Night Owl Cards

The cash from my most recent Beckett Vintage magazine article came in and I went right to work. I usually devote about a third of my magazine payments to card quests and I had a few lined up as soon as I knew I would be writing that article. One card that I had my eye on was this 1966 Topps Ron Perranoski. As you know, I don't care about graded cards, but this was the best deal I could find for this specific card in decent shape, and it accomplishes quite the job. It is a pesky high number and now that I own it, I have completed the 1966 Topps Dodgers team set. This is an achievement in a few different ways. Looking at the big picture, I have now completed the Topps flagship Dodgers team sets from 1964 through the current year. There is also precious little that I need to finish off all the Topps Dodgers teams sets of the '60s, although it will take me forever to do so. The easiest will be the two high number cards from the 1960 set that I still need. And then I...

Here are the rest of the cards that I bought with some magazine-writing money. They're not as exciting as the 1977 Renata Galasso cards that were the stars of this purchase. But they mean quite a bit to me, so let's get to it. The most notable thing about this group of purchases is that I used COMC, ebay and Sportlots together for the first time. I think I'm at the stage in my collection where I need to consult all three, mostly for inventory, but also for prices. The majority of my money went to ebay. COMC and Sportlots got the leftovers. You're going to see the COMC leftovers first. I bought just three 2019 cards. Two of them were Revolution of the Game inserts from flagship. These were maddening in their unavailability when I opened packs. I didn't buy a lot of 2019 Topps, but I did get enough where I think I should have seen at least one of every insert. Unfortunately, Topps now creates eleventy billion inserts so I guess I shouldn't be anno...

I didn't know this until today, but I have won a card contest every month since August. I don't consider myself one of those people who wins contests all the time. As I just mentioned, I even ignore contests for free cards sometimes. So if I don't always enter contests, how do I keep winning? Well, for five easy payments of $99.99, my proven contest-winning methods can be ... nah, not really. I have no idea how I keep winning. I'm just in some sort of contest zone. Like a hitter in a hot streak, I'm seeing the ball real big right now. It's like a beach ball up there. A giant, free-card-filled beach ball. Let's see the rundown of contests I've won: August: The "guess how much the cards I bought at the card show cost" contest, from gcrl September: The "explain yourself for minis" contest, from It's Like Having My Own Card Shop October: The "almost the easiest World Series on the Web" contest from Collector...