Game On! March Madness Sweet Sixteen Style (A Contest, Obviously)

Make the picks. Win the cards.

It's pretty simple. Pick the best NCAA bracket and you can win a prize. There are also runner-up prizes. I will also create a bonus contest at some point, selecting a game for anyone, including those who don't want to fill out a bracket, to predict the final score of (game TBD.)

This is the sixteenth edition of the contest, and I appreciate all of you for joining up. Go Ducks!

2025 rules:

• Selection Sunday is March 16th (tomorrow!), which means that is the earliest the brackets can be filled out. The games that actually count for the contest will start on March 20th.
• Default ESPN scoring rules apply. You must fill out the entire bracket, including the tie-breaking final score of the final game.
• First place wins a 2024 Topps Heritage High Number Value Box OR 2025 Topps Heritage Value Box (blaster) or suitable equivalent (subject to availability! up to $24.99 in value!) I will email the winner shortly after the final game to make the prize selection among the available products at the time.
• Second and third place prizes will consist of some team bags of cards from your favorite MLB and/or basketball teams. And maybe some other card junk.
• As always, the worst (honest) bracket will get something, too.
• Click here now to join, and follow the "Create a Bracket Now" link. Make sure to fill out your entire bracket prior to March 20th!

Radness is Coming; A PWE Round-Up for Monday

Look for a new contest sign-up next week! For now, let's check out some cards from plain white envelopes.

It's time to recap a few of the sneaky white envelopes that trickled in over the past few months. I actually have been getting a ton of these in the mail lately, but at least 95% of them are part of TCDB trades. I've made sure to set aside any others that come in so I can show off the cards here. (I'd love to show off all of the TCDB trades, but I can just barely stay on top of getting them logged in and sorted.)

Padrographs sent me one of my first looks at the 2024 Topps Archives set, which was released very late in the year. Topps caught a lot of flack, at least among the online circles I spend time in, for their terrible attempt at the 1970 design. The biggest issue was the player name font, which bears no resemblance to the original design. It's even more silly when you consider that it's essentially the same font used on the 1994 design (which looks fine!) and was featured as recently as 5 years previously when its turn came up in the Heritage set. It was obviously a choice, and people have opinions about that choice, but I've never really heard a definitive, satisfying answer. What I do know is that while they do try to replicate a lot of the design elements for the Heritage sets, Archives often ends up becoming a more cheaply made, fun house mirror version of the original cards they're attempting to emulate.

Nachos Grande is a big Barry Larking collector, and I recently pulled one of Larkin's shiny parallels from the 2024 Panini Prizm set and sent it his way just for fun. I wasn't expecting anything in return, so I was pleasantly surprised when he hooked me up with some of his Allen & Ginter mini extras. The two Luis Castillo cards (black border and Allen & Ginter back) join up with Tyler O'Neill's mini to head to my Ginter set binder.

These two Brendan Donovan minis (A&G back and black border) are headed to my Cardinals binder. Unlike O'Neill's card above, I didn't have a single copy of either of these.

The biggest of the three PWEs came from frequent flyer gcrl, who sent over a fat stack of Cardinals cards and set filling needs. Alec Burleson's second year Topps card is a sparkly purple parallel numbered to 799. Do people still say "second year card"? I'm guessing not, unless you're trying to scam influence someone on eBay or somewhere of the like.

Chrome Sapphire cards are a pricey thing, so I am always thrilled to snag one for my team collection. Most of the ones I do have seem to be of the reliever variety like Gallegos here, but I'll surely take any of them.

This one is a Halloween-ish holiday parallel of Cardinals speedster Victor Scott II. Any time someone insists on going by "II" as a suffix instead of Jr. makes me tempted to call them The Sequel. I know that Topps was thinking "orange and black" when they designed these parallels for the Topps Update set, but they really made it look weird instead of spooky or whatever.

Here's a couple more parallels (rainbow foil and royal blue) from last year's Topps sets. I believe royal blue has been phased out in favor of even more foil this year.

