2012 Topps Series 2 Retail

Greetings!

Hope everyone's doing well, and has some good times planned for Labor Day weekend.  I've been away for a while, finally starting to get the massive card organization project off the ground (my purpose for joining this site in the first place).  The wifey is certainly pleased to have piles of cards all over the little home office.  Anyway, that means future posts of mine will start coming from older sets.  Everybody wins!

Before that happens, might as well put up a pack of something I would have assumed someone else would have done by now...2012 Topps Series 2!

The pack's from Target (the gravity feed box, I think).  Everyone with a blog has posted their thoughts on the set already, so let's just see the cards:

#356 – Endy Chavez

#370 – Lyle Overbay

#358 – Jacob Turner

#619 – Tyler Greene

#435 – Jeff  Baker

#616 – Tyler Pastornicky (Target Red Parallel)

No # - Uh...Bunt?

OK, so at least they didn't count this ad card as one of the 12 in the pack.  I didn't scan the back; it's Topps' attempt at imitating late '90s Skybox doing "Hey batter, batter".

Oh, does anyone know these Bunt cards are supposed to make a picture of some sort? 

#GM-44 – Josh Hamilton (Golden Moments)

#569 – Travis Hafner

#394 – Bryan LaHair

#596 – Freddy Garcia (back)

#545 – Randy Wolf

#332 – Jose Reyes

Anyway, that's the pack.  Enjoy the weekend!  More later...thanks for reading!

2012 Panini National Sports Collectors Convention

Once again, neither delegate from the state of Community Gum attended the National Sports Collectors Convention this year. At least one of us should and will be roaming the show floor in 2013 when the NSCC returns to Chicago.

Even though we weren't able to see all the amazing action in person, nor stand in ridiculous line for crazy exclusive redemption sets and packs, we were able to get our hands on 5 packs of Panini's special National exclusives. How, you may ask? Well, simple.

I gave them money. They ran a special on their website offering redemption packs for your online order along with a Rated Rookie T-Shirt while supplies lasted - all for free. I went ahead and bought a box that was over-priced in terms of retail value but with the "free shirt and packs" built-in, it worked itself out.

Only 2 cards per pack. There's some autographed cards to be found, some relic cards in there (including of Panini team members - no cooler business card, although I question their collectability), and some low-print run parallels such as the cracked ice, which as I understand are not actually numbered, but have a print-run of 25 copies. Will I find any such things in my 5 packs?

#39 - Thomas Robinson - Mr. Robinson was the fifth overall pick in the 2012 NBA Draft, a fact you wouldn't know from looking at the card.  That's a little confusing and disconcerting. You have his new team on the front and back, so why not the draft status?

#3 - Adam Jones - Team Colors - The biggest problem with the Panini Packs is I can't tell what's an insert and what's not (if anything).  It sure looks like an insert to me.  But is the Robinson part of the main set and slightly short printed?  Is this part of the main set?

#19 - Curtis Martin - Class of 2012 - If I had to guess a regular set this would belong to, my guess would be Prestige.  This guy was 4th in all-time rushing, yet I have no idea who he is.  Perhaps I should follow football more.

#82 - Peyton Manning - What a crazy sequence of events this whole Peyton thing was, eh?  I guess the football world needed something to fill the Favre fervor fvoid in the off-season.

#11 - Steven Stamkos - I don't know much about hockey, but I do enjoy watching it on TV those rare occasions I'm able to sit still long enough.  I do know he's pretty good, and 10 years younger than me.  Ugh.

#21 - Andrew Luck - Yee-haw!  Woopie Ding! I is a meelion-air. moneymoneymoneymoneymoneymoney.  Watch him get hurt week 2.

#33 - Yoenis Cespedes - People still like this kid, right?  All I ever hear about is Harper and Yu, Harper and Yu.  There are some other really good rookies getting left in the media's dust.  This guy possibly being one of them.

#5 - Courtney Upshaw - Team Colors - Yep. No idea who he is. Again, don't follow football.  Not a bad looking card at all, though.

#4 - Tim Tebow - 5 packs yielded 3 big named QBs.  You can't hope for much more than that, really.  Who's clamoring for a Tebow card as a Jet?  I certainly don't need it and I wouldn't mind getting rid of it before he falls completely off the map.

#29 - Tori Spelling - #4/5 - Yes, my big hit of the 5 packs was this very limited edition National Stamped version of a non-sports figure limited to only 5 copies. There's gotta be a 90210 Super Collector out there somewhere, right? Please?

I like the effort of the set. I think it's pretty confusing and will be difficult, as these get into the wild, to know where exactly they came from. Only the Tori is stamped with the National marking, and that's because it's a low-numbered parallel. The rest don't have a consistent design which may make finding cards of your favorite players, or god forbid the entire set, quite difficult.
Despite that, it's fun to have a little piece of the national show up at my doorstep and while we hope to share a lot more of the NSCC next year, at least we got to let you live vicariously through our vicarious packs.

1990-91 NBA Hoops Basketball

I found this pack at Target. Not in a repack...like, in a box of packs. They scanned it and had to ask me the price. It was pretty awesome.



