Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web 3

It's that time again.  It's NFL playoff time and that means in time for the 3rd Annual Almost the Easiest Super  Bowl Contest on the Web.........

It's easy to play and you could win some cool stuff.


All you have to do is tell me who's going to win the Super Bowl.  That's it.  But since more than one person might actually pick the right team we need a few tie breakers.  So I want you to tell me who the opponent is,  how many total points will be scored in the game and I also want you to tell me how many turnovers will happen.

So your entry should look like this:

Packers over the Patriots, 56 points, 2 TOs

If for some reason there is still a tie we go to random.com to find a winner.

What am I going to win this year CB, you ask?

Well the Grand Prize is .....

 both of these 2012 Topps Rookie Premiere Patch cards and some other cards of your favorite team.

Update also added to the Prize pool this!!!

But there will also be a door prize for anyone who enters and if you pimp this contest on your blog you will get an extra door prize entry.  All names will be entered into random.com and the list will be randomized 3 times to find a winner. The door prize will be one or maybe two or three  eTopps card(s) from your favorite team, maybe, I've got a lot of eTopps in hand from about 2003 till they quite making them so chances are I'll have something you like.

So for easy picking here are your choices

AFC
Division Champs
New England Patriots
Baltimore Ravens
Houston Texans
Denver Broncos

Wildcards
Cincinnati Bengals
Indianapolis Colts

NFC
Division Champs
Green Bay Packers
Atlanta Falcons
Washington Redskins
San Francisco 49ers

Wildcards
Minnesota Vikings
Seattle Seahawks

So leave your pick on this page and a link to your blog or website pimp of the contest.  The contest in open until Saturday January 5th at 12 noon Alaska Time, 4 pm Eastern.

Winning is like Christmas

First off Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to everyone.

I was surprised to get an email from Sam over at the Daily Dimwit that I had won his 800th post contest. It was a simple contest, which are the best kind, shameless plug, the 3rd Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl contest on the web is only a week away.  All I had to do for Sam's contest was tell him one of my favorite blogs and then post a link to something, your blog, photobucket, ect.  I chose to represent a non-sports card blog and recommended The Bloggess.

Anyways Sam informed me that I had won the contest and asked if there was anything I'd like that he had highlighted on his blog.  Well I went back a few months and asked if he'd let me have a 2012 Triple Threads Reggie Jackson Black parallel card I had seen or some random Brewers would be fine too.

Well I got my winnings just before Christmas and lets just say it was a great prize pack.

He sent along the Reggie I asked for.  And that probably would have been enough.

But also nestled in the package was this card

A 1991 Upper Deck Dan Plesac autographed card and this...

a 2008 Taylor Green Rookie bat card...

numbered to 500!  But wait there was also this...

2011 Bowman Sterling Jed Bradley Prospects Autograph card and this...

A 2009 Upper Deck A Piece of History Mat Gamel rookie autograph card #d to 99!

And while autos are awesome it was this last card that made me take notice.

2004 Fleer Platinum Richie Sexson patch card.  Sure this labels Richie as a Diamondback, but he's featured in a Brewers uni and the patch is obviously a piece from a Brewers jersey. But lets have Fleer prove it.

Man remember when card companies put these kind of COA's on the backs of cards?  "The card you've just received contains a piece of a jersey patch, taken from an authentic game worn Brewers jersey worn by Richie Sexson of the Arizona Diamondbacks"!! I mean yes Richie's now with Arizona, but here is a kick ass piece of jersey from one of his old Brewers jerseys.  

Anyways it was a great prize pack and I'm really happy to be able to add all these cards to my collection.  Thanks Sam!!

State of the Blog - 2012 Review

I started doing these State of the Blog, I actually called it State of the Collection, a few years ago after I saw a few other bloggers do it, they might have called it their blog new years resolutions or something like that.  Anyway I started doing them because  I needed to focus better. On the blog and on my collection. In January, I posted this years State of the Collection. In that blog post I set out 8 goals for this year, lets look back and see how I did.

1. More Trades. - Well I managed to get 29 trades done. I might get one more done before year end who knows. Not too shabby considering that I bought way less product this year and I was also out in the field for about 3 to 4 months.  Over all I'm really happy with all the trades.  I made trades with long time trading partners and made some with new people as well.


2. Limit my set building. - This year I said I was only going to build a few sets.  Topps flagship Baseball, including update, and football, Heritage, and Allen and Ginter. However I also started a Score football set and bought a box of Topps Prime even though I knew I wasn't going to put the set together.  So not too bad really.  And the Score boxes were good to me. I was able to sell off the "hits" to cover the price of the boxes, which were a good deal when I bought them.  And I also dipped my toe in on Topps WWE Heritage.  I only bought a few blasters to complete my set, but now I want to complete a few of the inserts sets as well.