Speaking of foil, here's a parallel of Jordan Hicks' rookie card from the inaugural Topps Big League set from back in 2018. It's numbered to just 100. Hicks finally successfully converted from a reliever to a starting pitcher last year with the Giants after the Cardinals had attempted it a few years back.

The set needs came in various flavors. Here's a couple base cards from the 2004 Topps Heritage set plus an insert from the 2020 set.

Alec Mills is not exactly a household name, but he did notch a no-hitter in that 2020 quasi-season. The Carlton Fisk card is a big get, since I'm very close to finally finishing off the 2014 Allen & Ginter set. This is the last set I haven't completed aside from the first two (and the last two where I decided not to pursue them anymore.)

The last grouping of cards are all from the 2003 Topps Heritage set, one of my personal favorites. I love the logos, the multiple photos and the green card backs. Of course, I like the original 1954s that they represent, but they're not always so affordable.

A Holiday Gift

 

Baseball and football cards -- just the way you like them!

Christmas in sports cards form came late, but that's because I was out of town. I usually end up with a pile of packages and trades around the holidays, mostly because I figure that people are in a giving mood and also maybe have a little extra time off to do the card thing. I'm also out of town for a bit around these holiday maybe every two out of three years, so I was greeted with an avalanche of envelopes of all shapes and sizes once mail delivery resumed after the first of the year. At the top of the pile was a generous holiday package from Dennis of Too Many Verlanders, which is always a welcome sight.

Let's look at the football guys first. This is one of the blue mirror parallels from 2018 Panini Certified and is numbered to just 50 copies. I know some people dropped a lot of money on cards of the Heisman Trophy winner Mariota early in his career, and I've benefitted lately on picking up a few of his nicer cards now that the shine has long worn off.

Here's another Ducks QB in his pro uniform. I think Justin Herbert is going to have to shed the stigma of being a Chargers player entirely if he is going to elevate his status in the NFL, but certainly having Jim Harbaugh around could eventually change things a bit. We'll see.

Of course, this is another card for my Oregon collection, but it reminds me of how strange it feels that I actually rooted for the Chiefs at one point. Like... this decade. Kind of.

It's kind of incredible that I now own two distinct versions of this fairly obscure auto/manupatch card of late oughts Ducks running back Jeremiah Johnson. You can see the other one here. (Same card, different patch!)

For every Jalen Hurts, Donovan McNabb or Randall Cunningham in my time following the Eagles, there's been a couple of Kevin Kolbs and a couple of Detmers. Well, maybe just one Kolb. Anyway, it was a great year for the Eagles and you'd think I'd have more to say about it, but the Super Bowl was kind of surreal... in a fun way!

I'm not a full fledged Eagles team collector in the same way that I am with Cardinals (baseball) cards, but I do have a couple of boxes set aside for them. I did add a bunch of base Duce Staley cards to my want list on TCDB since he was a favorite from the past, and serendipitously ended up receiving this numbered "Premiere Date" parallel from Dennis around the same time. It's great!

Jevon Holland is a really good player, and a free agent. I could certainly think of another bird team whose uniform he'd look pretty good in if you ask me.

Here's another Duck! Ed Dickson is showing off the underrated late '00s Ducks look here.

Of course, the package wasn't all pigskin pushers. (That's a thing, right?) Dennis sent over a nice little stack of baseball parallels and inserts from sets I dabble in from time to time. These two Bowman Heritage cards are both chunky one-per-pack parallels with facsimile signatures. This era used to have a lot of thick cards that would theoretically throw off someone trying to search for similarly thick coveted memorabilia cards.

This trio of lesser known baseball players are featured on mini parallels from the 2005 Bowman Heritage set. Chris Volstad is the only name I remember here. It's possible that the other two never made it to the bigs.

Last up from the set stuff is a 2005 Turkey Red red parallel for the meta collectors out there, and a '74 Highlights card from the 2023 Topps Heritage set. They don't really fit together at all, but what the hell, I was saving some space.

The last card featured here is a Cards card (hey, that's the blog!) Kolten Wong had a decent run with the team and will always been linked with the Mike Matheny era, for better and for worse. I think most of us would welcome something on the level of the Matheny days right now, considering the current state of the team (ahem: mediocrity.)

