is more rare than last year's equivalent Gold and Red Hot Foil cards. People on the forums are saying that means there is a much bigger print run of 2015 Topps than there was in 2013 and 2014. I guess I can believe that. Arias and his UPF make another appearance. The Baez card would have got a spot in the base card group if he didn't appear here. On the parallels Topps should have used blue for the Dodgers logo, as on Puig's Gold card here you can't even see the logo in the corner. I imagine the Yankees and Padres might have the same problem.

In addition to the more common parallels I pulled an elusive Pink parallel of Dilson Herrera, numbered # 30 / 50. These cards fall only 1:527 Hobby packs, if the odds on the pack are to be believed. Again, it seems like these colored parallels are extremely rare this year, pointing to a much larger print run this year than in years past. I actually just went back and checked the odds for 2014's set, and Pink parallels numbered out of # / 50 fell at a 1:501 rate, which means they were more common, but not by a gigantic margin. I guess if you're opening 25 cases or something it would matter to you, but when you're just opening a box or so it doesn't change your odds of pulling one by that much.

And that's it for the base cards and parallels I pulled from my Hobby box of 2015 Topps Series 1. I'll post about the inserts soon.

Pack of the Day 84: The Other Box of Downton Abbey Seasons 1 & 2

I know what everyone's been wondering. You've all been wondering if I got any 2015 Topps Series 1 yet. I did get in on some 2015 Topps action, but I'm not done spamming your faces off with non-sports cards. I've already broken down the first box of Downton Abbey cards I opened, the missing hit from that box that Cryptozoic sent out to me, and some autographs I bought and busted out of their cases, but I haven't yet shown the second box I opened. Let's get to it.

Here is an example of a base card next to one of the mini cards. The minis use the same images as the base cards, but they are cropped a bit differently, printed on different cardstock, and have a different design, with borders on the top and a changed bottom border. If this is the face Mr. Carson makes when things are normal, I'd hate to see what he looks like when things are bad.

And here are the backs of the cards. The back of the mini features a truncated version of the text on the bigger card and omits the photo. Surprisingly enough, the photo on the back of the large card gives more context than the photo on the front did, as we can see a soldier in the background loading up the supplies mentioned in the card text.

Collation matched the stated odds in this box all around, so I got the expected two cards from the World War I insert. I had a hard time watching the war scenes in the show. It wasn't because the horrors of it all reminded me of my own time overseas, it was just because they got so much wrong. I couldn't take it seriously. I'm that guy. A couple of weeks ago a comic book cosplayer I follow on Facebook posted pictures of herself dressed up as Black Widow and everyone was like, "OMG so cool!" and I was like, "How is she fighting villains without a magazine loaded in her gun?"

Here are the two Downstairs cards I pulled from the box. I don't know much about these two folks, but there is one episode (several episodes?) that features a running gag involving Mr. Molesley. He tries dying his hair and everyone in the house asks him if he is ill or if something is wrong with his head. Eventually he is told to fix whatever is wrong with his hair. Good stuff.

I also pulled two Upstairs cards. One features the Dowager Countess who doesn't have anything better to do than make snide comments and work behind the scenes to mess with everyone. She does have her redeeming moments, like altering the vote so that someone else could win the Blue Ribbon for rose growing at the annual festival. She's not all bad. Lady Edith Crawley is the other card I pulled from this insert set. She might be my favorite of the Upstairs characters, although in reading the episode descriptions it seems that she makes a long string of bad decisions. I guess it wouldn't be a drama without plenty of bad decisions. I would have to watch the episodes, though, to ensure that she is still my favorite. Maybe once I get done with school in about ten weeks I'll get around to it.

My relic from the box was Sarah O'Brien's Black Dress. I guess it's an all right pull, although the Downstairs relics don't pull nearly as much weight as the Upstairs relics. Using the informal gauge of value, my wife hardly gave this one a look, and stated that she wanted to see some of the Upstairs dress relics. She doesn't like O'Brien very much, as O'Brien is one of the more villainous servants in the estate.

The autograph was one I didn't have yet, but it isn't among the most popular in the set. Iain Glen seems to be a fairly prolific actor, but his Downton Abbey character Sir Richard Carlisle only appeared in the show for six episodes as a newspaper editor who is newly wealthy. I guess he tries to marry Lady Mary Crawley and manages to make an enemy out of the Dowager Countess, and then he leaves.