3. Finish my Player Collection tabs. - I'm happy to say all but the Prince Fielder page is done.  I'm still struggling if I really want to have him up there now that he's gone.  I've still been putting his cards in his part of my Brewers PC box if I happen to get some, but I haven't gone after any of his cards this year.

4.  Finish off a few more sets from my needs list. I finally finished off my 2009 Upper Deck Baseball set.  With a little help of the blogging community and a few singles pick ups I finally did it this Black Friday!! And I'm really close to a few  more.

5. Start a vintage set.  - I decided to try and put the 1963 Topps Baseball set together.  Why?  Why not?  After picking up some really cheap lots and a few not so cheap, but good deal, star cards, I've amassed about 13% of the set.  And at the onset I knew this was a set I would be building for years.  I've been also putting together the 1981 and 1982 Topps sets.  I'm almost done with those too.  Maybe time to move on to 1980?

6.  Get back into drawing.  Well this has been hit or miss.  The first part of the year I was really gung ho to try and get back into drawing and painting and then that fell off quickly. But in the last month I've really started to pick it back up.  I finally finished a few wedding presents that I had promised over a year ago. I also switched gears on one of my  other blogs 13 Tenets of Cynicalbuddhism and turned it from a rant/blow off steam blog to my art blog.  Check it out I've posted some of my latest art over there.

7. Post more on my other blogs.  Again here I'm pretty bad.  I've been toying with shutting down my Brewer and Packer-centric blogs because mainly I really don't have a lot to contribute.  I thought I'd try harder to put up team set posts and other cool card pick ups, but to be honest that really hasn't materialized.  And on top of that I decided to start another blog to keep track of my set building  interests. The Minifigure Collector. Yeah I'm a glutton for punishment. But if your into Legos or any other building sets and minifigures check it out.  I'm slowing adding links to cool Lego and Minifigure websites and blogs and updating my collection as well.

8. Send out more TTM's.  I'm really happy with my success in the TTM realm this year.  I wish I'd have kept better records of the TTM's I sent out, but I think I got close to 75% back so that's pretty sweet.  I had a lot of non-sport success and I really would like to try to get a few more Olympic cards signed from the Topps set.  I also plan on hitting my Brewers project harder next year and focus on just one brand to try and finish it.


All in all a really good year overall.  I'm looking forward to next year and I'll have my 2013 State of the Blog address up after the 1st.  And I'd like to thank all of you readers out there that take the time to read what I write or at least stop by to look at the pretty pictures.  I'm sure I'll have a few more posts before the new year, but just in case the apocalypse was a day late, Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Years everybody.

Only 2 weeks left till The Third Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web!!!!!

Wow that season went by really fast.  And despite the rocky start with the NFL refs lockout it seems that we had a fairly good season.  Got to see some amazing rookie standouts and of course my team clinching their division in week 15 was pretty nice too.

So just like in past years it'll be pretty simple.  All I want you to do is pick who's going to win the Super Bowl.  But of course there's always the possibility that two people will the same team so we need the tie breakers.  You'll need to pick the opponent and total number of combine points scored in the game.  And if for some reason that still doesn't decide it, I'll use the random.com, but we've never had to go that far and I don't expect to have to this year either.  I know your saying CB this is a contest right? What are the prizes?  I don't know yet.  But we'll have a great grand prize and of course a door prize for all those you participate and pimp the contest.  I'll be posting the official contest link after next Sunday and you should have a good week to get your guess in.

Spawning a New blog

I've been debating doing this for a while now.  As I'm getting more and more into Lego's, again, it occurred to me that this blog really isn't set up for that.  What I mean to say is that Collector's Crack is more of a Trading Card blog and there are lots of great Lego and building block sites that don't fit here.  I didn't want to set up a separate blog roll and it was hard to organize sets and my minifigure collection in just one separate page.  No, it was going to take a whole other blog. I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to another blog, but I have.

So the....

...is born.

Click on the picture it'll take you over there.  Not much there just yet. Working on putting together a links list, blog roll that's Lego and other building brand centered and working on putting up some pages to highlight different sets and brands.  I still plan on posted the random Lego review and pick up here, but also over there and I'll probably repost some of my earlier minifigure posts over there as well.  So if your interested head on over. I've added a link to my sidebar and I'll probably add a link in the blog roll too. If you have a blog dedicated or even partially dedicated to Lego's and other building brands let me know and I'll add to the to the TMC's blog roll.

