A NASCAR Christmas Card

I've had some pretty good luck in finding new Danica Patrick cards for my collection lately. A lot of the stuff out on eBay is the same old recycled overpriced auctions, but some gems pop up from time to time. It seems like many of the best deals to be had are on serially-numbered parallels, because they can sometimes blend in with all of the overpriced base cards that cycle endlessly on the site.

This card wasn't particularly cheap, but I felt like it was worth grabbing for the asking price. It comes from the 2012 Press Pass FanFare set and it's a Silver parallel. Even better, it's a Christmas card, bearing the serial number # 12 / 25.

I am kind of looking forward to the start of the NASCAR season. I am not a die-hard fan or anything, but I try to catch a few races a year on television and I almost always at least look at the leader board throughout the race to see how my favorite drivers are doing. I can't really pinpoint the source of my additional excitement for the 2016 season, but it's definitely there.

Pack of the Day 118: 2 Packs of 1987 Sportflics

I mentioned in my Pack of the Day 116 post that I had done something silly and purchased some retail packs that I knew wouldn't be worth the money I spent on them. Sometimes the pack-busting itch gets to be too much, though, and you've got to scratch it. It is hard for me to remember the last time a retail pack purchase didn't leave me feeling a bit disappointed, though. The repack box I bought as the baseball portion of my purchase contained two packs of 1987 Sportflics Magic Motion Baseball cards. Each pack contains three full-size cards and two smaller logo cards, all with that sweet lenticular motion technology. The team logo cards also feature Magic Motion Team Startistics, whatever those are.

These things don't scan particularly well. Those first two cards at the tops are part of a subset called The Big Six, which features six players in a given theme. All six players are pictured on the front, with the two frames changing images three times as you tilt the card. The first one is The Best of the Best, which cites the six best players in the game as selected by a New York Times poll of major league players. The six players are Don Mattingly, Rickey Henderson, Dale Murphy, Eddie Murray, Dwight Gooden, and Roger Clemens. The second card is Hot Rookie Prospects and showcases Randy Asadoor, Casey Candaele, Kevin Seitzer, Rafael Palmeiro, Tim Pyznarski, and Dave Cochrane.

Finishing out this scan are cards of Sid Fernandez and Mike Witt. I was kind of glad to see these packs come out of the repack box, as I didn't have a lot of them when I was growing up, so the novelty is still there for me. The only lenticular cards I really remember from my youth are the ones that were put out by Kellogg's, which I believe were distributed in their Corn Flakes cereal.

My final two player cards are George Brett and Jesse Barfield. Barfield was coming off of his best statistical season and George Brett was nearing the end of his 13 consecutive All-Star appearances, so this probably would have been a nice pair of packs to bust open in 1987.

My favorite part of these packs was the team logo cards. I was lucky enough to pull my favorite team, the Houston Astros, as well as a pretty cool Pirates logo, a neat throwback of the Expos, and even the Phillies logo is kind of interesting in a nostalgic sort of way. Each card features either Team Leaders or 1986 Divisional standings on the back.

These two packs were one of the highlights of my retail purchase. Overall the transaction wasn't worth the money I put into it, but these packs probably carried their own weight.

Pack of the Day 117: Lotte Star Wars Bikkuriman Special Edition Stickers Box Break

I saw some Japanese Star Wars Bikkuriman stickers around the internet, including the card blogs Torren' Up Cards and This Card is Cool. Upon further research I found that there were three different series of these wafers packaged with stickers. One series covers the original Star Wars IV-V-VI trilogy, one is based on the I-II-III prequels, and one covers all six films and carries the label Special Edition.

I located boxes of the Special Edition wafers for sale on one of my favorite Japanese shopping sites (the same place I get my unopened BBM True Heart Wrestling cards) for about $20 less than the going rate for a Special Edition sticker set on eBay, even after shipping. The sets contain 24 stickers each, and a box of wafers contains 30 pieces. I'd heard that a box will get you a full set, so I made my order and waited f...o...r...e...v...e...r (several days) while the box made its way across the ocean, through customs, and onto my doorstep. I took a bunch of pictures so that you can enjoy the unboxing with me.

