Night Owl Cards

  When I receive a card package that contains Dodger cards from a fellow collector, there is a 95 percent chance that some of those Dodger cards will be dupes. That's just a fact of life that I made peace with a long time ago. I have more than 23,000 Dodger cards, you aren't going to get every card past me. It's just not happening. But if you are going to attempt to make sure that every last Dodger card that you send is a need, then you must do what Robert of $30 A Week Habit did when he sent an envelope to me recently. Every last Dodger card that he sent was new to my collection. How did he do that? A) He got lucky. With one of the cards anyway. The above Cody Bellinger insert from 2018 Stadium Club had eluded me. But that's what you need as a fellow trader, luck. I don't know how many of the messages I scrawl that accompany my trade packages contain the word "hope," but it's got to be most of them. But that is just one card from the envelope Robert ...

Just before I started to return to collecting modern cards in 2006, card companies seemed to be going wild with sets that were difficult to define or track or both. Really, this had been a pattern since the mid-1990s but I tend to pin the blame for that period of craziness on Pacific and Pinnacle and other very '90s sets that had burned themselves out by the first couple years of the new century. With just Topps and Donruss, Fleer and Upper Deck remaining, for the most part, I thought maybe things would have relaxed just a little. But they didn't. Sets grew stranger and more confusing. I was reminded of this by a package I received recently from Greg at The Collective Mind . During his multiple-state travels where he went a-gathering for trading cards and is now inundated with them, he found a few bits of weirdness for my collection. The card above doesn't seem all that weird per se. I like it's shininess. It seems straightforward: it says right there on th...

I picked a strange year to fully rejoin the modern collecting scene. My return was in 2006, but I didn't realize all that was out there until 2008, when this blog started. And, 2008 -- how do I describe 2008? It wasn't the greatest year for cards. Oh, I'm sure some are nostalgic for it. Upper Deck was still around. You could get presidential people on your cards if you liked that kind of thing. But, damn, there were some weird sets. Upper Deck Documentary. Topps Moments and Milestones. Upper Deck Spectrum. Upper Deck Yankee Stadium Legacy. And the set that I still haven't figured out: Topps Co-Signers. Since I am a poor, retail-bound collector -- and was even more so in 2008 -- I don't get a handle on hobby-issue sets. They're strange and unfamiliar. But Co-Signers made it particularly difficult to comprehend for a plebeian like me. Any Co-Signers cards I received were the box-breakers' "discards," such as that really ugly Brad Penny c...