Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The state of adding new mini-collection cards

I like rummaging through loose cards in-person, where I like to lean on my esoteric mini-collection interests and at the very least, look for cards with unique images - at the moment, I don't really have a card shop or card show or even a swap meet / antique store to be able to actually dig through the fool's gold, where I find my 'gems' to build around my collecting topics subset narrative.

I miss stumbling upon boxes of cards at a show, finding out how much the cards are generally are [usually I'm looking for the quarter boxes] and figuring out where to start digging - there isn't the process of impulsively building a stash of cards and then sort of making decision on which cards are going to be taken off and which cards I going to be left off a vendor or dealer's common boxes.

I end up doing some 'research and development' online, where I read up on blogs or do random searches on eBay or COMC to see which cards I'd like to add to my collections - there isn't the instant gratification of having a card in hand, but I save the image of the card and/or list it on my wantlist.

Doing things on online might be easier and/or convenient, especially the hunt in-person might not be so fruitful and when I'm so far removed from picking up cards from places other than a big box store - I can take all the time in the world and treat online sources as my virtual card closet, where I have all these cards that I can look at and actually have shipped to me when I decide I want them.

After doing some ground work in discovering the following cards, I had them on a micro-mini wantlist and wanted to see if I can pick them up outright - the four cards cost me about $0.50 each with s/h added in and while I might pick up more cards at one time, I don’t want any one particular common card to be creeping up towards the dollar mark.

1988 Classic Eric Davis #213 - maybe the best ‘gum card’ I’ve seen.

When I can go through my mini-collection cards, I like seeing the different varieties of cards, how many different players are represented and if how many cards I end up of a player - I think I've mostly collected cards from Topps and the other major brands from the past 30 years, but at times there might be stragglers that may seem unfamiliar.

For a moment, seeing a card that is a different is neat - even if it is just a base card I shouldn't really dwell on.

1993 Bowman Edgar Martinez #515 - a Hall of Famer at work image, I presume this was during Mariners spring training in Peoria, Arizona.

1996 Donruss Glenallen Hill #75 - I saw this on a mail day blog post and had to add to my wantlist.

1996 Score Bip Roberts #38 - is this card of Roberts donning a sombrero sort of a cult classic? I felt like a big deal was made about this card at some point, but maybe it's just random card blog posts / Twitter posts of that drew my attention to this peculiar card.

Maybe 10 years ago, Bipping was a thing among notable card bloggers - where dupes of a particular card would be sent in trade packages as a friendly prank of sorts.

3 comments:

Brett Alan said...

Yeah, that Bip Roberts made the quarterfinals of the original Dime Box Frankenset voting, losing to the eventual winner.

http://baseballdimebox.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-frankenset-bracket-elite-eight-pt-1.html
http://baseballdimebox.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-frankenset-bracket-elite-eight-pt-2.html

Fuji said...

I've seen the Roberts before, but the other three cards are all new to me... and they're all fantastic!

GCA said...

My 15 minutes of fame is being the first Bipping victim. My post on A Pack A Day was where it was coined.
http://apackaday.blogspot.com/2008/06/repack-box-remorse-volume-2-stealth.html