I haven’t dipped more than a toe into the vintage sports card market to this point for a few reasons: A lot of vintage cards worth having are kind of expensive and rare The sets I find most attractive, for the most part, are also sets others find attractive, and thus, those sets are a… Read More The Old Hotness: Churchman tobacco cards
You may recall that I had purchased the full base set of the 2020 Panini Prizm WNBA offering as a sort of quirky investment play a couple of months ago. Prizm is the most sought-after set for collectors in any sport it issues in (except maybe baseball, where the lack of an MLB license holds… Read More Blast From the Packs: The 1st and 10th WNBA sets
A couple of weeks ago, I was feeling the itch to open a pack of something I wouldn’t normally buy: A sport or a set I’m not in the habit of collecting, maybe. I browsed eBay and settled on soccer, but the issue with soccer is there are so many leagues and competitions that there’s… Read More Packs R 4 Suckers: An Evolvingly Cynical View of Sports Card Collecting
I’ve learned some stuff over the last several months of re-entering the sports card collecting hobby, and one of the things I’ve learned is, at the level that I’m collecting, the most important thing really is connection and enthusiasm for the cards you have. Buying favorite players, collecting favorite teams, going back into my own… Read More Blast From the Packs: Reminiscence Bites, Vol. 2
In this occasional sports card feature series, I highlight a few of my favorite single-card purchases of recent vintage. Since I haven’t written much about sports cards since the start of the new baseball season, I thought it’d be appropriate to take a look at four of my favorite baseball card acquisitions as of late.… Read More The Singles Mixer: A couple Sox, a Redleg, and an Angel
I’ve been a basketball fan for pretty much my entire life as a sports fan. It was easy, coming of age during Michael Jordan’s rise to GOAT-hood (and doing that in a city very close to mine), to fall in love with the game, even though I admittedly grew bored at times with the Bulls’… Read More Blast From the Packs: A set of 2020 WNBA Prizm
Disclaimer: This piece is pretty long. I learned some things in the 48 hours after writing it (and then some more several months later) that made me add a section to the bottom that makes it a bit more definitive in its negativity, but I think it’s still worth reading through, top to bottom, to… Read More Not Fun Trading: I’m trying NBA Top Shot (update: I’m not trying anymore)
Last year, Topps did a yearlong thing mixing art and baseball cards called Project 2020. The concept was that 20 artists from across the art/fashion/culture spectrum would be assigned 20 classic cards from the Topps catalog, and each artist would put their own artistic spin on reimagining those cards, and the resulting 400 pieces of… Read More Topps Project 70: Déjà vu, but better
I never had what anyone would call a large sports card collection. As a kid, I hung onto EVERYTHING, every single, every common, every dupe, and I put them in shoeboxes with cardboard dividers so the cards could stand up neat, rather than sloshing around the box in a pile. Of course, at one point,… Read More Blast from the Packs: Reminiscence Bites Vol. 1
When I was a young sports card collector, I didn’t really “get” the whole Donruss Diamond Kings thing. Diamond Kings was an insert in the Donruss baseball card sets with hand-drawn/painted images of some of the day’s most popular players. I always thought the drawings/paintings looked kinda lame, and the design of the cards was… Read More SportKings, Topps Gallery, and Panini Diamond Kings: Sports cards as art
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