Night Owl Cards

  Like I mentioned a couple of week ago, the 1975 Topps buyback game has reached a new level since 2024 Heritage came out. What has been mostly a down-low pursuit, in which I have been grabbing buybacks here and there for the last seven years sometimes at a rate of a handful per year, is now like chasing buybacks on speed. New '75 buybacks, buybacks that I need -- not the same damn Bobby Heise buyback over and over -- are up for sale all over ebay. And I've been on that stupid site at a rate the last few weeks that I haven't been on since before the blog had begun. I don't like being on ebay that much, especially when it comes to bidding. I already have a low impression of humanity without having to go through that. But for chasing down more buybacks from my favorite set of all-time? Sure, I'll wallow. Before Heritage came out, I owned 481 of the 660 cards in the set in buyback form. I knew that with what I saw available, I could get to 500 pretty quickly. So join...

I started thinking about the topic of this post even before I saw this image today on the Twitter page of @halocline_gg . I immediately breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing the photo. This hobby disaster had nothing to do with me. To run into a sign like this -- if it involved baseball -- would be deflating. And that's why I was relieved that it was targeting a product -- and collectors -- that are so far removed from the way I collect. Here are the things that I don't care about concerning 2019-2020 Optic Mega Boxes: 1. It's Panini 2. It's basketball 3. It's basketball players on Panini cards. There are few cards that I know I will never buy, but current basketball cards are definitely in that category. And here's the exercise: since I have a wide variety of card interests and lots of things that I would buy, I tried to think of cards I would never buy. Ever. Not on a whim. Not on a dare. Never. I came up with a few. Let's start with the...

I don't know how long stamped buybacks have been around. I have considered them a recent creation as they are so pointless to me that they have to be a modern invention, right? The earliest reference to buybacks that I can find on my blog is from July, 2014, not that I should be a historical source for buybacks. In fact, my disregard for these affronts to cardboard means I'm fully unaware of the fact they probably have been around for much, much longer (I am aware of the longstanding practice of inserting old cards that are newly signed into new product, but that's a different thing and totally understandable). For instance, the card above. Did you know that is a buyback? Did you know it's a buyback from 2003? I didn't notice the stamp at first as it's much less apparent than the buybacks these days. And then I was horrified. WHY ARE WE STAMPING A PERFECTLY GOOD 1961 TOPPS GIL HODGES CARD? It's a good thing I have a copy of this card -- unst...

I don't have a lot of use for the buybacks that Topps has been putting in its products the last few years. To me, stamping an old card is completely unnecessary. If you want to wow a collector with a 30-year-old card then just put the damn card in the pack. You don't need to deface it. But, somehow, by stamping cards, and stamping them in different colors, Topps has convinced some collectors that they have something special. I don't get it. I'll never get it. Don't bother explaining it to me. The reason why I collect the 1975 Topps buyback cards is because I want these buybacks to have some meaning. This is the only way I can think of where they have meaning, by trying to complete a set of them -- or at least as many of them that exist from a particular set. I've formed this thought process all without pulling a single buyback card. Buybacks, for the most part, are inserted in hobby boxes. I don't know why, maybe so shop owners and dealers can tout t...