Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web 5 reminder.

It's on. If you haven't already entered. GO HERE to put in your entry.

5th Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web Official Entry Post

It's that time again.  Time for my fifth, yes fifth annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl contest on the Web!!

Once again all I want you to do is tell me who's going to win the big game.

But of course we also have to have some tie breakers, so I also want you to tell me who the opponent will be, total points scored and total field goals in the big game.

So your entry should look something like this..

Green Bay over New England, 56 points, 3 field goals.

Here are the teams in the playoffs.

NFC

Dallas Cowboys

Green Bay Packers

Detroit Lions

Carolina Panthers

Seattle Seahawks

Arizona Cardinals

AFC

New England Patriots

Pittsburgh Steelers

Cincinnati Bengals

Baltimore Ravens

Indianapolis Colts

Denver Broncos

I've got some great prizes for you this year.  Some vintage, some oddballs, and some new stuff plus a pile of your favorite team too.

And like always there will be a door prize just for playing.  And if you pimp the contest you'll get a bonus entry. Just make sure that you leave a link to your pimp so I can verify it.

You have until 12 noon Alaska Time/4pm EST on Saturday Jan.3 to get your entry in.

I'll be out of town visiting some family so the offical entry post will be a few days late and after wildcard weekend.

Alright good luck

cb out.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone.

He's watching you know!!??!!

See you all on the flip side.  And remember my 5th Annual Super Bowl contest will be starting up after all of Sunday's games wrap up.

Happy Festivus!

If you can't find Festivus poles near you you can order one from here, really.

2014 Panini National Treasures

Panini has been posting all sorts of sneek peaks of the new National Treasures baseball.  You can see their full post here with a ton of photos.

Overall the cards look great even without the logos.  All the autos are on card and some of the relics are pretty awesome.  Still does that justify a $400+ price tag?  

It's nice to see that at least one Brewers rookie in the mix.  I'm hoping I can do what I did when Immaculate came out and pick some of these up for super cheap.  

All photos borrowed for the Knights Lance.

The set is loaded with stars, prospects and Hall of Famers.  I'm hoping Robin Yount makes it into the set as well.  Not that I have hopes of picking up one of his cards, but I do like to see him included.

 My favorite cards from the set are the these die-cut sweet spot signature cards.  They also feature a nice butt shot for the ladies.

And for those of you craving a Charlie Hustle fix, Pete Rose if featured in the set as well.

As much as I bitch about the cards companies putting out too much high end stuff, I do love it when the big stuff comes out.  I love watching the breaks on YouTube.  The awesome hits and the terrible boxes.  Even if I had the means, I doubt I'd ever open a high end product like this.  I'd much rather pick up the cards I wanted on the secondary market.  Still haven't seen a checklist for the set, but you can rest assured there's probably a little something for everybody.  Anybody think they'll actually spring for a box of this?

5th Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web!!

Wow I can't believe I'm actually holding my 5th, yes 5th, Super Bowl contest.  Sure we've still got a few weeks till the regular season ends, but that doesn't mean I can't plant the seed.

This year I'm calling it my Big Old 5, kudos if you get the nerdy reference.

I love holding my Super Bowl contest.  Unlike my World Series contest which the playoffs start almost the right away and I have almost no time to get the post ready and take entries, my Super Bowl contest has a good week till the Playoffs start and usually we know most of the teams.

This year I'm going to have a nice mix of old and new. Some nice relics, vintage, and oddballs.  And as always a smattering of your favorite team mixed in.

So you've been warned, stay tuned.

Brick Loot the Unboxing!!

I posted this over at my Legocentric blog The Minifigure Collector, but since I'm not sure how much overlap I get I figured I'd post it here too to see if anyone was interested in this sort of thing..enjoy.

So I had done a nice unboxing video, but for the life of me I can't get it to load to Blogger (because the files too big) and YouTube says it's going to take half a day to upload a 3 minute video, so as much as I would have loved to enter Brick Loots Mega Brick contest it probably ain't going to happen. But I might give it another go when I have more time.

But I hadn't seen any Brick Loot unboxings on the regular blogs so I figured I'd do a quick unpacking for those curious.

So you can see you get a wide assortment of stuff.  There is a nice little flyer with a write up off all of this months partners

A code for 25% off Vinyl is your Friend.

A code for 40% Lego books at nostarch.com

A sheet of brick stickers, I'm not sure if these are from Vinyl is your Friend or not.

A Brick Popper! This will be a most welcome addition to the bulk Lego bin.

A Liteup Block sample. They also have light up lightsabers !!! Check out the website!

Bright.

A S.T.A.R. Patrol Accessory pack

Looks like great detail.

A custom Oyo Sports Brick Loot figure!

A custom build designed by JK Brickworks with what looks like about 40 actual Lego pieces.

And a full set of nanoblocks!!  I'm not a big fan of nanoblocks.  Mainly because they're not compatible with other full size building blocks, but I am a big fan of WWII warbirds.

I'll be featuring a lot of the stuff from the box in separate posts later, but lets see what kind of value I got in the box.

