Please Allow Me To Reintroduce Myself

Ok, so it's been awhile since I've done one of these. Two and half years give or take. A lot has happened since then. I won't bore you with that any further. 

I recently went to a local card show for the first time and had a great time.

I found a table that was full of deals ranging from items that were specifically marked in price to boxes full of assorted stuff marked 4 for $5. I brought home a lot of stuff that I'm hoping will lead to more blogging. We'll see. 

The first thing that jumped out at me at the show though was this set of Score Impact 90's Players marked for $10. I was a big fan of Score back in the day, but even thought these looked kinda familiar, I really didn't remember them. I certainly had no idea that it was a NINETY card set. 

With a Griffey Jr card on top this seemed like a helluva deal and as you can see, it came home with me. 

As soon as I saw the Tigers cards I instantly remembered these. However I didn't have any recollection of the rest of them, which turned out to be fantastic. It's a great mix of the hobby stars of the day.....

.....along with quite a few whiffs where "Impact Player" was considerably a stretch.

All in all this is a great looking insert set and I'm ecstatic that I added it to my collection.

Seeing this set though, triggered my memory of the various self-contained packaged Score sets that were released in the late 80's and early 90's which has led me down a rabbit hole. If these sets are this cheap then these would be a blast to try and pick them all up! 

I got on the trusty TCDB machine and quickly complied a list of the sets from 1988-1992. A couple are insert sets and a couple are regional food sets, but as this was peak Score I felt they should all be on the list.

As I was compiling the list I laughed when I saw the 1989 SCOREMASTERS set. I actually have the original set I bought back in 1989 still in the box! (Which is good because these puppies sell for $15-20 now on eBay...)

I haven't looked through this box in at least 30 years, and I was shocked when I pulled them out at how beautiful they were. 

It's a shame that these were a one-and-done deal because this might be the best looking set Score ever produced. These were art in a time when cards were anything but. 

As I was digging in the card closet to find the SCOREMASTERS set, I noticed something on top of a box that I had completely forgotten about. 

I was in Chicago on Memorial Day Weekend in 2017 and stopped by the BBCE warehouse sale that was going on. I bought several things that day (some will be blog posts later) and I couldn't help but laugh when I saw these. 

Yes, the price on those is correct. I did in fact, buy those for a dollar. 

They're in pages inside a sealed plastic bag that I've never even opened up until tonight. 

Both sets are full of "that guy's star never rose with the Tigers!" cards.....

....."holy shit I forgot about that guy!" cards.....

.....and "who the fuck is that guy?" cards, which are right up my alley from that era. 

There are a few bangers as well. 

Even the Magic Motion World Series Trivia cards are interesting, primarily because I never knew there were side loading 12 pocket pages that fit these perfectly! As much as Score loved those little things, there's another blog post just waiting for the light of day.

Well that concludes this round of GSS (Groovy Score Sets). There will be more to come. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed blogging about cards. 

Like Score itself, it's nothing but good, cheap fun. 

Soccer Stickers?

Who knew that soccer stickers would end up being my favorite release of 2022?

I never saw it coming.

I’ve long been a fan of the Panini sticker releases for NFL, NHL, and NBA here in the US. I usually pick up an album and 10-20 packs of stickers each year when these come out (sadly 2018 was the last year Panini released NHL, eventually Topps took over and let it die out after a couple of years. It may be an online thing now, but I don’t know and don’t really care).

I was on vacation this fall when I saw the World Cup stickers & albums (at Walgreens of all places) and picked up an album and 20 packs of stickers. When I got home I set them on the shelf and never thought about them again until the WC started play. Remembering that I had them, I got them out when I sat down to watch a game and started stickering.

I was hooked.

I cannot explain why.

Maybe it’s the crisp colorful design of the stickers complete with all kinds of info about the players. Maybe it’s fantastic album layout that basically doubles as a program/yearbook. Maybe I’m just tired of modern card collecting and just found joy in something so pure and simple.

I had to go out and get more. I ended up buying 4 boxes during the course of the tournament!

Even with that many boxes, I was still about 125 stickers short of a complete set (The set contains 670 stickers). Sticker collation is without a doubt the most random distribution of any card or sticker set. While you do get doubles, I never once opened a pack that had the same stickers in the same order like you find in most card releases today.

