Boxes 'O Chrome

So my LCS owner had a bunch of boxes of Topps Chrome and gave me a deal on two of them. I love Chrome this year especially with the Lineage and the Rookie Reprint inserts. I wish that Hobby boxes had more color in them. To me it's the second biggest downfall of buying the Hobby boxes. The biggest complaint for Hobby is the fact that for the price you only get one autograph. And it may be like one of my two boxes where you curse the day that player even agreed to sign for Topps. I had my son help me open the packs and he by far pulled the best card. My box had this beauty-


That's right people I pulled a SIXTH round draft pick that has yet to see the professional football field. What a FRAKING WASTE of cardboard!! Ok...... deep breath..... back to the actual good stuff. My numbered card I actually missed the first time through and had to go back for. It's a Gridiron Lineage Refractor of Emmitt Smith and Felix Jones numbered 4/99.


As I said earlier these are some of my favorite cards from Topps base and Chrome. Some of the match-ups are kinda silly but the design is really nice.

My sons' box was much better autograph wise so I'll show that last. His color came in the form of a Panther. A blue refractor of Jon Beason numbered 180/199.


His autograph is out of the "A" column and has a similar theme as his color for the box.... it's also a Panther. This time it's Jimmy Clausen. I like these autos and the way that Topps put the team name under the sticker. At times it makes things hard to read but overall I'm going to give it a thumbs up.


As for the Rookie Reprint subset I'll show off two of my favorites I've pulled so far. Gayle Sayers and Peyton Manning. They just look spectacular "chromed" and I'll be looking for more of these for my collection.


I also picked up a couple singles for my PC. The first was a Topps Chrome Refractor of the KC Royals rookie Kila Ka'aihue and the second being one of the Topps UFC Nickname SP's. I went through all of his UFC singles and managed to find one, Marcus Davis "The Irish Hand Grenade."


Both the autographs and the Blue Refractor will be on E-bay soon if anybody is interested. Or you can make me an offer and we'll talk. Looking at this week I have several packs of 5finity's newest sketch packs, Hack/Slash, coming and three boxes of the new Star Wars The Clone Wars: Rise of the Bounty Hunters should be here sometime as well. I'm hoping to pull some nice sketches from both to fund some other fun stuff. Hope everyone had a good weekend, With the Vikings winning mine sure had an up side!

Recent Additions

So I've been gone awhile but that hasn't stopped me from picking up a few things in the mean time. Starting on E-bay I was able to get a costume lot from my favorite TV show Battlestar Galactica. These are from the premier set that came out back in 2005 and I haven't seen any boxes for a long time. I was mainly after just two of the cards, the Number Six red dress card and the Boomer card. I've seen the Boomer card go for $30-$40 just by itself so I was glad to get a good deal on the whole lot. I'll end up keeping three or four for my collection and probably resell the rest. The Starbuck card is a piece of her flight suit and has a leathery feel to it.


I've also bought a few boxes of the Topps 2010 UFC release and am working on a complete base set now. My two latest boxes were quite good and produced extra hits for me. All told I ended up with five autographs of Wanderlei Silva, Keith Jardine, Nate Diaz, Dan Hardy and an Ultimate Fighter of Josh Bryant. My relics were just ok until I got the last one which is a three color fight mat from an Anderson Silva match. The last hit was probably my favorite. Topps pulled thier usual "hidden treasures" and replaced 25 fighter names with their nicknames at a ratio of 250 for each, basically a case hit. I was lucky enough to pull one.... Chuck "The Iceman" Liddell. This is staying with me for awhile. These are easy to miss if you're just opening trying to find your hits so if you've opened boxes of 2010 UFC you might want to go back and see if you missed any.


I also have a few new sketches that I've added to the collection and have a few others that haven't reached me yet. First off I bought another box of Star Wars Galaxy 5 while I'm waiting for the new Clone Wars cards to come out. I was fortunate enough to get a nice sketch from Jason Keith Phillips of Darth Bane.