Takin' Some Shorts (Prints)

Cardinals and Heritage needs, including a stupidly elusive card. 

 

The latest (well, as of November) mailer from the one and only Night Owl Cards was heavy on some harder to get cards from a certain set that I collect. Before we get into that, however, it's to give the Cardinals some due. I don't know who invented the X-Fractor, but that particular shiny Chrome design still amuses and delights all these many years later. Chrome was the first and easiest thing for me to make fun of when I started collecting cards again almost twenty years ago, but it didn't take me long to get suckered into liking these, at least when they suit my team collecting interest.

I ended my quest to collect all things Allen & Ginter with the 2022 set, but that didn't stop me from buying a couple of blasters of the most recent product. They make decent trade bait, after all. This year's design is fine, but it's not at all what drew me to A&G in the first place. This black bordered Ozzie Smith mini isn't a bad look, but it's just not Ginter to me. (I am still collecting those sets from 2006-2022, by the way. I rarely give up on anything, to a fault.)

This one is a regular bordered mini, with the A&G logo thing on the back. You'll just have to imagine what it looks like, or do a Google search or something.

This is one of those cards that I could have sworn I owned at least five copies of, but apparently I did not. The 2009 Bowman design was pretty far away from what Bowman sets look like these days. I mean, these had black borders. Black! Can you imagine?

This is certainly an oddball, which means I totally love it. It comes from some sort of Willie Mays Story set from 1983, which means it was probably pretty far off of my radar. I don't usually comb through checklists of sets that feature a player that isn't from the team that I follow, so this was a really cool find.

Topps did a boneheaded thing (can you imagine?!) with the 2024 Heritage set, where they decided to make the first 100 cards of the set short printed instead of the usual last 100 cards. Well, almost. There's a Nathan Eovaldi card in the first 100 that is actually not short printed (but is often listed as such), while Leody Taveras (card #407) is actually short printed. The most annoying thing is that this is typically one of the most expensive cards in the whole set. My theory is that this card isn't any more rare than the other 99 SPs and just received extra attention from people who couldn't fill that hole in their base set, but the current (low) population of the card on sites like COMC would suggest otherwise.

Night Owl ended up having a bunch of extra Heritage SPs to trade off, as he is the '75 guy and ended up with a lot of extras in set build, so I was more than happy to be one of the lucky recipients of a pile of these pesky cards. Short printed cards from newer Heritage sets are still pretty affordable (Leody Taveras notwithstanding), so I am tempted to fully put this thing away before time gets away from me. Alas, almost immediately after I put what I have of this set into a reasonably sized binder, I heard the ugly rumors that a High Number series is still forthcoming. If that does come to fruition, at least it should be cheap!

Contest Results (and More)

The results are in! And... let's also check out some Cards cards.

The big football contest is in the books. The winner is none other than Ginko-5, who will win a blaster box of the new Topps Series 1 set plus some extra. Coming in at a close second place is Elliptical Man, with Pete L rounding things out in third place. Meanwhile, the worst place "prize" is heading to Dean K.

It was a fun, but bloated season, with a first-ever twelve team playoff that only really produced a couple of really interesting games. Unfortunately, the Ducks were on the wrong side of one of the numerous blowouts and found their undefeated season go up into flames before making it to the semifinals, which is certainly a possibility when a single loss can end it all. I'm sure more changes are on the way eventually, but at least it was better than the BCS, I guess?

 

If you're here for the cards, well, we've got some cards. Cardinals cards, to be exact. This latest batch comes from a bunch of Nachos Grande Discord group breaks. Masyn Winn is at the front of the line of the next generation of Cardinals stars, so I'm quite glad to see a few more cards of his heading straight into my collection.

I've never been a big fan of the velocity/laser parallel design that Panini rolls out frequently as it looks really busy. The pink and red border doesn't look so bad on a Cardinals card, though. This one is essentially a parallel of a parallel, numbered to just 79 copies.

Brendan Donovan is another one of my newer Cardinals faves. He's probably never going to lead the league in any major statistical categories, but he can play almost any defensive position well, is a smart base runner and is an extremely tough player to get out at the plate.