Here is the top of the box. It's got a nice little scene featuring a duel between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, along with a representation of the wafers. I am guessing the text in the lower right lets you know that there are 24 different stickers. Up above is the packing information and handling instructions.

This is one side of the box. It's got some more art on it, with young Anakin in his podracer and R2-D2 doing his droid thing.

The back of the box shows Han Solo and Princess Leia as well as the Millennium Falcon.

Finally, the other side of the box shows the podracer art again and C-3PO accompanying R2-D2, along with probably a lot number and an expiration date.

This is what the box looks like with the seal broken and the lid folded up into display mode.

And here it is from the front. The box front features droids again, with R2-D2 accompanied by the head of C-3PO.

There are two different pack designs. One features the same art as the box top, and the other combines the podracer and droid art from the side of the box. The back of the packs contains a lot of text. I can pick out a few things, but a lot of it is a mystery. I think the part of the text under the flap details a redemption contest, where specially-marked stickers can be mailed in for a prize. I didn't get any of the mail-in stickers. Nutrition information wraps around the side of the pack.

Opening the pack reveals the wafer sitting in a little cardboard tray. This one was a little crumbled, probably because it was in the corner of the box where any impacts would affect it directly.

Under the wafer is the sticker. The stickers in this box were just packed in with the wafers. I have heard that some Bikkuriman stickers are wrapped individually. Some of the stickers had a fair amount of wafer flakes and chocolate bits on them. I cleaned them up as best I could. 

Top Row: 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 Bottom Row: 11, 12, 13, 14, 17

The first 20 stickers are in order by episode, but the foil stickers didn't scan well and I had to separate them out from the non-foil stickers. The last four stickers feature a gold finish and come from Episode IV, V, and VI.

It's hard to pick favorites out of this batch. I like them all! The sticker with R2-D2 and C-3PO's head is a good one. I like the one with Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Luke. The vehicles are all cool stickers. That Han Solo and Leia sticker is a good one, too.

Top Row: 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 Bottom Row: 15, 16, 18, 19, 20

These silver foil stickers didn't scan well at all. They didn't photograph particularly well, either, but I did the best I could. My favorites here are probably Boba Fett with Han Solo in carbonite, the Luke / Vader duel, Vader with his shuttle, and the Death Star.

Top Row: 21, 22 Bottom Row: 23, 24

The four gold foil stickers scanned pretty well. They are all pretty good, but I like the one with Yoda on Luke's back and the one with the Emperor using his Force lightning on Darth Vader best.

I scanned the backs of the stickers for the sake of completeness, but I can't read them. All I know is that the titles in the upper center match the text on the front of the sticker, the film the image is based on is listed in the upper left, the card number is in the upper right, and the Disney and Star Wars logos are in the lower half.

This was a pretty fun box to open. I did wind up with a complete set of stickers as well as a handful of duplicates that will probably be going out in trade packages. The wafers are tasty enough, but I don't know what I'm going to do with 30 24 wafers. I guess it's a good thing my kids are snack fiends. I definitely want to collect the other two sticker sets, but in digging around it looks like it might be cheaper to buy them outright as collated sets than it will be to import them in their original packaging.

Breaking it Down 27: 2015 WWE NXT In Line Sasha Banks Autograph

Once again I joined a 2015 Topps WWE Undisputed break at TeamBreaks.com, buying the base card slot and a couple of random wrestler spots. I haven't scanned the base cards from the break yet, but I did manage to score a hit from the random wrestlers portion. Again it was a female wrestler, Sasha Banks, although this time from the NXT In Line insert rather than the main WWE roster. NXT is the WWE's developmental property. I didn't have a lot of personal interest in this card and eBay sales are pretty strong on it, so I've already got this one listed on the auction site. Hopefully I'll be able to turn it into some Paypal credit and be able to buy something nice for one of my collections. I have something good in mind already, actually, but you'll have to wait a few weeks to see what it is. 

