Night Owl Cards

As you may have heard, I am a set collector from way back. I love completing sets. Big, honking sets of 700-plus cards with no short-prints is preferred. But the set-collecting pull is strong, and I'll settle for what they're putting out these days, as long as it doesn't look like crap. Late last week I opened a package that contained the last card I needed to complete the 2015 Stadium Club set. It was the Kris Bryant card that I ranted about a few posts ago. Now, normally, this would be the best news of the day. A set is complete! All that effort and time, all that cash and cataloging, all that sorting and admiring. Completion! On your average day this would prompt me to craft a post all about 2016 Stadium Club, or list my favorite Stadium Club cards of all-time, or my favorite club sandwiches of all-time. But something bigger happened on that day. Something bigger and cardier. The package arrived from Cardboard Icons . Ben's a blogger from way back, former ...

A little while ago, I received a package from fellow supertrader Adam of Infield Fly Rule . It's so good to have a destination again for all my spare Rockies cards (and all Rockies cards are spares). In that package, I came across two different topics that I wanted to discuss. The first is how nostalgia can pop up in the strangest places and with the strangest cards. For me, the most nostalgic cards, by far, are cards from the 1970s. So many memories and pleasant card moments from that decade. Cards from other eras hold some nostalgia, too, but I would never expect junk wax cards to produce many fuzzy moments, particularly anything from the early '90s. Those were not great cards, nor great times. So how do I explain the rush of feelings I received when I saw these cards come out of the package?: 1990 Score? Why in the world would anyone get melty over that set? Well, every time I see a few 1990 cards grouped together I am immediately transported to a small colle...

When I coerced UltraPro into making pages to house 1975 Topps-style minis and then somehow got them to send me a box of the new pages , I knew it wouldn't be long before the guilt would set in. My primary goal in getting these pages made was so I could store my 1975 Topps mini collection, which is now three cards away from completion. That collection is now stored in those free pages and ... I have a few leftover. What do I do with the leftovers? And -- here is where the guilt comes in -- will I ever need more of these mini style pages? I eased my guilty thoughts by quickly storing some 1970s Kellogg's 3-D cards in the remaining mini pages, knowing that I would likely be pursuing more Kellogg's cards in the near future. But at the achingly slow rate that I am adding cards to my collection, when would I ever need to buy more mini pages for the cause? Enter Tony of Off Hiatus Baseball Cards , who reminded me that '75-style minis are here to stay in many diff...