Luckily I was able to get some help with some great trades from the Twitter & Discord communities (too many at this point to single out everyone by name but THANK YOU!!!) and got that number down to 24. From there I went to Panini’s website where you can order individual stickers for 40 cents each plus $4 s/h. I am anxiously waiting for those to arrive in the mail any day now.

Nearing completion of the set, my interest was piqued into looking back on previous years. It was in my search that I came across this amazing book that details Panini’s 60 year history of stickers for the World Cup and various European leagues. Not only is it a great look back at the evolution of stickers over the years, but it also recaps the events of seasons and tournaments as well. You can enjoy this book whether you are a sticker fan, a soccer fan, or both.

So then I decided that I would take a stab at the 2018 Panini World Cup sticker set.

Oh boy.

Immediately after digging in I noticed that something was “off” compared to 2022. After a lot of research I was finally able to piece together what was different.

In 2018 there were two different sets that are essentially the same set. The larger set, which has 682 stickers with black backs and was distributed in what looks like to one set of countries, and the smaller set, which has 670 stickers with pink backs and was distributed to another set of countries.

The sticker fronts for both sets are identical. The only difference is that the pink set does not contain stickers 20-31 (these are the posters for the various cities that were hosting games) and have been renumbered from that point on. I don’t know why this was done and I haven’t been able to find anything on the webs explaining the reasoning.

The oddity for me is the pricing of the boxes for each set. Neither appears to be in short supply looking on ebay. The makeup of the black set boxes is 50 packs (5 stickers per pack) for a total of 250 stickers box and the makeup of the pink set boxes is 104 packs (5 stickers per pack) for a total 520 stickers per box. However, the pricing for both of these boxes appear to be the same (in the $40-50 range). The only thing is that there are no stickers 20-31 in the pink boxes. But at those prices, I’d be far better off to buy pink boxes and then pick up the missing 12 poster stickers on ebay for $1 each.

Did I mention that there are two different albums too, and probably even more? I picked up a softcover and a hardcover album for the black set since that’s the larger set and that’s the one I’m going to try to complete. I have not come across them yet, but I’m assuming there is at least a pink set softcover book and maybe a hardcover version too? (a quick check online shows that there was a hardcover version for the 2022 set as well. Doh!)

Lastly, there was a cool little tin of sticker packs that were available although I don’t know which countries they were sold in. I will keep this one unopened since it has the cool European price sticker on the outside.

Postscript

I don’t know why I didn’t think to check there first, but TCDB.com has a great detailed explanation of the various sticker configurations. WOW! Someday I would love to find out why Panini does so many variations (especially the 2022 Swiss gold release!)

But for now my first box of 2018 stickers are here and calling and it’s time for more stickering!

1980 Topps Football

I was perusing Twitter today and saw a discussion about favorite football sets. I was going to respond & post why, until so many reasons came to mind that I figured it would be easier (and more fun) to recount them in long form.

Hands down, 1980 Topps is my favorite football set. I know, it's seldom on anybody's lists of great Topps football sets, but it easily tops mine.

I was an 11 year old kid living in Rota, Spain in 1980. I didn't really get into football until a couple of years before. It was far more popular with my classmates than baseball (imagine that!).

We moved to Spain in the summer of 1978. I had just gotten into baseball & baseball cards that summer. When school started in the fall though, I soon learned about this other sport of football, and I was in.

All my classmates were either Steelers or Cowboys fans, except for the one goofy kid who was a Vikings fan. The Steelers won the Super Bowl at the end of that season, so I fancied myself as a Steelers fan.

I soon learned that there was a guy who tore up the league that year named Earl Campbell. To this day I can't explain how or why, but I soon became an Oilers fan.

I don't remember much about the '79 season. The Steelers beat the Rams in the Super Bowl. That's about it.

Now a little bit about living in Rota. The Navy Exchange didn't sell sports cards. I don't know why and I'd love to find out why someday, but I doubt that will be today. But needless to say, sports cards were hard to come by. New cards basically consisted of some new kid moving to town and trading with the rest of us. Pretty soon he would be in the trading collective, and eventually we would all end up with the same cards anyway.

I don't remember the exact why or how, but my Granny sent me a box of 1980 football not long after they were released. Funny the things you remember from your youth, but I can still remember opening the box and seeing all those shiny cello packs. JACKPOT!!!