Unfortunately the WWE Undisputed boxes weren't great sellers for the breaker in question, so I am still a number of cards short on a base set from the product. I need to get out there and grab the singles I need before they dry up and become hard to find. It seems like that happens pretty quickly with some of these high-end sets. Everyone busts through them so they can find the big hits and resell them, and then the product all but disappears.

Check Out My Cards 5: 2015 Panini Immaculate Collection Jon Singleton

I recently went on COMC to check out some UFC cards for a couple of player collections (PCs) I want to work on building. While I was on the site I looked at some of my baseball PCs to see what could be found. This card probably qualifies as the Find of the Night for that particular order. It's a 2015 Panini Immaculate Collection auto-relic card of Jon Singleton.

When it arrived in the mail I got to thinking that the card looked awfully familiar, and maybe I'd had another, "Oops!' moment. It turns out the card I already had was a Prime Parallel that is numbered # 02 / 10. This latest addition is slightly less rare, being the non-Prime version and numbered # 17 / 25 copies. It does at least feature two different colors for the fabric swatches and an autograph that manages to stay on the sticker.

2001 BBM Fighting Beauties Set

Now that I have cleared out my Draft folder completely of the low-hanging fruit, I am working on the posts that take a lot of time to write, generally because they have a lot of scans in them. I don't know how a lot of folks churn out those long posts every day. I guess maybe they have a little more leeway in their lunch hours or some sort of time management skill that allows them to accomplish the things they plan on doing. I just get to the stage where I think about doing things, and then I goof off until bedtime rolls around.

This post showcases the 2001 BBM Fighting Beauties card set, which I think is sort of the predecessor to their current True Heart Japanese Women's Wrestling set. I haven't extensively researched it, but I can find some mentions of this set name for 2000, 2001, and 2002. It looks like the True Heart name comes into being in 2003, so that would make sense from a timeline standpoint. All I have at the moment is the 2001 Fighting Beauties set, as that is the only set that I've seen on eBay. I bought it quite a while ago and now I am getting around to showing some of the cards I scanned.

While newer sets have pictures of the wrestlers in their ring gear on card fronts and backs, the older sets featured the wrestlers in their street clothes on the front and in wrestling action on the back. The colors used in the nameplate correspond to different wrestling promotions. I tried to pick some of the most interesting photos to share here. Command Bolshoi is one of my favorite wrestlers. She always appears in her mask, even in her various social media accounts. A lot of her masks are themed, like the snowman one she is wearing here. In addition to being a wrestler, she is also a competitive bodybuilder and a musician. I will always post any card featuring an athlete with a pet dog, even if that mop in Sachie Abe's arms barely qualifies as a dog. That ice cream cone shot on Hiroyo Muto's card would fit right in on a Collector's Choice baseball card. That set always had nice candid photos. I like seeing the masked wrestlers in their everyday clothes and in everyday settings.

The card backs feature the wrestler's name, the promotion they wrestle for, biographical information, and a photo of them in wrestling action. The colors in the background match up to the colors used on the front to distinguish between the promotions.

I picked a few more cards from the set to show here. Ayako Hamada wrestled in the U.S. from 2009-2013 for TNA Wrestling and Shimmer Women Athletes. Yoshiko Tamura's dog definitely qualifies as a dog based on my qualifications. I wonder if that dog sheds much? I have a brown and white dog, and that stinking white hair gets everywhere. My dog has never been in my car or visited my office, but his fur is in both those places, as well as on any clothes I happen to be wearing. My wife's dog sheds about as much, but her dog has black fur that doesn't show up as much. I included the Akino card because I thought the picture was funny and the Reggie Bennet card because I am not sure if it is meant to be out of focus and blurry in an artsy way or a drunken cell phone pic way.

