Night Owl Cards

    The main reason for starting this series other than having a post for the blog is to land some easily obtained cards of my team from that super-plentiful decade of the 1980s.   Hopefully, I half-thought, I could be done with collecting '80s cards forever.   Well, from the point I first started researching the first post of the series, I figured out that wasn't going to happen -- there were plenty of obscure and hard-to-find cards created in the '80s, and so many of them.    But I have been able to grab a few cards, even complete some team sets, thanks to this series. Often what happens is I nab a card or two while I'm writing the next post in the series ... and then I stall out. That's what happened with the last post in April .   I quickly grabbed the Pee Wee Reese 1987 Hygrade card to finish that team set, except for the variations that I'll probably never pursue.      And I nabbed the final card I needed for the 1987 TCMA 1955 Bro...

  OK, I said last month when I did the last Elusive '80s post that the next one would show up pretty quick, and here it is.   Only a month between posts hasn't given me much time to tackle any of those elusive '80s needs but several are sitting in carts and you're looking at the most recent arrival, which was on the last post as a need -- the wonderfully charming Jiffy Pop Fernando. (Never mind that "1st annual" nonsense).   In this post I'm tackling the Dodgers I need from sets issued in 1987 -- still seems ludicrous that I would need anything from 1987, even with this series telling me that needs are all around me, no matter what year.   Expect a few more Valenzuela appearances.   1987     1987 Albuquerque Dukes Police    Technically not a Dodgers set but I've been known to gather Albuquerque Dukes cards from the '70s and '80s, as so many future Dodgers favorites are displayed on those cards. This is a 30-card set and I don't have a s...

   I watched a half-a-box break of 2026 Topps Heritage last night. Yikes.   I was really glad afterward that I had already made the decision not to chase the set, as I had for 2023, 2024 and 2025 Heritage. It does not look great. Even the replication of the design -- which is not difficult for 1977 Topps -- is not good, which was mostly all I had to keep me dedicated to Heritage the last couple of years.   A lot of the photos do not represent 1977 photography and there were those ridiculous blue-sparkle parallels in every third pack and chromes in the rest of them (I also hear the collation is not good). This set is so far away from what it has been and what I was counting on it to be once Heritage reached the mid-1970s set. Very disappointing.   So I'm not building any modern sets for the first time in a few years and don't have any large vintage chases either. This is the perfect window to gather those random Dodgers needs, and so with that in mind ...  ...