Night Owl Cards

A 2026 Topps fat pack tale.   I visited the Target card aisle again Monday as I was there to do some birthday shopping, too.    GOOD NEWS   The shelves were fully restocked (again) and this time filled with 2025 Stadium Club, too, along with 2026 Topps and 2025 Update. (Not my photo, I forgot to take one).   BAD NEWS   The hanger boxes had disappeared. So I grabbed a couple fat packs against my better judgement (they are are a dupes machine).   GOOD NEWS    I found the Ohtani card.     BAD NEWS    A bunch of cards in the first pack were miscut.     GOOD NEWS   None of the Dodgers were miscut and I needed all of them!     GOOD NEWS   The Stars of MLB card was a Paul Skenes.   BAD NEWS   The 1991 insert was:   a) A Rockie b) A player I don't know c) Featuring a city connect uniform I don't like     GOOD NEWS   Leaps at the wall! (Who needs Stadium Club?)   ...

Hard-core team collectors, of which I am one, know all about duplicates. It is a necessary side-effect of collecting your team. The question is: what do you do with those duplicates? For me, most of the duplicate Dodgers go in the Big Box of Dupes. If I can't dedicate the cards to some other completion quest, a set, the night card binder, whatever, they're stashed in the BB of D. The dupes box comes in handy when I'm trading with a fellow Dodger fan. But otherwise, they sit and wait for me to come up with some genius plan, like making a table out of them. Other duplicates, as mentioned above, will go toward a set I am half-heartedly collecting, such as 2016 Heritage. And then there are the doubles that make it across the duplicate dividing line. Maybe you have such a line yourselves. For me, that line is 1977. Any Dodger duplicate from 1977 or earlier still gets featured in my Dodgers binders. Those duplicates are just too rare or fun to be stashed in a box, ...

Ever since I was a budding collector, I have been ever-vigilant about preventing doubles from invading my collection. It's obsessive, I know. And at the rate that cards arrive in my mailbox, it is now also a little pointless. But, still, I can't shake the mind-set: filter the dupes, filter the dupes, filter the dupes. My Dodgers collection is rather advanced at this point so the routine that I go through every time a package arrives in the mail is pretty important. Upon opening the package, I shuffle through the cards and place cards I know I need in one stack and doubles in another, separating the wheat from the chaff if you want to get biblical about it. "Got it, got it, need it" will be a prevailing thought process as long as I'm collecting, and I've got this routine down cold. I'm pretty good at it, although I'm extra wary about any card from the mid-to-late '90s or early 2000s. So, I went through the ritual again in my first trade w...

As someone who collects cards, it's difficult for me to think of dupes -- otherwise known as duplicates, doubles, the same exact thing -- as something desirable. But in real life, a dupe isn't all bad. Twins, for example. Parents of twins love their dupes. And plates. I'm told it's a good thing when the dishes you set out for dinner all look the same. Socks are usually dupes, too, unless you're a teenage girl. A weekend is a dupe -- two straight days off. See? Dupes can be good. As for cards, I still avoid dupes for the most part. As a set and team collector, I'm required to have a number of dupes just so I can complete both set and team missions. But other than that, the best I can do is tolerate dupes. In my Dodgers binders, if it's a card from before 1978, then, yes, I'll allow a duplicate in the binder. Anything after than that has to be pretty special for me to include the same card back-to-back on a page. The card you see above is an exa...

Those of you who participated in or watched Nacho Grande's Stadium Club group break probably already know what I am going to write about, so go click on riveting election coverage if you're bored. I hardly ever join group breaks anymore. Someone who needs to save every dime shouldn't be playing slot machines. But this group break was different. This year's version of Stadium Club isn't available in retail stores. And it's a beautiful product. If I wanted a chance to own the Dodgers in the set, I had to join. And so I did. As expected, I received a bunch of Dodgers. Also, as expected, I received a bunch of dupes. You don't bust a bunch of cards from a 200-card set and not expect doubles. But Stadium Club -- at least in my experience --  is especially known for horrid collation. You got your full bleed photos. You got your quality pictures. You got the same damn cards over and over again. But if you want some gorgeous cards sometimes you have to t...