Night Owl Cards

I am not as obsessive about variation and error cards as some collectors, particularly when it comes to the minute "errors" that people chase with cards from the '80s. Even with some of the larger differences, I can't be bothered. It's kind of like: if it wasn't common knowledge when I was collecting then it doesn't matter. I knew about "blackless" 1982 Topps cards before I started reading card blogs, but it wasn't much earlier than that. I barely gave it a thought. In fact, to show you how much I paid attention, I thought people were referring to cards that were "backless" . OK, hold on ... There we go. But I must admit the first image is what popped into my head first. I thought "backless" because what the heck is "blackless"? That's not even a word! I don't know who first started referring to those 1982 Topps variations in that way, but the nickname stuck. And now it is common knowledge and there are a...

All right, Topps has been a naughty boy and attached a hard-to-obtain card of a super-hyped-pitcher to the end of its 2010 base set. It callously manipulated its Million Card Giveaway site so it would spit out the periodic Stephen Strasburg card. It just announced the addition of a different Strasburg card, also numbered 661, to its factory set. Believe it or not, I refuse to get myself worked up over this. It's obvious that Topps has decided that doing things like this is a successful business scheme -- that there are enough idiots out there who will sacrifice common sense for the chance to own something that might be worth bragging about for 3 weeks -- that it can make crates of money off of it. As a set-collector, that's supposed to irk me. And it has in the past. Very recently, in fact (see: 2006 Alex Gordon, etc). But not anymore. As of now, I'm done with that. No, I'm not dropping Topps. I will continue to collect Series 2, and when I receiv...