In my last posting, I titled it to the affect of joining me while I go into super-collector status. While I'm not sure I'm there yet or not, I admit I was intentionally trying to write a provocative title so more people would read. (Provocative? Yeah, yeah - I know - it would only be considered to be that by nerds like you and me who have a love for cardboard!)
A friend and I got into a conversation about it - what is a super-collector? Is it someone who just bought a bunch of cards of one player/team/other theme? Or is there more to it than that? Is a pre-requisite that you must be a long-suffering collector who has searched high and low for half your life to find the best of the best for your collection?
While I'm not certain if *I* am there yet, I'm more uncertain of what one truly is.
In any event...I bought more!
It was so large, it made my dog quite happy.
But, before the deal was made, quite a few things happened. I made this purchase from someone who had put in thousands of dollars for this collection and wanted to get out of it. I ended up getting everything for thousands less, which was great! Waiting a week, admittedly had me biting my nails.
The day I made the deal, I made a new friend at a party.
Meet Wendy the Alpaca - beauty, eh? (We took our son to a birthday party at someone's farm and they raised Alpacas ... word to the wise ... stay away from the males!)
A few days later, my son wanted to update his website, so we spent a the good part of an afternoon adding all kinds of bells & whistles for he and his friends to have fun in his password protected site on the web. A center piece for any kid website is, of course, staging legos and taking pictures of them for the site.
I'm proud to report that not only did he figure out how to upload the logo, he also took pictures of his legos and loaded them onto the site all by himself!
Last but not least .... HOLY COW. His feet are almost as big as mine (and I wear size 12 shoes!)
Okay, so I'm sure that while you are VERY entertained with pictures of alpacas, legos and feet, you are looking more to see and read about the cards.
After going through the collection spreadsheet of the guy I bought from, I was split between trying to buy a few vs. everything. At first, he was asking 3 times more for it all than what I was to offer initially. That prompted me to spend a LONG time going through the list of 1,200 or so cards.
I found about 175 or so cards that I needed, and unfortunately, after all that time, it turned out that the number I had in my head for everything was what he wanted for those 175 cards. I ended up going up a smidge, and got it all! The 175 I needed consisted of a lot of great stuff. Heck, even the cards I already had were great - like early finest refractors, serial # pacific 90's cards, etc.
Here is a picture of all the cards I received:
Here are some pics of the stand outs.
There are several #'ed to between 5 and 25.
Heck, I think I even have 3 or 4 serial #ed cards in the bunch that are number #1/10.
I already had the 93' finest refractor shown below, but I love it a ton. It will definitely be sold off, along with the other 1,000 duplicates. The subway token is a card that I've always wanted, but sometimes fetches $50. The Topps Tek below is #/10 and is gold. The Metal is a PMG and the Fabulous 40's card is something I was very happy to get my hands on. It is hand numbered, and was a card I had bid on months ago - I think I put in about $18, and it ended up going for something like $60-70.
Some Circa Raves!
Aficianado First Pitch ... PREVIEW. This card was only to be had by doing a phone interview or something like that, iirc. The '86 Donruss Highlights card is the white letter variation. Again, just one of those cards that when I saw online, would go for $80-$100 and would just be something I would hope to own one day.
Platinum Medallions! These suckers are hard to find. Another ebay sob story for ya - the one on the very right was one I saw pop up online earlier this year. I offered $20 or similar to someone - I think he said he'd take $25. I thought about it, and someone bid so he said never mind. It ended up going for $60-80 EDIT: LOL - My sometimers is kicking in here. Apparently I told this exact same story in my previous posting. In any event, you guessed it - I now have 2!
I am still absolutely baffled that even though I have gone through *LITERALLY MILLIONS* of cards over the past several years, how few of the 90's serial #'ed stuff (and even non-serial #'ed) I simply never saw. I guess in order to really get a substation collection of a player, you truly to need to seek out the special cards instead of just opening boxes and relying on purchasing collections.
There are just tons and tons of cards and variations I have never even seen! I guess when some inserts/parallels are 1 in every quadrillion packs, the insert/parallel of the guy you collect could be 1 in every bazillion packs.
I will stop there - there is a lot more goodness to be seen, but one thing that has taken my heart was finding out the different variations of cards not mentioned in beckett. Take for instance the prisms - they can be found with or without serial numbers:
But even more interesting to me was the "junk wax era" variations I have been finding. I have gone through so many of these types of cards, I can't even begin to tell you. I find it very funny that there were so many variations to have marched through my fingers, and I didn't even know it! For instance:
The 1991 Donruss Grand Slammers ...see the border variations?
1987 Donruss ...
Turn them around? Yup ... the factory set version backs were opposites!
The wax box bottom cards ...
... can be found in 2 different card stock!
1991 Donruss not only had different border splatter colors...
but on the back, they had some with a period after INC and some without. The kicker for these is this: The 2 cards that you see are identical just above this sentence are the ones that are different in the pic below!
What about the 1989 Donruss Grand Slammers? Everyone knows about the several color variations ... right? I just found out about it myself maybe a year or so ago?
Well, how about this! One of the color variations has 2 variations: one with a back stripe and one without.
The list goes on and on. One other - the 1988 donruss versions have different border variations, as well as factory set variants. The factory set back has a *slightly* different font, so the wording on the back ends up in a different place. These are generally 20-30 times rarer than their wax counterparts. Don't get your hopes up too much though, as that probably means there are only about 3,000,000 of each instead of 100,000,000 each LOL.
Fleer, Score, Upper Deck, and others all seem to have different variations. It is maddening for collectors, but I am getting such a kick out of this. It is making me look differently at junk wax. Now, they have more value to me.
Moving on, I have been doing a few other customs for my collection. The first is a 1952 Topps style Canseco in an Angels uni. The back of the pic was mega boring, so I added a picture of a baseball stadium (25 points to the person who guesses what stadium it is).
I really, really wanted to do a white border with only the stadium background a refractor style.
I hope to have Canseco sign in red, in the white spot at the bottom. I think that would be an awesome twist to the card!
Finally, the latest one I did was today - I browsed a thread that asked people to post their favorite card in their PC, and someone posted a 2014 Topps Heritage Bob Gibson. I LOVED the design, so I just had to do a Canseco using it. I think it came out great! My wife doesn't like the design, but I fell in love:
Plus, it has Rickey Henderson melting into his arms ... what is not to love about that?
I love doing my own designs as well, and some of my designs are my favorites, but I can't get over using card designs that already exist and use them to make a card of Canseco that doesn't exist. It gets me every time.
That about does it for this week - here is a little video I put together to show off the customs and some of my latest Canseco acquisitions. Don't forget to hit me up if you have any Canseco cards I need! My check list is at: http://www.mycollectionofcards.com.php5-20.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/josecanseco.htm - remember anything NOT highlight or NOT on the list ... I NEED!
This weekend is the TRI STAR CARD SHOW - my Christmas! Wish me luck - the last time I went, I searched for some Canseco cards, and only found 2 that were for sale! How crazy is that? One of the biggest shows in the world, and 2 Cansecos were being sold.
My next blog will likely be about the show, but *perhaps* the posting after that one will be about what is in this box that I just received yesterday.... TO BE CONTINUED
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