The Obligatory Raptors Post

As I wrote when acquiring some of the rookie Raptors out of Contenders draft, the one benefit to this season being really about Zion is that teams that aren't the Pelicans can be picked up inexpensively in team select group breaks. And that's what I did with recent breaks of Hoops and Certified.

There was a lot of base cards in this, so I'm really just going to cover inserts and parallels as I go through this. This purple parallel is the most common in the Hoops boxes, and I landed one of the Raptors superstar.

This green was the only numbered base parallel from the Raptors.

The 'City' jerseys get highlighted in that insert, and I really like how the background of the card matches the colours on the jersey.

The big draw for me in Hoops was the 'Road to the Finals' inserts. There's one for every game in the playoffs, with the card listed for the winner. They drop in print run as the playoffs go on, and I got at least one for every round. The usual suspects appear.

This is also part of the RttF insert set. These aren't numbered, but are SPd to about one per case.

Also part of the RttF is this. Like the Kawhi card, these are not numbered, but are listed as being SSP'd. All of these are sweet additions to my collection of cards celebrating last season's victory.

I also bought the Clippers spot in this, hoping to get some Kawhi cards where he's still pictured with Toronto. And sure enough, there were a couple.

But I did land an unexpected bonus for my Canadians-in-the-NBA collection, with this pair of autos from the first rounder.

Are there more Championship themed cards in Certified? Of course!

Here's some of the colourful, albeit unnumbered, parallels as well. Rookie Dewan Hernandez makes his first appearances in Raptors colours, but I'm really hoping that Terence Davis starts showing up in sets sooner rather than later, as he's become the far more interesting rookie on the team in the early going. Still, there's some more Siakam.

And there you have it!

Expo Hockey Not-So Miscellany

Finally, hockey stuff for my varied PCs.

This is a pretty meta mask design for the binder. It is a mask with more masks on it. You can see Gary Bromley's, Kirk McLean and John Garrett's lids on there, along with Curt Ridley on the other side.

Marc Denis' Blue Jackets mask may not bring the history of Schneider's, but it is one of the more famous ones in the short history of the franchise.

While I'd prefer an auto of Miikka as a Flame, I'll take this one just as gladly.

I guess this auto of...C311A?..could go in my Sens collection as well. Yegads that's a horrible signature. I see what he's going for with it, but I really don't want to play Pictionary while trying to interpret an auto.

This could also go in either location. At least the signature looks like one that could conceivably belong to a guy named 'Damian Rhodes'.

OK. So my Sens autograph acquisitions didn't have the best penmanship. This one seriously is a candidate for worst of all-time. To quote a line from Law & Order: "It looks like a breakdancing chicken wrote this".

At least they can't screw up relics.

Now that's more like it for signatures. These two are bound for my Kitchener Rangers alumni collection, and feature beautiful, large signatures, including their jersey number. Even if they're initials only for Skinner, at least it still looks like he and Al both made an effort with theirs.

And that's another Expo in the books!

Expo Hockey Miscellany

The Expo goodies posts are drawing to a close, with hockey taking its natural place with the most singles acquisitions. These here are the cards that I picked up for 'cool card' reasons, as opposed to being for my varied PCs.

Even though it is not vintage, I couldn't pass up a chance to add a card of the one-and-done Philadelphia Quakers to my collection. That net behind Cude looks huge in comparison to the netminder, and it must have felt that way, as they went a ghastly 4-36-4 in their only season.

Normally, this card would be part of a Legends subset, but since this is Crown Royale, it is a Regents card.

An inexpensive relic of a HOFer? Why not?

As for this, this does include my favourite type of background photo for cards that choose to remove it from the actual photo - a cityscape.

Two Crown Royale cards in the same post! Upper Deck really does need to borrow (read: rip off) the Scratching the Surface design. It is so nice for a card that is sorta of a sticker graph, but isn't a sticker graph, but still sorta is.

Like I'm going to leave a card of a guy named Lennart Petrell behind.

Random auto-acquisition #1. I'm not sure why, since I already have at least one auto of his previously. Maybe it was the Caps uniform?

Why not add a Trevor Linden auto to my collection? He's in that realm of guys (Roenick, Verbeek) who you'd figure were in the Hall of Fame, but are somewhat surprised they aren't, but if they get in when they need a fourth some year it wouldn't be a shock.

Now here is a Hall of Famer. This autograph comes from the Goodwin Champions-ish ITG release Canadiana. I've also used this to add autos of Trish Stratus and Chantal Kreviazuk to my collections, so why not use it to add a HOFer's sig as well?

And sometimes, you just need a card with a Latvian flag on it. At more than 4 times as many games than all other Latvian-born players combined, he's easily the best choice for a world-themed card.

Let's end it with Rocket Richard looking like a total bad ass in acetate form.

Baseball at the Expo

While most of my baseball singles purchases involved putting some finishing touches on my Heritage High Numbers/Minors sets, there were a few others I grabbed, with only of these going beyond the $1 mark.