Then this last weekend Nathan at Sadlittles offered up a special. For $20 he was selling triple sketch packed sets of the Essence of Fairyland, two color sketches and one test sketch from the preview sets. I hit him up for two and got them yesterday. My favorites are the Axebone test sketch, the Michael "Locoduck" Duron and the Kathryn Layno Lewis. I also received sketchs from j(ay), Nestor Celario and Scott Zirkel.



As I mentioned I have more sketches coming and I'll post them when they arrive. I was also in a group case break of UD Philadelphia football and will show those as well when they come in. If I don't talk to you before everybody enjoy your weekend! And don't forget the Randy Moss makes his BIG comeback with the Vikings in prime time on Monday night. How will two of the best players ever get along??? I personally hope REALLY well!

Today at the LCS

So with a little extra money burning a hole in my pocket I decided to stop by my LCS and see if I won anything off the bid board last week and see what was new and looked good. As it turned out I did win the two cards I bid on. I now present pin-ups of the 1890's......


Both of these cards have the Sweet Caporal Cigarette logo on the back. I don't know if they are real or reprints but either way I think they are great.

I actually had gone to find a box of the new Topps Finest football but the owner said he had gone through all 4 cases he had ordered already and was getting some tomorrow. Nothing else in sports really caught my eye box wise so I checked out his non-sports area. He had a bunch of the Empire Strikes Back 3D boxes still so I talked him down $10 on the cost and put that in the pile. I pulled the one per box sketch out of the very first pack I opened. A really nice color sketch of R2-D2 by Jennifer Mercer who did 100 sketches total.


I did pick up one other box but I'll get to that in a second. The next thing in the pile was three packs of 2010 Topps Jumbo football. Got the standard inserts and such so nothing special until the last pack....


SWEET A CASE HIT! And he's even the starter now!! Not sure if I'll keep this or throw it up on E-bay yet but gotta say it's cool to finally get one of the rookie variations.

Now on to the last box I bought. After watching a bunch of breaks on You Tube of this I decided to take a chance on 2010 Topps UFC. You're supposed to get four hits, two relic and two autographs, in each box plus an insert in each pack and another numbered card of some sort. The base cards look nice and show either a fighter or a specific fight from one of the UFC Pay-Per-Views. The inserts are all holo-foil cards but I really like the looks of them. They range from UFC 2010 video game cards, Pride and Glory, fight poster cards, Octagon of Honor and my favorite Bloodlines. Here is a sample of all of them,

I got all four of my promised hits. My numbered card of Rafaello Oliveira 156/188


The relic cards were both just ok. One was a fight mat of Amir Sadollah numbered 83/188 and the other was fighter worn gear of Chris Tuchscherer.


The first autograph is one of the normal autos in the set and it's of UFC Lightweight Jim Miller. Miller has an overall record of 18-2-0 with eight of those fights being in the UFC. His record there is 7-1-0.


The last autograph was defiantly the hit of the box. A short-print autograph of welterweight Josh Koscheck numbered 3/8! Josh has an overall record of 17-4-0 with 17 fights in the UFC and a record of 13-4-0 record there. Josh is also one of the head coaches for the current season of The Ultimate Fighter vs. George St. Pierre.


Overall I would say this was a productive day at the LCS. Now I just have to start saving for the next time!!

Million Card Givaway

This is courtesy of the Beckett Blog:

By most accounts, Topps‘ Million Card Giveaway has been a resoundingly popular promotion this year with countless baseball fans and collectors from the past and present redeeming their codes for their MCG account, trading (electronically) their cardboard like the days of old.

However, I noticed something in the official rules that I wonder if many a collector noticed. (I hadn’t even after redeeming more than 30 codes.) Once a promotion’s deadline hits in March 2011, undelivered cards in your account vanish.

As in your mom threw them out electronically.

Here’s what the rules say:

Warning: Giveaway ends 03/15/2011. After 03/15/2011, Option (iii) will no longer be available and all Accounts will be closed by Sponsor. Once closed, the contents of Accounts automatically revert to Sponsor and Accountholder waives and releases any and all property rights in Account and its contents without compensation of any kind. Participants may not receive any further notification prior to Account closure on 03/15/2011.