2 Blasters of WWE Heritage Break

I tried yesterday to find a hobby box of WWE Heritage, but to no avail.  I still have to stop down at my other great LCS, Don's Sportcards, but I hit up Bosco's first thinking if anyone would carry a box or two of WWE Heritage Hobby it would be Bosco's, nope.  So I ended up stopping at Wally World and they had blasters and rack packs.  I opted for the 2 blasters mainly because you get a relic per box  and for the same price You would get the same amount of cards but aren't guaranteed anything in the rack packs, although you probably get one of every insert in a rack pack.  Not that I won't pick up a rack pack or a hobby box now if I can find one.  Anyway...I don't really follow professional wrestling much anymore. As a matter of fact I only recognized a handful of names of the current stars.  But back in the 80's growing up I was a huge WWF fan.  I would watch the shows even thought the stars fought nobodies and I would make sure that I had my Saturdays cleared when the Saturday Night Main Event would come on on NBC instead of Saturday Night Live.  So half of this set is for me.  Plus it's on old school cardboard.  No gum though. And of course this isn't the first Heritage WWE set that Topps has put out either, but I don't ever remember seeing the mid 2000's releases and those sets were based on classic Topps baseball designs not Topps classic wrestling cards.

Here's a box label for anyone who's not going to put there set in a binder.

First lets look at the base design.  It's based on the original 1985 release, there was also a 1987 WWF set, which is the one I remember collecting, so we might see a second WWE Heritage set next year if this one is a big hit.  There are 110 cards in the set. The first 55 are current stars and the last 55 are classic stars.

Here's the Rock in the current stars pile.

Really Fast 5? I think I could have picked a few other movies that were bigger blockbusters than that.

And here we have the Andre the Giant from the classic pile.  You'll notice that they couldn't use the original WWF logo since the WWF was sued by the World Wildlife Fund and they won so the WWF became the WWE.  Not really the same. I always thought the WWF had such a cool logo. And it just rolled off the tongue.

Grenoble, France huh?  Damn that would make a good trivia question.

This set has some parallels and lots of inserts, with relics and autographs.

I did get one parallel.  I'm not sure if it's retail exclusive but odds on the side of the box say they are 1:90, so a harder pull from retail.

I got a silver border Koko B. Ware card.  I remember that guy!

The backs are the same. There are also suppose to be gold and black numbered parallel cards and printing plates you can hit.


The first insert set is the Family History set.  I only got two of these so about one per blaster. I think the odds are actually like 1:6 like most of the inserts.

There is also a cool Fables Tag Teams insert.  Although looking through the checklist there are also some great Tag Teams missing.

Next up is the Ringside Action inserts set.  The largest of the insert sets at 55 total cards you get one per pack.  Here are four of my favorites.

Next up you have the Superstars speak.  I ended up with 4 of these and there are 20 cards in the set.

Next up we have Jerry "the King:" Lawler Portraits. I only pulled one of these.  There pretty neat, but not original.  There are original sketch cards in the product though.

Next up one of the inserts I will be collecting the Andre the Giant Tribute cards.  I only got 2.

And there are also stickers in the set. Another one of the inserts I will be trying to put together.

There are 18 stickers in the set and if that seems odd it's because the back of the  first 9 and the last 9  form puzzles.

The Red Bordered puzzle is Sgt Slaughter.

I'm not sure who makes up the yellow border puzzel just yet.

But my favorite insert set and the whole reason I wanted to pick some of this up is the Allen and Ginter mini inserts. Totally out of place in this set, but that's what I love about them. Plus they are just so cool.  I only ended up getting 2 from my two blasters and oddly enough they came from the same blaster.  At 1:6 odds you would expect to get at least one per blaster and I'm happy that I got my two. It's a big set with 30 cards and will probably be one I'm working on for a while.

I was also lucky enough to get one of each type of relic possible out of my two blasters.

I have no idea who Dolph Ziggler is, but I like the retro 80's card design and the big WrestleMania logo.  Really 27?  Man I can remember the original WrestleMania and Battle Royale.

I like how Topps tells me that I now OWN something.   Damn right I do.  At least for awhile.

And I also got a Randy Orton T-Shirt relic.  Also someone I know nothing about.  And I could have done a quick Wikipedia search and found something out for you, but I didn't.

Overall I really like this product.  I wish it were a bit cheaper more like the 80's releases when you could get it for a quarter a pack, but we ain't in the 80's no more. There are quite few classic stars missing, but I'm sure that's all contractual BS or something.  I love a few of the inserts. I love the classic card stock and mix of current and classic stars, even though I'm a classic guy.  And I really like the A&G inserts.  Out of two blasters I didn't have a single double card and almost put a full set together, I'm only missing 12!  You can see what I need to complete my set and insert sets on my Help me Complete a Set page.  It's right on top.  I promised Colbey I'd help out with his insert needs so he has first dibs.  The relics are up for trade for a few days and then I'm going to be putting them up on ebay to help the cause.  The Stickers, A&G and Andre Tribute cards I'm keeping.