Turning The Page

Back in mid-January, I posted that I found a bargain for UltraPro 9 pocket pages from Noble Knight Games.  These 125 count boxes of "hologram pages" were $20 compared to the $26 that Amazon offers for 100 Platinum pages.

Let's see how the two compare:

They have a similar hologram label on the spine.

The new page is on the left, and a Platinum page is on the right.  They both feel pretty close to the same weight, and I can't tell a big difference in the construction.

The Platinum pages do say so below the holograms. 

The holograms are different, but I feel like either one is suitable for my stuff.

I'll let you know more once I start using them heavily, but I would get them again so far.

On a side note, if anyone has any spare UltraPro binders in these two colors, I'd be willing to swap you for some plain ones, or "view" binders with the clear covers that you can put cards and papers down inside. 

Looking for gray or the rusty burgundy color.  I have the different decades color coded for my set binders.  Would like to keep it consistent, though I won't be getting all the 50's sets any time soon.  (Only have two more 60's sets to go for all 10).

 

This Is Why We Mark 'Em Non-Machinable

Made a trade last week with TCDB user tntcardsstg (Trevor from Bump And Run Football blog) for 25 cards.  20 of them were for Angela - mostly Eli Manning, a Brett Favre and a John Riggins.

I get the daily USPS emails that show what mail is coming that day.  There was a picture of the mailpiece there, but it didn't appear in my mailbox.  But the postal gal (I could tell by the handwriting) said contact them to verify that it was mine.  It looked like this:

It probably was marked "non-machinable", but we all know they try to put it through anyway.  This one lost so much of the envelope that there was no destination or return address left at all.  I'm guessing it just arrived stacked between the other couple trades I got that day.

Here's the envelope, or what was left of it.

Luckily, the cards were fine.  I showed the gal at the post office the TCDB trade page when I went to pick them up.  It was the perfect way to verify where they were supposed to go.  I should have said that any stray packages of cards are probably mine, but who knows?

Thanks Trevor!  Looking forward to the next round!

I don't blame him for anything.   This just happens now and then.  Glad they made it OK.

Night Owl Knows Rock'n'Roll

Well, I'm back into trading on TCDB, and pretty heavily at that.  I posted that I had passed the milestone of my 500th trade on there, and got over a dozen new offers in the same week!.  At one point I had 21 active trades going and a handful of offers pending behind them.  

Plus, I got most of my collection back into the proper places - cabinets, shelves, closet, etc.  There will be another post on the card room soon.

So among all that, I've blown like three weeks between posts here.  I've got a couple ideas for posts after this one, so hopefully I don't forget them before I get 'em up.

Meanwhile, I had the images from this mailday ready to go, so that's what you're getting today.

Night Owl sent me this one that I kinda gushed over for my player collection:

It's the Archives black parallel.  I probably would have a hard time finding this one in the wild.

The rest of the package threw me off for a while.  I thought he had tossed in some random RockCards, which I had already completed a while ago.

I was like, "that's nice, but I have all those."

But then I turned them over....

They were all consecutively numbered, and had a 1990 copyright date.

There was a Megadeth sticker too, shown here with the last card in the set.

When I compared it to the sticker I already had, it was different in that it had the band name across the bottom.

The one in the regular set does not.

I looked them up on the database, and these are the complete set of promo cards for the Brockum RockCards.

Whoa!  Thanks Night Owl!

Here are the rest of them - Mötley Crüe and Aerosmith

Rock on collectors!

Fuji Sticks It To Me

Another quick loot post, this time from my west coast man Mark at Chronicles Of Fuji.  He texted me a while back and became the first blogger to send me stuff at the new Hivemind Headquarters.

A very Washington centric payload, and a lot of them were very fancy!

OK, the Action Packeds aren't that fancy, but they're still cooler than regular cards.  Contrast them with the two more current autographs, though.  Sweet!

 Not one, not two, but three encased Topps Pristine 'Skins!  You don't see those, or any other encased cards very often!

But the coolest thing Fuji included was this vintage stamp album.  I've seen these before, and have several of the four-stamp panels that includes 'Skins guys, but this was even better than all of those....

It included all the stamps!  Can't say the application was the best, but they're all in there!

Thanks to Fuji for all the additions to the 'Skins collection.

Bo Blazes, Priest Performs, and Sheena Shines

Just a quick mailday post from a couple weeks ago when Gavin from BBC Breakdown fulfilled a request I had a year or two back.  As you've probably seen, he does some cool custom work.

Five different finishes on a silhouette version of that iconic Bo Jackson Score card with the shoulder pads and baseball bat.  I arranged them in pretty much the order that I like them, although the last one is cooler than last place...

A Santa-ized and framed piece featuring another PC of mine.  The Topps All-American card looks like the hat was there when they printed it.  I'm glad it's on a hanger thingy, because it would be hard to add to the binder being oversized as it is.

And finally, the one I was most looking forward to.  The rainbow flowers fit this card very well.  Before I discovered the sound of metal guitars, Sheena was my first favorite singer.  She's got a few trading cards, but this one is the hottest image.

Thanks to Gavin for all his work! 

 

Slaying The Exorbitant Price Dragon

As I'm settling into the new house, I'm finally getting the card room up to a functioning level.  Angela has even started a collection of her own - Peyton Manning, but only in a Denver uniform.  I pulled out a binder for her and went to put some pages in it.  We had to dig a bit to find the 1.2 boxes of Ultra Pro pages I had left.  That's enough for a while, but I hadn't checked on the current price for a while.  To my horror, Amazon lists 100-count boxes of Ultra Pro Platinum pages at about $26 each.  This is like $7 more than I'm used to seeing.  