Anyway, I don't break that much basketball but I make an exception for stuff from my childhood.



Here are the first three. Vlade Divac had a profound impact on my youth basketball career as he taught me to flop. Which is something I will still do, to this day, even in games without referees.



Bill Cartwright isn't a guy you say "wow, one of the best centers of all time" about...but he's definitely a guy you would want to have on your team in his prime.



Here we have a cool Akeem Olajuwon card reminiscent of Diamond Kings from Donruss...and I always enjoy seeing some Jeff Hornacek. He will never be a hall-of-famer but he was an elite guard in his prime.



Dave Corzine is probably the best player named Corzine in the history of teams from Washington.

1991 The Rocketeer

One of my top ten favorite movies, The Rocketeer.

A really cool adventure flick about a hard-luck pilot who stumbles upon a secret-weapon type rocket pack that the bad guys want to mass produce to rain destruction on the United States.

The cards came out in 1991 in conjuction with the Disney movie of the same title.

I have, or had, a complete set, or at least close to it, somewhere.

I remember ripping through two boxes of wax packs with my son when he was small and putting the cards in  pages in a binder.

For my son, this was a scarry scene in the movie when Cliffs plane crash lands.

Horrible special effects though for a grownup.  You can see the cable pulling the plane forward.

The back of each card tells the story of the picture on the reverse, giving the reader a pretty good idea about  what's happening in the movie.

I've never been really big on movie card sets.  More often than not the scenes depicted are, well, just kinda dumb.

Each pack came with 1 sticker.  This is the best part of the pack.  I dig the Art Deco-ness of it.

There were several different graphics depicted on the stickers.

The back of the stickers formed a 9 piece puzzle picture when put into a 9 card page.

I'll have to do some digging around to see if I can find my set.

2011 Upper Deck MLS

Over the past three decades, I've played basketball, football, baseball, tennis, volleyball, handball, racquetball, and even a little teatherball.  I've bowled, golfed, and messed around with a bow & arrow.

But the one thing I've never played is the most popular sport in the world: soccer. 

As a kid, I had zero interest in the sport, because I thought you had to run too much.  And while my friends played in adult soccer leagues, I was playing FIFA on the Sega Genesis, N64, and the PlayStation systems.

So today's $64,000 question is... why am I busting a pack of soccer cards?  It's simple... I really... really... really want an Alex Morgan card.

My first thought was to grab one off of eBay, but her cards were selling in the $5 to $10 range after her popularity peaked when Team USA took home the gold medal at the Summer Olympics.

That's when I decided to pull the trigger and buy a box of 36 packs (6 cards per pack) for $25 delivered.  It's been awhile since I've posted on this site, so I decided to save the first pack out of the box for all of you.  Here's what I pulled:

#24 Drew Moor

#82 David Beckham

#164 Nick LaBrocca

#183 C.J. Sapong

#89 Michael Stephens

#149 Fredy Montero

Unfortunately, I didn't pull the Morgan... but at least I recognized one name in the pack. Mr. Beckham is one of the biggest names in the game. Or at least I think he is. Either way, he's married to one of the Spice Girls.

FYI: A few packs later... I pulled this:

#198 Alex Morgan

I know what you're thinking... what's so great about her?  Well... have you seen her Sports Illustrated body paint photos?  Here's one to grab your attention:

Not bad right?  Plus it doesn't hurt that she attended and played four years at UC Berkeley.

Oh... one more thing.  Kudos to Upper Deck for their great collation and amazing base card design.  When I was finished with all 36 packs, I was sitting with a complete, 200 card set in front of me.

I've been a Topps guy my whole life, but I've got to admit the hobby isn't the same without Upper Deck and their MLB, NFL, or NBA licenses.

Happy Sunday and sayonara!

2012 Topps Mars Attacks Heritage Hobby

I recently spent a week in Madison, WI which has two major card shops, Jim's Card Korner and The Baseball Card Shoppe.  In a perfect world, the clutter and great prices of Jim's and the organization and high prices of The Shoppe would combine to form the perfect Madison card shop.  While I was in Jim's, I bought five packs for $10 of Mars Attacks Heritage purely to try to get a sketch card.  I have more than two complete sets of the base and I'm working towards a green border set as well.  

Each pack comes with six cards, four of which are reprints of the original 1962 card set.  My pack only had three base reprints...hmmmm...I wonder what that means?

For the uninitiated each pack comes with one card from the Deleted Scenes insert set and one card from the New Universe insert set.  The Deleted Scenes cards were cards that proposed and abandoned from the original 1962 set.  From this pack I pulled my favorite new Mars Attacks card.  It's just so wonderfully gruesome and I am amazed that something like this was proposed originally.

The New Universe set highlights scenes from the new Mars Attacks comic book from IDW Publishing.  This particular card is reminiscent of the "Burning Cattle" card from the original set.  Perhaps this one should have been called "Burning Pachyderm" instead.

Three base cards = 1/1 sketch card!  This black and white ink sketch is by artist Mike Hampton.  This brings is the second sketch card I've pulled from a pack and overall it is my 11th overall through all my eBay pick ups.