by Matt | Jan 21, 2016 | Cards
The best kind of Christmas cards aren’t those with wreathes and holly or pictures of fat Dutch saints with beards. The best kind of cards are small, covered in pictures from this crazy game called “base ball” and from friends. These particular cards came from my Yankee’s fan counter-part in New Jersey, AJ the Lost Collector. It’s always a great sign of the generosity in this hobby that fans who would normally be polar opposites with their team loyalties can trade numerous time and with such joy. Kind of restores your faith in humanity a little.
Pitchers who led the Sox to a World Series from a set I haven’t finished, an awesome way to start a package.
Two cards for Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez (that has such a nice ring to it).
Two Nomar cards I didn’t have, always a welcome sight.
Three from the “big dawg” Mo Vaughn, including a “Double Trouble” appearance by Nomar. Solid cards all around. I love the insane metallic purple floating eyeballs on the Pacific Metal Universe card.
Last but not least, the Large Father, looking all retro in Topps Heritage.
Awesome package AJ. A return package is forming itself in a pile on my desk!
by Matt | Jan 20, 2016 | Cards
I’m not exactly sure what my plan was regarding this card. It’s not like it fits into a box, or a page, or even my display case. Regardless, nabbing a 1/10 5×7 “Topps online exclusive” card for next to nothing was rather appealing.
It’s big, it’s huge, it’s 5×7 for goodness sake. I love it in it’s “I’m a wacky, different, sort of card” way. Apparently the regular versions were available online, but the red versions were only available in a set, and there were only 10 sets, so says the page on Topps.com (see here). They were also apparently $2k. Woah. So, some dealer got their hands on a set and split it up and sold them individually on ebay. The seller I bought this from had pretty much the rest of the set as well.
1/10 certainly isn’t shabby. The only real problem I can see is that Topps didn’t really seem to care about the production value. They used the same card stock, which is fine at 2.5×3.5, but starts to feel flimsy at 5×7. They also just “enlarged” the card design instead of recreating it at a higher resolution. You can see the obvious printing dots with the naked eye…
Lastly, they didn’t even bother to foil stamp the logo or the Future Stars writing.
I mean, if you’re willing to do that for 700 cards x millions of copies, why can’t you be bothered to do that for TEN copies of something you’re selling for big money. Oh, yeah, that’s right, it’s all about the money.
In the end, I don’t really care. It’s a conversation piece in my collection. It has the coolness to stand on it’s own, and I can’t believe I got it for less than $10. Oh, and did I mention it’s huge?
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