Even though time and work have gotten the best of me the past few years, I’ve still been collecting sporadically to keep me feeling human. Mostly, this just means buying cards, either as singles on ebay or comc, or buying boxes of stuff for the joy of ripping and the intention of trading/selling off the rest later.
I’ve bought a lot of boxes of cards as part of black friday promotions or to celebrate my birthday or anniversary, etc. Usually they don’t give me a lot for my own collections, but I do get some. The problem is that I tend to prioritize trade packages and so these never make their way onto the blog. Well, those cards matter too, dang it. And if I’m going to show all of the cards in my original 6 player collections, then we might as well start today.
Die cutting is the only way to make an ’89 design look good
We’ll start off with a few from our last burst of case breaking. Back in 2014, when things really started to hit the fan for the first time. The least exciting of that bunch is this mini, which is saying something because these are nice.
There’s another metal border that’s tougher
Has any Tony Gwynn collector out there counted how many times the rookie card has been used? I bet it’s a lot. Maybe once my collection is complete, I’ll bite that bullet.
I didn’t have an extra of the regular insert, but did get this
Lastly from the cases is this gold insert parallel. The regular ones are some of the toughest from that year. There’s also a red version /50 that’s eluded me.
Speaking of designs that have been overused
At one point, I bought a box of these 1998 Leaf Fractal cards. I spent too much on it and it was quite uneventful. I really don’t know why I bothered. I guess I assumed that some of the parallels would be more common than they turned out to be. It still might serve as some unusual trade bait, but this was about it for me. This is the second most common version #/3050 in a floppy plastic form. About 90% of the box were these and the #/3999s. They can’t all be winners.
Only 7 more to go
I also took a flyer on two retail boxes of 2005 Playoff Prestige, specifically to seek out these inserts. I need a bunch for Tony, Frank, Greg (and a handful of Kerry). I wound up with quite a few, but only this one for my binders. It’s tough to tell, but this is the blue #/900.
Two Cubs hats out of 4. Forgot Prior was a Padre.
Some longtime blog readers may remember when I was posting random packs of 2008 UD Piece of History from a birthday box binge. I never got around to posting the pack that had this one. That was a fun box. A lot of numbered stuff like this, but most will hopefully end up in your hands. Wow, I have a lot of trade bait posts to organize….
Now that’s a painterly pose
To end things, we’ll go with the lowest numbered card. This wasn’t from a box exactly. Dave & Adam’s was selling 20 pack lots of Studio cards and I bought a few to chase these portrait cards. Sadly, most of the base cards were damaged, but the inserts were oddly unscathed. That’s great news as I have a lot of Portraits to share, and it also meant that this Frank Thomas #/50 was safe.
So, what you do all think? If you made it this far, which of those products would you like to see offered up for trade on the blog first?
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