I searched around and couldn't find a better deal until I came across a gaming site called Noble Knight Games.  They had boxes of 125 pages for the same $19.95 here.

I got three.  Hadn't seen this type of packaging before.  I'll let you know if they're any different.  Unfortunately, at press time they are out of stock, and rightly so.

Currently, they have 100-count boxes at the same price here.  Or $2 less for gently used.  Check them out if you need sheets.

Your Thoughts - Survey Results

The Results are in!  Well, they've actually been in for some time.  I put up the survey on Sept. 23 and got 38 responses by the end of the year - more like the end of October really.  So I guess out of the 61 followers I've managed to attract, 38 of them are true fans.  😥  

I cleaned up the chart images for posting here.  Enjoy.

First question:

The majority said they are still primarily hanging out in the blogosphere.
 

At least everyone said to keep going....

Here's the full text of the question: 

Loot posts ranked second, which is encouraging.  As was the positive response to research posts.  A little over half of you said you'd like to see a giveaway - I'll have to work on that.  And 40% of you approve of the occasional fabulous babe to enhance the experience.  I might catch some flak from the girlfriend on that one...

Somebody skipped this one.  I hope they joined up too!  

Now we get into the demographics.  I was a bit surprised that the majority are set builders.  I assumed it would be a bigger mix, with set builders in the middle somewhere.  The rest came out about as expected.  There are a lot of Random collectors, which is kinda cool too.

This one came out in order listed, but it is interesting that baseball dominates by so much.  All but two of the respondents do baseball.  Non-sports are keeping up too, which is nice.

Pretty much everyone has been doing it since the 80's, and collects back to the vintage era too.  This chart doesn't show it, but I know from reading elsewhere that a lot of you are younger than me and started when the late 80's stuff was new.  But that's not news either.

And finally, how much do you have?  I fell into the Multiple rooms category, but you've seen that I've consolidated into one bigger room.  (Although there's still stuff in the old room too.)  I was expecting at least one or two slab-only people, but I guess that's just a demographic that's too far from us.  Glad to see the biggest numbers are roomfuls.

Thanks to those who answered, and to all of you that read and comment regularly.  I'll keep this old Cube chugging along, even if it is at a snail's pace compared to years past.

Maybe The Best Year Ever

As I cross the finish line on year 58, I can confidently say that this has been the best year I've had in a long time, if not my whole life.  I found my dream home and dream girl in the same year.💕

Continuing my annual tradition, here are the dreamy girls I share a birthday with.  (I got permission to keep this up as long as I make a post about the studly guys that my girlfriend shares a birthday with in July.)

Kate Middleton has apparently rebounded from cancer treatments last year.  Hope that's the last time she'll have to deal with that.

Nina Dobrev has split with her Olympic boyfriend Shaun White.  Sorry, I'm spoken for now...

So for equal time, I'll be posting shots of Thomas Gibson, Patrick Wilson, and whoever else she likes, but not Tom Cruise...

2025 Is In The Rear View, What Did We See?

Dollar signs, mostly....

Many have already said it, but it feels like the "regular collector" is being left behind in the hobby culture more and more.  It's all about the revenue to the companies in charge.  Everything is more expensive, and the resources for cards seem to be dwindling for those of us that aren't wooed by a plastic prison with a number on it, or a Mojo box break.

Between my buddy Stuart in Michigan, and my knowledge of the local area here in PA, there are still several shops and shows we know that continue to have stock of single cards that aren't the big hype thing, and are reasonably priced for bulk purchasing.  Online is a different story, though.  I have been a regular customer of COMC for a few years, snagging around 100+ cards at a time.  But now they have jacked up shipping costs, which negates much of the value pricing I was finding.  A few years ago, SportLots was my other choice.  There, I could find a few vendors who had decent stacks of things I need, and it was easy to pile up a nice order.  Today, the site interface makes searching and browsing one dealer's inventory a maddening mess.  Other sites are only baseball and are limited in their selections, especially when you're not interested in current flagship products.  eBay is OK, but if you buy something expensive, they have to double check it for you, and if you're looking for singles lots, often each card is listed separately.  The rest of the online dealers only carry (overpriced) boxes. 

For singles, anyway...

When I go to shows, I typically only find a couple current football players' cards.  The older stuff that isn't vintage is rare.  And you have to pass by all the Pokémon and 

Yu-Gi-Oh! tables. 

The new innovations that were hinted at when Fanatics took over have not happened as far as I can tell.  Anyone feel like they've done anything for us?

Sorry, I'm still not into rookies, many current players, expensive boxes, or high end mojo hits.  I want to finish my sets and older player collections and still be able to set up my new house and garage too.  I'm old enough to remember boxes of new product costing $50, and a box of sheets wasn't over $20.   Not any more...

Jeremy summed it up well in a comment the other day: 

... I feel like as long as there are rich people, companies can charge as much as they want. COMC might lose some customers due to long shipping times, but the scalpers and flippers that that can pay out the butt for expedited shipping will do just that and the collectors who can’t or won’t pony up the cost will just miss out on the cards from the site. 

... It ticks me off that deep pocket collectors and scalpers can buy up all the products, charge over market value, leave nothing on the shelves or online, have tons of elite sets like Triple Theads, etc made for them, be the reason for 1,000’s of parallels, ruin shows by driving out dime and vintage boxes, make slabs popular, bash people’s knees at shows with their stupid briefcases, and be the only people that can shop on COMC because of shipping prices. The bubble has to burst, and I will gladly take a hit on card value if companies overproduce as long as these scalpers and flippers leave the hobby. 

Rant over.

 Jeremya1um  January 3, 2026 at 7:13 PM

Thank goodness for TCDB trading. At least they haven't found a way to mess that up yet.  I just have to get my act together and get back to trading!