My dad, being the brains of the outfit, would only let me have one pack a day. He kept them hidden somewhere that I never could find (and I tried!), but it was still a treat every morning to come into the kitchen for breakfast and see a new pack sitting at my place at the table!

I would pour over the fronts and backs of them every morning, taking them all in. I would take them to school (in my back pocket!) and show them off to all of my buddies. I'm sure they tried to trade me for them & I'm sure I refused every time. I LOVED these cards.

I wish I could add that I had specific memories or this card or that card, but I don't. I just knew that they were new, and I knew that they were mine. Hell I didn't even realize that Earl wasn't in the set.

Over time though, they disappeared, but the memories didn't. In recent years I have started to rebuild the set. My checklist currently shows that I have 127 of them. They're high on my list of commons I hope to find at NSCC in a few weeks.

My Granny passed away about 3 months ago. Twice while we lived in Spain, she sent me a box of cards in a care package. One baseball ('76 cello box in '79, a whole 'nother story for another time) and one football. When she passed, I thought back on all the memories of her in my life and this was near the top.

As far as Granny's go, she was the best.

2019 Donruss

Welp, I finally pulled the trigger on my first set purchase of 2019. At $45 shipped, it came in $5 under my budget of $50. (I still haven't paged last year's Donruss set, so the 2" binder I bought for $8 will only count as $4 since I will easily be able to fit both sets in it.)

AND, kudos to the seller for taping some of the wax box to the top of the white box. Very cool, and I've never received a set where someone has done this before. Sweet!

The base cards look pretty nice in hand. It's a shame that there are only 3 Tigers, but I blame the current Tigers "braintrust" more than I do the good folks at Donruss. I think this may be the nicest design of the Donruss rebirth. I just wish they'd dialed down the size of whatever that is going on in the bottom right corner to match the upper left corner, but otherwise no complaints.

They've stepped up the backs this year by adding a second color. Much nicer than last year's black  ink only. 

The DK subset is gorgeous. One Tiger, a couple who were, and one who needs to be. Hell, they ALL NEED to be, but that's another post for another time.

I love the look of the Rated Rookies too. This would've been great for the entire set design IMO. It's a shame there are only 20 of these in the set. Seems like Donruss is missing the boat by not adding more.

Again these "throwback" cards look great too. I like that this subset features mostly up and comers,  prospects, and rookies.

My only complaint with 2019 Donruss is regarding the "variations" which are boring and unnecessary. If you want to work 50 more stars into the set, which I'm on board with, I would've preferred a 50 card subset replicating the awesome 1985 Donruss Action All-Stars set.

Overall I give this set a solid B+. They look much better in hand than they did when I saw the pics on twitter months ago. I think this is the best looking Donruss set since they came back 5 years ago. And for $45 delivered I saved about two-thirds on what I've spent on last year's Donruss set (which is still not complete.....if anyone wants to help. I've got plenty of dupes.)

I Went To The Card Show

Last night I was deliberating whether of not I wanted to go to the twice-monthly card show here in Nashville. Even though this was the first weekend that 2019 Topps would be at the show, collecting modern has been a joyless endeavor for me for years now. But I didn't have shit else to do this morning, so I went.

There is one dealer at the show who usually opens up a quite a bit of all the baseball releases. Let's call him D1. Great guy with really cheap prices. You have to get there pretty early to hit him up because there are a handful of guys who clean him out pretty quickly. Even though I got to the show at 7:30, I was too late. There was a guy who already had picked out close to a couple hundred inserts. (Insert bloat another topic for another time....) I was able to pick through the left overs and find 6 Tigers inserts for $2 total. (Look for another blog post later in the week about the 2019 Tigers I picked up)

I asked D1 if he had any base I could look through. He was in the middle of trying to come up with a price for the guy in front of me and said that he did but it was going to be a little bit before he could dig them out. The dealer beside him, from now on to be known as D2, piped up and said he had plenty. D2 is a super nice guy too, but his prices are always too high. I usually hit him up AFTER I've picked up what I needed from D1. But I was only looking for base so I figured what the hell?

I was able to find all 10 Tigers base cards, plus a couple of inserts. When I asked him how much he said $5. Only because D2 is a good guy, I was able to stifle down "are you fucking kidding me?!?" That's a $1.50 worth of cards there tops." I didn't want to throw away 20 minutes of time spent standing there though so I handed over the $5.