Delivery of the cards in one’s account costs $2.92 for the first card and 53 cents for each additional card claimed in the same sitting.

That means we all now have a deadline to decide whether we really want our 2007 Xavier Nadys along with our 1967 Chris Zacharys and 1966 Ron Swobodas. For the most part, the promotion yielded many a card I already have and probably don’t need, but for me anything before 1970 might need to be claimed. (And, of course, if you pulled some money card, the answer to the question is obviously “yes, it needs claimed.”)

It should be obvious that Topps can’t manage its MCG database forever — and of course the code cards themselves do have a 2011 expiration date — but the aspect of having an account to store a virtual collection is something that many collectors probably enjoy more than then hassles of digging through cardboard boxes to find one of their cards.

I’m just not sure how many MCG collectors — even ones who have entered hundreds of codes — know about that deadline yet.

This item is the first step. Pass the link along to those who you know use the MCG.

Count me as one of those who didn't know about the deadline. I don't have many cards in my account but do have a few that I wouldn't mind keeping. Guess I'm gonna have to break down and have some sent to me. Thanks again to Beckett for pointing out the expiration date

Sketches For a Cause

One of my favorite sketch card companies out there right now is 5finity run by Steve Frank. 5finity is different from most companies as all they produce is sketch cards, no base set to collect. They also focus mainly on non-mainstream comics. They started out with their first sketch set based on the Archie comics for the March of Dimes. After this release quickly sold out many other sets followed, Greatest American Hero, Dean Yeagle's Mandy, Zombies vs. Cheerleaders, Moonstone Maximum, Voltron, Dead@17, pin-ups and puppies, The Pro, Mixtape and Pulp Girls and the latest offereing The Female Persuasion. I've purchased several packs and love the quality of the art that is produced. I was able to get two packs of The Female Persuasion. This was also a March of Dimes charity set with at least two sketches per pack. My pack were numbers 4 and 5 of the total run. I received one rare artist sketch of Sabrina the Teenage Witch by Amy Clark

Sabrina is the face of The Female Persuasion and I also got a card of her done by Remy Mokhtar


The other two cards fall under the "female" part of the release. I'm not sure who either character is or if they are based on actual characters. The first is by Patrick Finch


and the other is by Jason Worthington

The next release for 5finity is based on the Hack/Slash comic and is due out October 15th followed by Lady Death in January of 2011.

Contest

Hey guys, check out this great contest on a fantastic blog, DrewsCards. He's giving away several lots of cards from the new 2010 Obak release. Click on his blog name to get there.


Also want to mention another new blog out there, Too Many Grandersons. The box breaks are really well done and the Simpsons references make the reading well worth your time.

Art and Autographs

I recently commissioned one of my favorite artists to do a couple new 5x7 drawings for me, Beck Kramer of Beckadoodles.com. She has a great flexibility and can do cute kiddie stuff and also amazing pin-ups. You can see both styles at her website above. Earlier this year she had a sale trying to get rid of some 5x7's that hadn't sold and I picked up a couple, Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Hermione form the Harry Potter series.


After getting the first two pieces I talked with Beck about doing a couple more pin-ups for me. I love the Harry Potter series and decided to have a couple more of my favorite characters done. I first went with Harry's future wife Ginny Weasley and then with a character that I wish was in the books (and films) more, Nymphdora Tonks.


As Beck was working on these I came up with another idea. For the Harry Potter pin-ups I wanted to try and add a little something to tie them into the movies. The best way I came up with is to try and get autographs of each of the actresses from one of the multiple card sets that are out. Now this may take a while and I don't think it will come real cheap as Emma Watson's (Hermione) autograph is always limited in each release. I'm please to say that as of today I've got one down and, at the moment, two to go!


I'm going to get other characters done as well including the Patil twins, Bellatrix, Fleur DeLacour and Cho Chang and match them up with autographs also. The pieces that Beck did for me are matted but I'm looking around and seeing if there is a good way to display a 5x7 and a trading card together. I hope I can find a nice display and use it for each of the drawings I have done. Thank you so much to Beck Kramer who does amazing work. If you need great work done at a good price don't be afraid to talk to her.