Night Owl Cards

  March is dead again, you guys. Oh sure, it will come back to life, but today is a day to celebrate!   I often celebrate my least favorite month's demise with some sort of card order. A COMC or sportlots arrival or something like it. In fact I am welcoming various cards from a sportlots order right now, but they're not all here yet.   I can, however, take one of the cards that showed up and celebrate the completion of set -- because on the very day March took its last breath, I completed 1983 Donruss.     This Ron Jackson card was the last one I needed to finish the set. Jackson comes in three varieties. There's another one with a green border (which all of his Angels teammates have) and another one that reads "A's" in the glove instead of "Angels". I'd like the green border one someday but that's not important right now. What's important is THE SET IS COMPLETE!   Finishing the 1983 Donruss set was key because it's one of the last ma...

(I am preparing to have my dinner at the office again tonight after yet another prediction of a late afternoon/early evening snowstorm. This is convenient for 9-5 workers, who can close up shop early, but definitely not for me. Let's see if I can get out of the work parking lot late tonight. Time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 363rd in a series):   My collecting during the junk wax era was sporadic. I've written many times that I didn't collect between 1986-88 (save for one pack of Topps I bought in '88). I collected Topps like crazy in 1989, then went cold turkey again in 1990. I came back somewhere in 1991 collecting casually and then bought a bunch in '92 and '93.   I can see good and bad points to this. The good: I have no fond memories for mediocre sets like 1990 Donruss or overvalue 1989 Upper Deck. The bad: I missed several players commonly known by junk wax devotees, who were kids at the time and memorized the front and back of every card.   For...

   One thing that has become very clear to me over the last year is that my way of collecting cards -- the way that was the established primary way of collecting for as long as I've been alive -- is being phased out.   There are a variety of reasons -- and forces at work -- for this. I am reminded of one of them every time I attend the monthly card show.   In the past year, the show has moved from primarily sports cards to primarily RPG/TCG cards. I have less than zero interest in these. When I paid my entrance fee at the table, the guy there asked if I wanted to enter the raffle and gestured toward a gift basket filled with TCG stuff -- don't ask me what it was, I couldn't tell you. I gave the guy a flat "no" that sounded like "of course not."   But I'd say more than half of the tables was Pokemon, Magic and whatever else there is in that fantasy realm. Just about the rest was graded football and basketball of mostly modern cards. But I've writt...

  Wow, that's a lot of scuffing on that card. It's still surprising what you see once you scan a card.   Before getting into the heart of this post, thanks to reader Casey for taking those cards off my hands from the downsizing post. There will be more posts like that, with (slightly) better cards!   OK, now while I'm trying to get rid of some cards, I'm still adding cards at a pretty good rate. Lately I've been swimming in 1980s Donruss, which if you knew me in the early 1980s would certainly make you chuckle.   I've written about this several times -- Donruss was my third choice in the 1980s from the very moment I first saw the brand in 1981. Topps first, Fleer second, Donruss third when walking to the drug store or deli to find cards. By 1983, I wasn't even bothering with Donruss. The following year, Donruss produced what I've often called "the only Donruss set that matters" but mostly the reason I bought any in 1984 was because I purchased ...

  Isn't it the best when you get sick on the weekend? I'm way under the weather with what I think is a bad cold and it killed all my weekend catch-up plans. I'm pretty much in a zombie state, waiting for my next round of meds.   I'm a little more capable of sitting upright today so I can get a post out for you to read. A little under a week ago, when I was operating properly, I received another surprise package from CardBoredom. I really like his thoughtful posts and am always interested in people's cardboard origination stories, which the most recent post tackled.   CardBoredom had taken notice of my recent 1983 Donruss chase and sent me a "lightly sealed" pack of '83 Donruss. This is pretty cool. I've mentioned before that I bought just three packs of Donruss that year, so not even the pack wrapper is familiar to me.   Let's open up this pack, but not before consulting the few remaining cards I need in the set:   277 - Ryne Sandberg 530 - Wh...

  When I first started chasing down the 350-or-so cards I needed to finish the 1983 Donruss set, I figured it would take me awhile.   I knew it would take longer than when I decided to finally finish the 1982 Donruss set. With that, I just bought a complete set. It cost me something like 50 bucks. Swift and easy. And with these '80s Donruss sets -- even though they include the players that made me want to complete them in the first place -- they're not appealing enough to get into the whole "joy-of-building" scene that we set-collectors are known to love.   But I knew I couldn't buy the full set of '83 Donruss and be done with it ... well, I could, but I'm not paying that price for a 1983 set. The Boggs-Gwynn-Sandberg rookies were holding up the quest, and I simply decided just to build it the regular way. Maybe I'll be done in 2026, I figured.   But almost two decades into this blog, I'm still underestimating its power and the generosity of collec...

  I've been logging my collection on Trading Card Database for four years now and have been trading on the site for around three-plus years.   It's taken me that long to reach 100 trades because I rarely have the time or motivation to make my own offers. But I hit that milestone last week with the largest total number of cards I've received in a single TCDB trade.   It was also the greatest difference in cards received and cards sent-out for one trade. My trade partner, Thebradford16, wanted just three cards (I threw in a handful more). In exchange, I added 167 cards to my collection.   Admittedly, this is a benefit of being a well-known blogger in the hobby. My trade partner was just looking to deal with someone he had read and helped him get back into the hobby. And my reward came in the form of a whole bunch of 1983 Donruss for the collection!     A cross-section from that stack. Love seeing my guys on new-to-me cardboard.      Some more v...