Night Owl Cards

(Happy Halloween! The work schedule dictates whether I'll be dealing with this holiday or not. This year I am not. So the day really is happy! ... Well, except for the work part. It's time for Cardboard Appreciation. This is the 314th in a series): On the years I post on Halloween, I try to have a theme. There have been several over the life of this blog . Tonight, all I have is an orange card. Real original, I know. But at least it's an unusual orange card. This is what's called a "logofractor." I know some of you don't know what that is. But when they were released about a month ago -- boxes contained five packs of regular 2022 Chrome cards and two packs of logofractors -- it seemed like everyone knew. The hype machine was in full spew. Collectors -- you know the ones -- couldn't get enough of them. My timeline was filled with gushing. Some of the cards were selling in four figures. All because of the MLB logo plastered across the image. Topps has...

That would be 2018. It's been coming for awhile. Probably around 2015 or so I began to think "I can't do this anymore. I just can't keep up." Even though from the beginning I always knew that there would be no way I could collect every Dodger card as a team collector, I still had hope for several years. There weren't that many parallels or that many inserts. Sure, there were a bunch of 1 of 1 cards, but I could ignore those easily enough. Then it became a deluge. More and more parallels. More and more inserts. More and more variations. Cards from Panini that I didn't even like and parallels and variations of those . Then the online exclusives came. More and more online exclusives. Topps Now and the Living Set and current players on retro designs that were issued like every week and that weren't available at the store down the street. Then came the club-membership-type deals from Topps where you could sign up and Topps would make cards made exc...

I am not very good at writing short posts. I like my posts to have something to say and the only way I seem to be able to do that is by making them long. Whenever I try to make it short, the post feels empty and can't help but think "who is going to read that?" It feels like I have nothing to say. But there is no time for a long post today. I'm going to have to write a short one, meaning I feel like I need cards that are appropriate for when you have nothing to say. What are the perfect cards for when you have nothing to say? That's right! Prizm! Perfect. God, look at those things. Every thought has just flown out of my head. I'm coming up with ... nothing. I don't even know if Panini is making Prizm cards anymore. I've completely lost track because I lost interest like five years ago. These were sent to me by Jon of Community Gum (who is probably wondering why he sent them now). He says they were on my want list. I'll take his ...

My want lists rehaul has been going on for eight months since a crash erased them back in April and I decided to revise the way I listed them. It's very tedious work, even more tedious than cataloging cards. It's difficult to get myself to update them. So I continue to apologize to anyone who has looked at them in the last eight months and can't find any listings for loads of sets. But it's no picnic for me either. One of the great advantages to having want lists is crossing off card numbers when you obtain the cards. I can't tell you how much joy I get from crossing wants off. OK, actually, yes, I can tell you much I enjoy it. This is how much: A week or two ago I received a bunch of cards from Jon of Community Gum . He is one of the few collectors I know who is interested in the Upper Deck Documentary set that was issued almost 10 years ago. The execution on that set was so off the mark that Documentary belongs on the island of misfit sets. But than...

I think everyone knows by now that I reside in a cardboard wasteland. There are no thrift stores that contain cards. No antique shops either. There are no flea markets. There are no card shops (there was once one that has since morphed into a memorabilia/sportswear shop). Card shows make a stop an hour away from me 2 or 3 times a year. Fortunately, the internet compensates for that. I often think what my collection and perspective on cards would be without the internet. No doubt, the collection would be much smaller and far less varied. And my perspective would probably be rooted in 1993. I'd likely still be on a quest to figure out what happened to Fleer baseball cards. I've come across collectors who don't follow the hobby online. It's obvious they are not up on the current state of cards at all. Often they are 20, 30 years behind. And that's fine if you're not interested in the cards being made today. It's not like you're going to be asked to...

A few posts ago , in a state of despair, I wrote about how I didn't know if I could continue writing every day on this blog anymore. But actually, I don't have it that bad. Even if I couldn't post once a day any longer, I'm pretty sure I could post four or five times a day. I don't think that's exactly neglecting the blog. Going a little further, I have been able to continue Night Owl Cards for five-plus years with almost no breaks. Save for holidays and vacations, it's been churning out a post a day for more than 1,900 days. How do I explain that? Luck. I've been fortunate to avoid any crises. Yeah, I've had health issues, work upheaval and personal problems, but nothing that could keep me away from the computer for more than a couple of days. And there hasn't been any new pursuit that I've found more to my liking than babbling about cards. Yup, I've been very lucky. I am reminded of this all the time when I read other c...

Sometimes I think I'd get more out of this hobby if I had a little more direction. Sure, I have certain cards I collect -- Dodgers, specific sets, night cards, oddballs -- but I could refine my collection a little more. I hate to use the cards I received from Jon of Community Gum as an example, but really I could have picked any group of cards that I received in the mail lately. For instance, I will take as many of these Moments and Milestones Dodger cards that you are willing to send, but what hope is there in me collecting them all? Will I make the slightest attempt to do so? Gary Sheffield isn't even a favorite of mine. Mike Piazza is a little more of a favorite, but my chances of finding all 150 of these cards are zero. These are very nifty. They're from Topps' golden giveaway website promotion from 2012, the one I completely ignored. I would imagine that there are other Dodgers in this set. But since I ignored it, I have no idea. And the i...