plain gray swatch

08 December 2012

Wax Pack Hall of Fame Inaugural Class: 12-13 Upper Deck Artifacts Hockey

In the early days of my card-blogging career, I did quite a few pack breaks. Most of the time they were the result of a $15-$25 binge on retail rack packs or discounted blasters, and usually were only of packs containing a legitimate hit. I've gone away from that, mostly. Not so much because I have not been ripping packs, as I have, I've just been in a nasty slump.

I got back into blogging around late September or early October. Much of it was because the 2012 baseball season and my own return to playing had reinvigorated my love of the game to a whole new level. Another reason was my first new purchase of fresh 2012 cards - a blaster of 2012 Allen & Ginter's baseball which netted me short prints of Bob Gibson, Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn; a beautiful red swatch of David Ortiz jersey and/or codpiece, and a Mike Lombardozzi red-back hand-numbered to 25. Yeah. Hell of a pack.

But since, I had been getting killed with packs, boxes, tins, etc. 2012 Bowman Baseball. 2012-2013 UD Artifacts Hockey. Worst of all, an absolute rear-ending by 2012-2013 Upper Deck Flagship Hockey.

In order to counter-act my spewing of moderately hard-earned coin into empty packs of brutal base cards, I had recently been tossing some singles and some lots up on ebay.

Gotta get that evil out, yo.

To my surprise, every Young Guns I pulled from 12-13 UD Hockey sold (except one, but there is still time). Mantle refractor? Sold! Harper & Trout+ Update Series Lot? Sold!

Then the realization: I had nothing to protect these cards from the holiday-rush/fraternal hazing that the packages are bound to receive in their respective cross-country trips.

So off to Target I went, $15 budget in-hand to grab some top loaders and maybe some 2012 Chrome Football. After my third stop, I finally found some top loaders @ 75/$9. I checked the Topps Chrome football box and saw something disturbing - six loose cards (four base, a regular refractor and an x-fractor). I was mad. So I looked around. 2012 Update Series? Meh, I have something like 30 coming in from PA this week. Bowman Chrome? I've learned my lesson, there. O-Pee-Chee? Too far into dupes territory. Score? Gah.

Then I noticed the absolutely bulging pack of 2012-2013 Artifacts hockey. Crosby looking seriously bloated.

Disclaimer: I am not a pack-searcher. But it's hard to ignore a stunningly fat-pack sticking out so much in a batch of skinny, underfit packs.

So I grabbed it. Don't judge me.

I got home and ripped in excitement. I saw the thickness of a "hit", and shifted it to the back to quell surprise. Crosby looks annoyed or disgusted on the front of the package. He knows what's coming out first:

Ewwww. A Bruin.

Oh, hello Sidney. Noticing a theme? This is my third of this card. Want one?

I love the Coyote's logos of all ages. This, unfortunately is a dupe.

Doug Wilson. Hoped it would fit into my base set needs, yet it does not. le sigh.

Whoaaaaa that's better. You'd think a card numbered to /999 wouldn't be so much of a hit, but at 1:160, apparently, it is. Dayum. At this point the pack is a major success, but keep in mind the meathead that brought my attention to it to begin with.

Well then. I'd have to say that's quite exceptional for a $2.99 retail grab.

Something else: if you scroll up to the top, you'll notice that the pack states there should be 5 cards in this pack. WRONG. There were six! Four base cards, a 1:160 Team Canada short print and a 1:70 dual relic. Should I write Upper Deck and complain?

07 December 2012

Bad, Bad Baseball Cards (1) 2011 Topps Edwin Encarnacion

This card makes me wonder if Edwin Encarnacion has ever played baseball before.

06 December 2012

Patchy.

I went a bit overboard on ebay this weekend, or maybe it was Monday, who knows - I was home sick until yesterday - going after my recent obsession with the 2011 Topps Update Series Throwback patches. To compensate, I threw up a bunch of mediocre Young Guns from this year's 12-13 Upper Deck hockey. Good news, they're all selling - and I can no longer feel like an ass throwing my moderately hard-earned money at fake patches.

This also makes me feel a bit better:

1953 Brookly Dodgers

I'm constantly finding cards in this set I did not know about - and this is one of them. If you had told me early on there was a Clayton Kershaw in this set, I wouldn't have thought much of it. The Los Angeles Dodgers logo hasn't changed much. However, once seeing that this was a Brooklyn Dodgers cap logo, I changed my mind. The thing is, I doubt this was ever on a Dodgers cap - as their hats were blue, and a blue patch on a blue hat just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Hoards of Dodger bloggers feel free to correct me.