And that's all for this box. Not really the greatest box, but I got all of the promised cards this time. I haven't actually sorted all of the base cards yet, but the collation seemed better than the first box was while I was busting the packs. In the first box I noticed quite a few doubles and packs repeating sequences from earlier packs. I didn't notice that as much with this one.

Seeking Redemption 10: Cryptozoic Sends the Missing Hit

This wasn't really a redemption card, but it was largely the same process and so I categorized this post accordingly. A few days ago I posted the results of my first box break of Cryptozoic's Downton Abbey Seasons 1 & 2 trading cards. The box was missing a Wardrobe relic card, so I sent off a help desk ticket to the company to see what they had to say about it. I got an e-mail relatively soon asking me to send in my box top and an invoice or receipt showing my purchase. I sent that in and a little while later I got a shipping notification from FedEx along with a tracking number. A few days later I got an envelope delivered. They did require a signature on the shipment, so it's a good thing my wife was home at the time. The card was packaged in a penny sleeve and top loader, and then inside of a padded envelope that was placed inside of another padded envelope which was placed in the FedEx mailing envelope. All of the envelopes were sealed, and the final envelope was one of those little plastic padded mailers that just stretch instead of ripping when you try to open them. Here's what I found when I finally got through to the card:

It's a Wardrobe relic of Lady Mary Crawley's Dress. The colors on the scan seem a little bit off to me, but looking at the card it appears the fabric is the type you can see on the sleeve of the dress. My wife seemed especially impressed with the card, which was pretty cool. I don't think she really gets excited when I show her my sports memorabilia cards, but this is something she can relate to.

Word on the forums is that these relics are from the same fabric used in the making of the costumes for the show, and not actual little pieces of the costumes themselves. The wording on the back seems to back up that viewpoint. They're still pretty cool, especially since it seems like most/all of the relic swatches can be matched to some part of the garment shown in the photograph on the card.

Cryptozoic's help desk was quite helpful, they shipped the replacement card quickly, and communicated well throughout the process. It is a much different and better experience than the interactions I've had in trying to get reactions from Topps about issues.

Red Sonja Sketch Card by Jason Keith Phillips

Here is another sketch card I picked up recently featuring the other famous barbarian, Red Sonja. Just like my last Red Sonja sketch, I selected a sketch that is a little more cartoon-inspired than the usual fare. The artist who created this one is Jason Keith Phillips, who seems to be a fairly prolific sketch card artist. The card comes from Breygent's 2012 Red Sonja set, which I was packed out in box set form, with each box set a base set, 9 insert cards, one sketch, and one additional hit which could be another sketch, an autograph, or a line art card.

His personal art tends to focus on horror and zombie themes, but he also has touched on most of the major pop culture themes like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Marvel and DC Comic Characters, Adventure Time, and various television shows. Most of his work seems to use similar coloring, with strong red, blue, and a kind of sickly white cast to it. I like a lot of his stuff, although the horror and zombie art turns my stomach a bit. I guess if I have a hard time looking at it, then he's doing his job and making it scary/gory enough.

Anyhow, I like this sketch and I think it's a pretty good addition to my small collection of sketch cards. I especially like all of the blending of the colors and the reflective highlights that make the shield and 'armor' look shiny. In the miniature wargaming hobby using blues, whites, and greys to make painted miniature figure look metallic is called Non-Metallic Metal (NMM). It's a more advanced technique than I ever mastered, but when done right it is very cool.

This Dwarf's weapon, shield, helmet, and fist all show NMM techniques. At first glance it looks like metal, but it's actually all carefully-applied colors to make it look like metal. It's pretty cool, and you can find examples where various colors are used to paint gold or even more extreme things like purple and green metals. It's a cool concept based on looking at an object and trying to imagine where the light and shadows would fall on it if it were really made of metal.

And now you know about that. Sorry to go off on a miniature-painting tangent in the middle of a trading card blog. I've been looking a little bit at my wargaming figures on the shelf and thinking about getting back into painting a little once I get done with school. So that stuff has been on my mind, and the colors on the sketch card got me to thinking about it.