Here are the backs of the previous four cards. Some of those action photos are pretty intense. The Reggie Bennet photo appears to be taken at the same outdoor venue as the Command Bolshoi photo earlier in the post. I guess I always think of wrestling as an indoor sport, but I guess you could do it outside, too.

The checklists fall in the middle of the set, splitting the individual wrestlers from the other subsets. The checklists appear to also include a few insert sets. I don't have any examples of cards from the insert sets, so I don't really know what their themes are.

The first subset is called Team Spirit and features wrestling teams. The best one in this batch is probably Ayako Hamada featured on a card with her father, Gran Hamada, although the uniforms on that ReDRUG team are pretty amazing.

To me, the most intriguing part of these card backs is that ReDRUG card. I am curious as to whether that wrestler in the center is Command Bolshoi unmasked. If so, it would be the first picture I've been able to find of her with her mask off. I almost don't even want to know.

These Flashback 2000 cards feature what I assume were prominent matches from the previous year. I don't know why these matches were chosen, but I imagine they had title implications or featured famous rivalries or were retirement matches for one of the wrestlers involved. It seems like any time a wrestler retires, they get a big sendoff event in their honor.

The backs of the cards probably tell you what happened in the match, but I can't read them. That one in the upper right almost looks like a retirement match because of the large quantities of ribbon in the ring and the giant trophy. The Ayako Hamada - Aja Kong match in the lower right was probably a title fight, as seen from the belt in the photo, and the one in the lower left was apparently the start of the zombie apocalypse.

The final subset is called 90's Legendary Heroines and features wrestlers who were famous in the previous decade. I believe Jaguar Yokota is still appearing in sets today, so she's had quite a lengthy career. The other wrestlers I've scanned here seem to be long-retired. Bull Nakano spent some time as a professional golfer with the LPGA but apparently didn't have a lot of success in tournaments.

The card backs feature more photos. Again, the sheer quantity of ribbon on the Sakie Hasegawa card suggest a retirement event. The other cards are less clear. As with all of these cards, I would probably be able to give a lot more information if I could read and understand the language. For now I am limited to whatever I can find in English and whatever work other people have done as far as biographies and descriptions. But that is at least a sampling of the 2001 BBM Fighting Beauties set.

2013 SEGA Card-Gen Extravaganza 15: Toronto Blue Jays

It's been months and months since I added a team to this series. I started this series of posts way back in May 2014 after I found a complete 2013 SEGA Card-Gen set on eBay. I still love these cards, but they might not be as fresh and exciting to my readers as they were way back then. Let's close out the AL portion of the set with the Toronto Blue Jays. After today it will be all NL teams. At my current pace I will finish the series on 06 September 2017. The Blue Jays get 15 cards in their team set, which is 2 more than the 13 per team average across the entire 390-card set.

The team set starts out with catcher J.P. Arencibia. He had a rough 2013, both on and off the field. He had such a rough time that he closed his Twitter account. After the Jays released him he spent 2014 and 2015 bouncing around a bit. Most recently he signed on with the Phillies' minor league system.

Emilio Bonifacio came to the Blue Jays in the big trade with the Marlins, which is why it seems like half the guys in this team set are wearing Miami uniforms. He got traded to the Royals partway through the 2013 season and subsequently has been with the Cubs, Braves, White Sox, Cubs, and Braves in a series of trades, releases, and signings. Not a lot of job security, but Baseball Reference says he's made $11.545 million so far in his career. I'm sure that makes up for some of the inconvenience.

Lawrie got traded to the Athletics in the Josh Donaldson deal. Donaldson went on to an MVP season in 2015. Lawrie was serviceable and then got traded last month to the White Sox in exchange for prospects.

Jose Reyes was traded to the Rockies in the Troy Tulowitzki deal in 2015, a move he was publicly unhappy with, then he got arrested in the off-season for a domestic dispute with his wife. I used to kind of like pulling his cards, but now I just consider him a lousy wife-beater.

