Collecting This 'n' That

 A little non-sports fun for today's post. Upper Deck DC Annual - 2023-24 version - hit our store shelves last week and I managed to snag the last, or only, two blasters. Upper Deck is clearly still struggling to get caught up, if they are trying to... Six packs of five cards per blaster. 100 card base set and a reasonable amount of inserts and parallels.  Base cards front and back. No duplicates from two blasters so that random luck was nice.  Some of the insets I pulled. None of these are numbered. The sparkled versions you could pull are numbered out of 99. The Joker is the unnumbered Gold version of the Backscatters sticker insert.  Parallels. This sparkle parallel is not numbered, but I only pulled one out of two boxes so they must be a bit tougher.    My favorite parallel is the Variant Cover. It is on "vintage stock" and also seems a tick thicker. I got seven out of the two blasters.  The one per pack retail parallel, Blue, is quite nice. The s...

Every collector has a soft spot for something a little out of the mainstream. Call it a guilty pleasure, perhaps. Mine is baseball cards that lean to the artsy side. A basic photo on a nondescript layout does not do it for me.  The 2003 Fleer Avant set fits that artsy bill. All paged up, it is a set I thoroughly enjoy flipping through every now and again. Damn I wish it was more than 90 cards! Early in 2019 I received this Carlos Delgado in a trade on TCDB. At the time I was doing a lot of Jays heavy trades and it was just another card. Looking closely at it and its vibrant colors, raised frame with inlaid photo. I knew this set needed to be collected. A box was ordered! From eighteen packs of four cards I had most of the 65 regular "base" cards - there were some dupes - and one short print numbered rookie. Filling out the rest of the base with a couple of trades/buys was no biggie.  Ten veterans/legends numbered out of 799 and fourteen more rookies out of 699 were now the ta...

  How does that grab ya?  I was rummaging through some unsorted boxes in the basement and came across two packs of this stuff. What is this you ask?  It is 2006 Upper Deck & Kryptyx Gross Out. It is an 80 card base set and 5 Power Cards. Great stuff ain't it. Here are backs of the base cards and Power Card, North American pack pictured below.  There was an Australian version of this product as well. Kryptyx issued it without partnership with Upper Deck. That checklist is 60 cards and in different order, and the insert set is Scratch n Sniff cards. That is way more fun than the Power Cards we got! COMC has both sets listed as 2006 and has the cards mixed together. TCDB has the Australian set as 2005.  If you are going to pounce on these as I know you will, check the backs of the base cards, the Aussie set does not have an UD Entertainment logo. Here is the back of the one I bought for my type collection. No logo in the top left corner.   One more fo...

 Spring has finally sprung in our neck of the woods, though there is still snow/ice on the ground deep in the forest. The to-do list around here is endless but rather satisfying. Nothing better than putting winter gear away.  The volatile economy has kept my card purchases on the lean side to be sure and even if I wanted to drop some coin to rip some packs new retail product around here is non-existent. The same tired Hoops and Score football still takes up most of the shelf space.  Nonetheless, a few good things were added to the collection in the last couple of weeks. Knocking out sets on the cheap is still satisfying.  The 1992 Dart FernGully set is complete. Quite a cast of voices in this film.  Info here I needed to add something to the Sportlots order, and the Moreland was the only card I could find. The 2016 A&G set build is nearing the end, ten to go, and only three of them are short prints. The 2020 short print of The Chicken, from a TCDB purchase, ...