2003 Toronto Blue Jays

Oh, hello muscle-bound Blue Jay. Robby was a Met when this logo was flavourful, I believe. Not many people like this one. It is, however, the first cap logo on a Jay's cap that I ever bought for myself, with my (actually) hard-earned landscaping money from high school. So it means a little bit to me. And it's Robby Alomar. He actually shows up in this set four times - once in which the readers here will see later int he week (hopefully), and also as an Oriole, a patch I already have duplicates of Zach Britton sporting, and again with the most mundane boring block C for Cleveland you could imagine. I'd rather have the Chief Wahoo, but that's a post for another day.

2003 can be considered a "throwback," right? No, probably not.

Ugggghhhhhh.

I could go on for hours about the shittyness of the 2012 Update Series patches. So of course I will soon own two of them.

So. Much. Awful.

But this is the only patch card with the Nue Jays logo, and it's Joey.

Don't get me started on the earth-shattering world-changing blockbuster deal that was Jose Bautista for Robinzon Diaz.

Again, another post, another day.

I was pleased to see these protecting the Joey Patch though:

Gypsies and Queens!

They were just filler in the team bag, but it was pretty rad, and rather coincidental that I: A) Want to complete this set eventually and B) Needed all four of these cards.

That's all for now. I am going to go watch Christmas Vacation for the third time since Thanksgiving.

Don't judge me.

05 December 2012

The Magical J-PA Rainbow Crusade: Gold Refractor Autograph

A while back, I posted a challenge. Not for the readers of this blog (which has seemingly tripled since - I cannot thank ya'll enough), but moreso for myself.

I stumbled across an ebay auction for the entire rainbow of JP Arencibia's rookie autograph refractor lot - including the base chrome, refractor (/499), blue refractor (/199), black refractor (/100), sepia refractor (/99), gold refractor (/50) and red refractor (/25). I avoided adding the superfractor, a one-of-one, to the rainbow - as they are extremely difficult to obtain - a veritable "pull of a lifetime."

Back to the auction. The seller was asking $212.99 including shipping for all seven. It probably took the seller over a year to put them all together And that's quite an accomplishment, I'll admit - but working it out to $28/card seemed like far too much for me.

So I challenged myself to piece the rainbow together for less than $215. And today, in an non-discrete mailer, arrived the gold refractor, thus far the lowest numbered of the six that I have compiled. Leaving only the red refractor autograph.

But guess what?

I've only spent $49.80 with shipping for six of the seven autographs. In case you love mathematics, that's $8.30 per card.

Here's a breakdown:

If you look at the chart, some of the prices I paid seem a bit odd. They're not scaled exceptionally well to the scarcity of a given card. I started low, grabbing the base and the refractor (ebay and COMC). The goals were set before I got the blue refractor - of which I grabbed the first blue I saw pop up on ebay. The lesson there is to wait it out.

The blue is essentially numbered to 200, yet I paid more for it than the gold, which I waited out until last week, a variation limited to 50.

The sepia set me back the most @ $15 even. I had been watching it for weeks at $25, and the seller put it on sale one day. Right now, there's an auction on ebay for it, sitting at about $6 to ship. Thus, I repeat: wait it out.

The black was a ridiculous Black Friday bargain at COMC. So I got lucky with that one. Of course, one of those is also sitting in auction on ebay right now, comfortably at about $5. I may grab it for the hell of it, as it is by far my favorite.

...yet the red remains elusive. I know of three. One is sitting on COMC for a cool $75. No thanks, tough guy.

Another, a graded version, is on ebay, graded 9.5/10 for $169. Hey, seller, his 2012 OBP was .275.

The third is also on ebay. Ungraded and sitting at $125. I find this ridiculous. The card is limited to 25, which is rare. However, I netted this gem for just over $13, and it was limited to only ten copies.

Thus another lesson.

Wait it out.