Foil Filagree! It figures that just as soon as I stopped collecting the Allen & Ginter sets (I still want all those goodies from 2006-2022), they finally came up with a flashy parallel that I actually really like. I'll just keep these for my team collection, though. I saw that they brought these back for the 2024 set as well.

Here's some more Masyn content. This is of the die-cut variety. I'm hoping someone eventually comes up with a good nickname for him, because it feels a little clunky to call him Winn or Masyn.

As you can probably guess, this one is a numbered purple parallel of the same card. I probably didn't have any 2024 Topps Finest cards before this, so I think I did well snagging these two insert cards.

Wacha Wacha Wacha!

My scan doesn't do it justice, but this is a silver/holo parallel of the Optic parallel from the 2024 (Panini) Donruss set. A parallel of a copy of a knockoff. I'm hoping Panini pulls even a slightly better design out of their collective hat for 2025, because this one was truly dull. Even having a full league sanctioned license in the NFL didn't really do it any favors.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the contest. Next up is... well, you know what it is! It's just weeks away!

Canadian Football and a Big Contest Update

 

Who will win the annual college football contest? Plus, cards! 

 

We're getting really close to kickoff in the final college football game of the longest season of our lifetimes. Who is going to take this one? More importantly: who is going to win the big Cards on Cards contest? It looks like the top prize is down to two competitors, based on their total points accumulated and the maximum amount of points still left on the table: Ginko-5 and EternalSigh (Elliptical Man). I won't be watching the game because I don't really want to watch either team win, but I will tune in later to check out the final standings.

On an unrelated note: cards! Actually, I received cards and a really nice signed 8x10 photo back in late November from Sportscards From The Dollar Store. This package sneaked in right before the big Canada Post strike that threw mail deliveries between Canada and USA in all sorts of upheaval during the busiest time of the year.

The signed photo is of Oregon Ducks QB Vernon Adams Jr., who is shown with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, meaning that this must have been taken during the 2017 season. I really don't have a lot of stuff like this, so it was a really nice addition to my collection. 

Of course, this package wasn't all Canadian American pro footballers (not to be confused with Canadian-American pro footballers, as Adams is from California.) Brian Westbrook is not Canadian and was not a CFL player, of course, but he does wear green! This is one of my first looks at the Topps Composite set, their apparent answer to Panini Chronicles.

I've actually been spending all day watching pro basketball and ignoring the real world. Here's a pro basketball player that I collect. Chris Duarte hasn't yet seen a ton of action with the Bulls, his third team in four seasons.

Speaking of not seeing much action, Jusuf Nurkic might be on his way out of the league after being removed from the starting lineup in Phoenix, a steep fall for someone who was essentially moved in exchange for Deandre Ayton and Toumani Camara. (Of course, there were other factors and players involved, but this was mostly what Phoenix got out of it, give or take a Grayson Allen and a couple of guys who aren't there anymore.) While people have been trying to run Ayton out of town since as soon as he arrived, Camara looks like a keeper to say the least.

Here's another Duarte card. I like that this is from the hobby release of Select. Too many times, people have traded me the retail versions of these cards when I already have them. (Those ones are blue.)

Payton Pritchard, one of the greatest high school players to ever come out of the state of Oregon, has taken on a much more consistent role for the defending champion Celtics. Boston is never going to be my favorite team, but seeing Pritchard do well there is a good enough reason for me to not to change the channel when they're on.

Josh Huff is another Duck who also became an Eagle.

I swear that I have about 100 different versions of this card with its unnecessarily closely cropped photo, and yet I didn't have this gold one apparently! I've made some good progress in collecting the various gold Cardinals parallels that Topps has put out in the last 24 years in their flagship sets.

I might not be the biggest hockey fan, but I definitely know who Keith Tkachuk is! This is a really fun looking jersey card from Pacific of all companies. Tkachuk spent the bulk of the last decade of his career with the St. Louis Blues and now has two sons in the league.

Thanks again to buckstorecards and everyone who entered the contests this year!