I circled the rest of the show, finding nothing worth looking through, and headed for the door, still in a foul mood about overpaying. Right in front of the door though, there was a table with a couple of dime boxes that I remembered seeing on my way in. I looked down and the 1983 reprint Dylan Bundy caught my eye. I've been casually working on this set, with everything I've picked up so far coming from dime boxes. So I grabbed a chair and started digging in.

Boy was I glad that I did.

I ended up pulling 20 of the 1983 inserts, including a few decent ones.

I also found cards for several other insert sets that I'm casually working on.

Some older insert sets and parallels. Love the Sosa's and the Bruce Sutter.

Some football, WELCOME BACK KOTTER, and college baseball.

A complete set of these Fleer inserts. With Lee Smith getting in this year they are all HOFers.

A nice little stack of 1975 Topps minis. I'm not working on this set so most of these will be trade bait.

A few vintage cards that are in much too good of shape to be in a dime box.

Oh yeah, there were Tigers too!

I ended up pulling exactly 130 cards for $13. I picked up a lot of needs and those I don't will go into trade piles. Needless to say, when I left the show I was no longer in a foul mood.

And it was much more fun than grocery shopping would turn out to be.

$600

Hey there! It's been a while. How've you been? Thanks for asking.

Hell, I damn near forgot this thing was still here.

Well, that's something I'm hoping to improve on this year (if you're reading this I've already surpassed last year's output). Like so many other bloggers, it became much easier to post my thoughts and comments on the hobby in real time on Twitter rather than sit down and spend an hour or two writing a blog post. But every once in a while a topic is just too long for twitter. This is one of those times.

After 40+ years of building at least some kind of set just about every year, I've decided to call it quits. No I'm not leaving the hobby. I'm no longer going to BUILD sets. I'm just going to buy them instead.

Buying complete sets is not new to me. I've been doing it with Bowman and Bowman Draft since 2013, Archives since 2013, and Flagship and Update since 2016.

Like most set collectors I've grown tired of spending big money to build sets that are only worth a fraction of what I spent (and with a slew of useless inserts that are worthless too. What exactly am I paying that much money for? The disappointment of opening packs??).

With what should have been a relatively easy set last year with Big League, I'm now over $200 into it and I'm still 25+ cards short of a complete set.

Happily those days are over now.

So I've sat down and made a list of what sets I want to /collect/buy, how much I expect to pay for them, and added in for binders and pages, and came up with a projected budget for 2019.

$600

What am I hoping to get for that $600? Well, here goes:

Baseball
Topps Flagship    $50
Topps Update      $25
Bowman              $30
Bowman Draft    $30
Archives             $100*****
Big League         $50
Donruss              $50

Football
Score                  $75
Donruss              $40

Binders and Pages $150

Total $600

Some of these are known expenditures while others are guesses, because I've never bought some of these sets before. For instance, I know you can get a factory sets of Flagship for $50 and Donruss football for $40. I have no clue what hand-collated Big League or Donruss baseball sets will cost. I don't even know if anybody even does them. I guess this could all make for potential future blog posts as each set is acquired to see how it's going. Yes, I purposefully left the word "interesting" out of that sentence.

*****Archives base sets can be had for much cheaper than $100. I just picked up the 2018 set for $35 shipped. But Archives is pretty much the only set where the inserts are interesting enough for me to pick up too. Plus you never know which year there are going to be base SP or not, or a really cool Tigers auto like Rusty Kuntz in 2017.*****

"But all the fun in set building is, you know, actually BUILDING the set." I agree. However, I've reached the age in life when keeping hundred dollar bills in my wallet IS A LOT MORE FUN. Or better yet, spending those hundred dollar bills building vintage sets at NSCC will be THE MOST FUN!

As I've previously posted, there are other ways to have fun with sorting and paging sets that can give some slight illusion to having built them yourself. I'm not linking to it because you can literally read that post next when you finish this one. Or you can skip to it now and come back to this one later. I'm down with whatever path you choose.

Am I going to miss set building? Absolutely. There IS a great sense of pride and accomplishment when finishing a build. But with each year it gets harder and more expensive. As someone once said, "all good things must come to an end." (The producers of LOST maybe?)