Acetate. Die-cut. Hall of Famer. Seems like a fun way to start a post!

Do I need to justify picking up an autograph of a guy named "Tripper"? I hope not.

Blue Jays stuff, as expected, was overpriced at the Expo. But I did add one card to my collection of a former farmhand. And even if I didn't add this to my Jays collection, I could also add this to my penmanship collection.

A Mets relic from Upper Deck during their "We'll just obscure the logo. What could go wrong?" phase.

Let's throw in a bat relic as well, this time with far more legal backing. A HoJo sliver!

While it doesn't look like he'll see the big leagues, at least as a Met, at least this is a nice little oddball autograph from a holiday set for my collection.

And at least Alex saw the big leagues. For one season in a Mets uniform. He'd play elsewhere for 3 more seasons, making him the most successful of the autograph subjects in this post.

There you have it! Two days of hockey left to end this recap!

Expo Hoops and Gridiron Goodies

I was going to split my basketball and football singles in separate posts, but then realized that when it came to cards for those collections that I was planning to keep - I only had 5 cards left to show off. So, here are the five of them.

Throwback uniform awesomeness! I don't care that Wheaton isn't in the league any more, or that this is a numbered parallel - all that matters to me is that this has the bumblebee jersey, complete with matching socks.

Tommy was a 7th rounder of the Bills in the past draft, and he hasn't seen much action. But he did make an unlicensed auto appearance, so I think I've finally wrapped up my acquiring of cards from the most recent draft class.

I'll head back to  Pennsylvania for the first of three basketball cards, this banner insert coming from 2012 Past and Present. In an interesting design quirk, the white of the banner is some sort of fuzzy material. Which is so perfect for a banner card.

Vintage! And a nice look at the Buffalo jerseys as well.

And if I'm going to limit myself to only one basketball hit, I might as well make it a sweet two-colour patch of The Dream coming out of 2008 Sportkings. Licensing, shmicensing.

There you have it! Baseball next!

Expo-sing new 2/14 cards

Much of what I got at the Expo were set-builders. I knocked two O-Pee-Chee sets completely off, along with a bunch of Heritage. How many cards did I get for my birthday PC? A grand total of 4.

This one wasn't a single card purchase. I landed this one in a box break of 2019 Upper Deck CFL. I couldn't see myself doing two CFL themed posts within a week of each other, so this shows up here. There's one or two of these /15 purple parallels per box, so I really beat the odds with landing the only 2/14 baby among the 200 card base set.

And 4/15? 4+15=19. That's numbered to his number. Sorta. still an e-bay 1/1!

Even better! This puts my total 2/14 collection at the 2500 mark!

I actually purchased a soccer card at the Expo. This one is a little more common than the CFL card, it comes in at /250. This is my first Premier League numbered card.

Signature Series card #1.

Signature Series card #2. While neither has the most spectacular penmanship, Hejduk does retain his 18 card lead at the top of the collection leader board.

But there you have it!

2006 UD Legends Box Break

This was the second of two low-priced boxes I picked up via blowout so far during Black November. I was a little worried about this at first, but since all the autos looked to be of the sticker variety, I wasn't too worried about a long-expired redemption showing up.

But first, the base cards. Maybe a little too much border, but a nice clean design. And I do like the football pattern on the bottom. There's a mix of mainly retired stars, with a few current stars among the 100 card base. Faulk would be the latter, although he was close to retirement at the time.

Other than the player featured, there's nothing to distinguish between the two on the design.

Sorta like Rookies and Stars, 101-200 in the set consists of rookies, SPd to 750 each. I only landed these two in the box, and while a nice little bonus, they really seem out of place in this set.

Somewhat surprising for a Legends set, the photos were actually pretty interesting on some of the cards. But that isn't too surprising for a UD release.

The Bills earned a disproportionate 6 cards in the legends portion of the base set. No complaints here!

Let's start with the autographs! The great thing about this is that the set is filled with people who rarely get autographs in products these days. Or ever. Kramer is getting a little bump in publicity this past week after the Vikings 20 point comeback against Denver, having QBd them to a team record 24 against Cleveland.

PACKERS! WOO! PACKERS WON! Since he wasn't on a SB winning team, I cannot fully break out the MST3K clip for this, although Brockington is in the Packers Hall of Fame. Just like with Kramer, neither one has made an appearance in a major release since this card.

This is actually pretty cool for me to pull. I've considered 'Something for Joey' to be one of those movies it is acceptable for a man to cry while watching and still be considered manly. While a Penn State card would probably be better for that, this is still a nice addition to my misc. football hits collection, especially considering that it is one I wouldn't necessarily add to my collection as a single purchase.

Good news: Bonus auto!
Bad news: It probably replaced the card that I would have needed to complete the 1-100 base set.

But it is an OL line guy auto, which are rare to see, and it features the classic, and amazing Chargers uniforms. So that's a pretty nice way to offset not finishing the set.

There you have it!