Oh, and here's goldylocks, if that's all you're here for:

03 December 2012

2012 Topps Update Series Want/Trade List

Need List:
24, 88
103, 130, 179, 184, 195
216, 236, 237
315

Trade List:
9, 10, 29, 32, 49, 59, 61, 66, 79, 83, 84, 92, 96, 99, 99, 105, 112, 115, 119, 121, 132, 137, 149, 150, 155, 158, 158, 161, 164, 167, 174, 174, 196, 196, 198, 203, 211, 211, 213, 219, 222, 227, 227, 227, 228, 228, 231, 231, 234, 235, 243, 244, 252, 277, 277, 285, 287, 289, 304, 309, 313, 313, 320, 321, 323, 328, 328, 330.

Trades and Upkeep

Many of you recently participated in Ryan over at Another Orioles Blog's trade bait closeout. It was a pretty fun experience, as a lot of great cards were snatched up by many a great bloggers - and I am certain that Ryan was able to haul in a massive amount of sweet Orioles cards in the process.

I myself sent him a not-huge but a rather heavy-hitting assortment of O's, and in return I efficiently flushed his collection of lovely cards to add into my own collection. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, and as of right now I am holding on to these beauties.

This Aaron Hill from 2005 Bowman was the one I made sure I had to have. I enjoyed Aaron Hill's time in Toronto marginally more than most - as I likened myself as a similar role-player to Hill in my own playing days. I also love the Futures Game (not to mention autographs and game-used bases), and Hill was the MVP of the one in 2004 (U-S-A! U-S-A!) Annoyingly, the card does not divulge what exactly Hill did to enjoy such honours. So it goes.

I enjoy a well-designed autograph card, and this is a good example. Churchy was a casualty of the Nationals-Pirates-Mets mediocrity of the mid-to-late 2000's, where all teams seemingly exchanged very similar role players who neither hurt nor helped there teams - they just all seemed to play for those three.

A nice Carlos Delgado relic is always appreciated. This one is a nice, simple blue swatch from the early-2000s Blue Jays uniforms that I, seemingly, was the only one to enjoy. That's right. I was the one guy who liked the muscle-bound Jay. Looking closely, this jersey swatch has a nice seam going through it. I like that.

As the trade with Ryan progressed, I demanded Griffey refractors. I, the awful collector that I am, had not yet possessed one. This is my first, and I quite enjoy it. Black cards work well with Reds uniforms from the mid 2000s and any refractor with a black background will certainly be well-loved by this bloggar. Ryan also sent a reprint refractor of Jr. Griffey's 1989 Bowman, but logistics of scanning the heavily-warped (no fault of Ryan's) card was not worth the effort. So just to let you know, I have it, and enjoy it. I may scan it another time in a top-loader for better results.

I also selected these future-cornerstones of my player collections of Mikie Mahtook and Daniel Norris. It feels a bit dirty, collecting a Rays player, but Mikie was an LSU guy and was raved about on the now-deceased Baseball Prospectus Up and In Podcast (I do miss it so...). Plus its a dang purple refractor - second only to blacks in the rainbow hierarchy of refractors.

Also included is a rather limited (245/250) Orange parallel out of 2012 Bowman of future Blue Jays ace (that's right, I said it) Daniel Norris. One of two remaining of the Lansing Three after Justin Nicolino's departure to South Beach. Normally I am not big on the range parallels, but this one will do - even wth the horrifically photoshopped Jays jersey.

Thanks for the cards, Ryan. Now on to other things, or rather, fragmented thoughts.

I've started selling on ebay again to offset my looming "seasonal unemployment." You can check my stuff out at the seller name "rolewiii13".

I'm contemplating adding another blog (or two) to my agenda. It will be entitled Rust Belt Cards and will contain longer, more thought-out posts about not just cards, but the importance of sports in my homeland, America's Rust Belt. It'll also feature my own photography.

I have a lot of other stuff to catch up on. I've sent out a few trades recently. Let me know when you get them.

I am expecting card-purchasing to die down for a while, at least until spring, as I wait until the contract that employed me starts up again "during the middle of the first quarter of 2013." Whatever that means.

I'm trying to organize my collections a bit better - but I could use your help. I would like to display cards on the wall - but am looking to learn of/invent a new, affordable solution to do so. Let me know what you know.

The Blue Jays claimed Eli Whiteside days after non-tendering whoeverthefuck Bobby Wilson is. It appears my main man - John-Paul Arencibia's days in Toronto may be numbered. So it goes.

This post now shares something in common with my coffee mug - it has dried up. My cue to click "post."

Peace, love, baseball.