The Manning Turnaround - Part 1

About a month or two back, I picked up a Peyton Manning autograph /5 in a group break at mojobreak.com. I sold it, and got a pretty penny for it. Like any sane person, I turned this into some more cards. I also caught up on some VOD releases at Rifftrax, but that's not really for this post.

I do have some more goodies that I'm waiting for, but I'll content myself with posting these for now.

This wasn't from a group break, but from ebay. I decided that with this money sitting in my Paypal account, it was finally time to add a 1/1 to my Senators team collection. Based on cost, and the time I spent building the set, I opted for this yellow plate of Eric Gryba out of Score. I admit that I expected this plate to show far more usage than it does, given the print run of the set.

Staying with hockey, I jumped into a random case break of National Treasures as well. The randomizer ended up on the Blackhawks, which resulted in a pair of cards coming my way. If I was considering starting a PC of Stan Mikita, this would have been an excellent start to it. The swatch card is limited to 21, and although this card does only have 1 colour to it, the swatch has the feel of something that would come from the logo. A nice keeper there.

The plate though, isn't a keeper. It might not be a perfect 2*3 rectangle, but I can think of someone that won't complain about dimension if it arrived in an envelope.

Just because they were available and cheap, I picked up the Washington Wizards in a basketball mixer. Not too many cards came my way, but still a pair of hits arrived. The only base heavy product was Contenders, and that brought this quartet of cards into my collection.

The backs are the highlight for me, reminded me of the City Lights inserts in 10-11 Pinnacle, with trivia about the city on the back. It is something different.

Here's hit #1. There was a Bradley Beal rookie autograph in this, and I'll admit that was the card I was hoping for. But, this is a nice consolation prize. It is certainly an interesting signature, even if the last name isn't the most legible. I did include a bunch of basketball cards for my "oddball birthplaces" collection. Being 1 of 3 born in the Czech Republic, Jan would qualify. Even though in all 3 cases, it was still Czechoslovakia at the time.

I guess this would be the better of the two hits, even though it is a plain white swatch, coming from the basketball version of National Treasures. Nice design as well - I really like how the background behind Wall is coloured in the team colour.

More goodies to show off when the mail carrier delivers more of the goodies!