Melky Cabrera signed with the Blue Jays for 2013 after coming off his 50-game suspension for PED usage. A friend of his tried to help him talk his way out of the charges by building a fake website and proclaiming that Cabrera had unknowingly purchased supplements from the site. The site was traced back to Cabrera and he admitted guilt. He played two years with the Blue Jays and then got paid by the White Sox.

Colby Rasmus played a decent role in the Astros big run in 2015. Then he made history by becoming the first player ever to accept a qualifying offer in the 2015 off-season. He's had a bit of a roller-coaster career, but overall has played well. I think the knock on him has often been chemistry in the locker room, something he seems to have fixed with Houston. His hair always seems more wet than it should be. I should probably look into starting a Rasmus PC, but I've probably got too much other stuff going on right now. He's also not a guy who makes it onto a lot of checklists, because he's not really a hot prospect or a star. Those days passed a while back, probably while he was still with the Cardinals.

Now we're getting into the real meat of this team set, with star bat-flipper and home run hitter Jose Bautista. I would PC his cards, but I can't afford them. He's sporting a nice blue glove in the photo, and a nice 8-star rating on his card.

Edwin Encarnacion is another elite hitter to round out the batters in the team set. Four of the top fifteen AL MVP finalists were Blue Jays in 2015, with Encarnacion (12th) coming in behind Donaldson (1st), Bautista (8th), and David Price (9th).

R.A. Dickey is my favorite player, although his star has fallen quite a bit since his 2012 Cy Young season with the Mets. He still goes through periods when his knuckleball is dancing and his numbers are elite, but he also is prone to getting shelled from time to time.

Josh Johnson didn't really work out with the Blue Jays. He has spent the 2014 and 2015 seasons in the Padres organization, mostly working on recovering from his 2nd and 3rd Tommy John surgeries. He's already been ruled out for the 2016 season. I guess he's still in his early 30's and could still come back, but after a certain number of arm injuries I would think you'd just call it a career and be done with it.

Mark Buehrle has had a pretty good career to this point, with a couple of no-hitters (one of them a perfect game) and many years as a consistent innings-eater. He was left off the Blue Jays' 2015 postseason roster and to my knowledge hasn't decided if he'll come back in 2016.

Romero pitched 7.1 innings in 2013 and hasn't been able to put anything together since, struggling through minor league stints in the Blue Jays' and Giants' minor league systems.

Morrow followed up a pretty good 2012 with some mediocre pitching in 2013 and 2014 for Toronto. After signing with the Padres he had a good start to 2015 but wound up on the DL after 5 starts and needed surgery on his shoulder. He got a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training for 2016.

Luis Perez pitched 5 innings in 2013 after coming back from an injury. He has battled injuries on various minor league deals since then, most recently signing a deal with the Blue Jays again with a 2016 spring training invitation.

Casey Janssen was the Blue Jays closer for most of 2013 and 2014, although he had plenty of struggles in the role. He signed with the Washington Nationals for 2015 and pitched in their bullpen for most of the season with mixed results. He doesn't currently have a contract in place for 2016.

It's amazing to me how much the league changes in just a couple of years. This set is still only a couple of years old and it seems like nearly every player has had some kind of significant career change, whether it is a move to another team (or three), a change in career trajectory, legal trouble, or injury. This wraps up the AL portion of the set. I am hoping that it won't take me until mid-2017 to get through the NL teams. I think my current average in this series is about one post every 40 days. I should be able to beat that. I already have the next several teams scanned, but I need to separate and crop all the photos. I don't really need to do the write-ups on the players, either, but I feel like I need to put something in between the pictures and I have a little bit of fun looking up each player and getting a snapshot of their career.

2013 SEGA Card-Gen Directory

Baltimore Orioles

Boston Red Sox

Cleveland Indians

Chicago White Sox

Detroit Tigers

Houston Astros
Kansas City Royals
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim
Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees

Oakland Athletics
Seattle Mariners
Tampa Bay Rays

Texas Rangers
Toronto Blue Jays
Arizona Diamondbacks
Atlanta Braves