Total cost for the box $33, $27 plus $6 shipping.
Decals - hard to put a price on the stickers, but lets say a $1
Brick Popper - These are $7.99 with free shipping on Amazon right now.
Liteup Block - $2.50 on their website
Brick Forge Accessory Pack - $6.00 on their website
Oyo Sports custom figure - No clue, but fully licensed MLB and NFL Oyos go for about $15 so let's say $10
JK Brickworks custom build pack- JK Brickworks doens't have a shop, so lets say that there is about $3 worth of legos in the pack?  Maybe a little more.
Nanoblock P-51 Mustang kit. - On the Nanoblock website this set sells for about $45, you can find them on Amazon for about $24 delivered.
So even if I bought everything at the cheapest I could find it I got about $55 dollars worth of stuff.  That doesn't include shipping for things like the Brick Forge pack and the Lite Up Block.  So I have to say it was a great box. And it delivered great value for my dollar for sure.

A couple of things. I really would have rather had a Lego Minifigure than an Oyo, but since this is actually my first Oyo of any kind I'll take it.

I also would have rather had a small Lego set rather than the Nanoblock set, but again that's just because it's incompatible with my other full size bricks.  On the other hand this is my first Nanoblock set and it features a theme I really like.

Overall I'm really happy with the box.  My two complaints are minor, probably less than minor, considering that I got to open and try out two products I probably would not have bought or tried out otherwise.

I won't be ordering another box right now as money is getting tight around the holidays, but this would be a great once in a while purchase.

And it looks like Brick Loot has competition with another Brick themed subscription service, Brick Swag. Looks like these guys started up about August or September this year, but price are the about the same.  Actually when Brick Swag's free shipping promotion is done it'll be dollar more expensive with shipping.

Well there you go.  That's what was in my box.

Topps Binders - I kinda like the idea

This is not breaking news.  Topps has been offering binders for certain sets for a couple years now.  It's an idea I really like.  As a set collector, but one who tends to store his sets in boxes, I envy those of you who have room to put your sets in pages and binders, because to truly enjoy the set it should be easily accessible.

I have to say I love the graphics on the binder, I'm not sure how well these would hold up to other brands, but the uniqueness of storing your set in a binder specifically made for it is appealing.  I'm not a fan of the price tag, $19.99, although Topps was offering this year's binders for $13.99 during their Black Friday sale and free shipping, I'm sure just not to Alaska. 

Anyone ever buy one and use it?  I'd probably be more prone to buying one if I saw it available at my LCS, but most of these are currently only available on the Topps website.

Yet another awesome trade with Nachos Grande!

I've lost count the number of time Chris from Nachos Grande and I have traded. And we both started separate Lego blogs around the same time.  Anyway, Series 12 Lego Minifigures abound and I had a few extra and Chris had a few extra that we each needed so we ended up trading.  With this trade that leaves just two more I need for the set.

Of course it wouldn't have been a trade if we also didn't include some cards.  Chris sent along a nice stack of random Brewers goodness and then something a little more oddball.

These may look like 2008 Allen and Ginter cards, but turn them over...

Yep Chris sent me some custom Munnatawket Ginter cards.  I remember seeing a post on these on his blog and the story, but for the life of me I can't remember the story too well and couldn't find the blog post.  So if Chris reads this he can elaborate.

He also sent a autograph card along.  His own!!

Another great trade thanks Chris.

What I did on Black Friday

Well we are a week removed from the biggest shopping day of the year.  What did I do?  I took off work and stayed home with my son.  Oh and I did my annual COMC Black Friday order.  I ended up getting my card yesterday.  I was surprised how fast COMC was able to process, complete, and ship my order on what is their biggest promotion of the year.  I also didn't spend a dime of my own money.  I have been completing challanges on the website for months and saving my money up especially for this event.  Well mostly.  All in all I think I amassed about $45 dollars in store credit.

That netted me 26 new cards.  It breaks down to 20 new Robin Yount cards from my collection.  Which I will showcase on the Yount Collector. I also picked up 4 new Rollie Fingers cards, 2 of which helped fill holes in my 70's cards.  Those will be showcased on the Rollie Fingers Collector.

I know what your saying, but CB what the hell are you going to show us then?  Well if your keeping count I still have 2 cards yet unaccounted for.

After I opened my 1996 Leaf Preferred pack I got from Collector Crate I looked to see who else was on the Steel card inserts checklist.

I couldn't resist picking up the two players on the checklist I collect.

I think I spent a whole dollar for both cards and while I prefer my Molitor cards with him in a Brewers uniform, I'll take it. I really like these cards.  That's what I love about a lot of the stuff that came out of the late 90's so much innovation and imagination.  These cards also come with a couple parallels, a gold version and a numbered Power version.

Anybody else have fun on Black Friday?

What other people collect ...cereal boxes.

I figured I'd share this. I was putting together a post for the Yount Collector on 1989 Cap'n Crunch cards and started looking for an image of the box to see how they were distributed.  I ended up coming across a cool little blog about cereal box collecting and a price guide.

And while I don't have any desire to collect the actual boxes there is some over lap with card collectors especially when it comes to the old food issues.

And of course Wheaties boxes tend to have a general following with all the sports figures used on the fronts.

While Steven is pretty much done with the blog as it was a stand alone project he has hundreds of images and would probably answer any questions you have on the hobby.

You can find the blog here at the Cereal Box Price Guide.

2014 Topps High Tek and Dynasty - what's a poor boy to do?

I've been putting together my checklists for my Brewers team sets and my Yount collection on their respective blogs and thought I'd share some thoughts on the two new high end releases that were officially released today.

First up Dynasty is all over ebay right now.  I'm sure the guys who bought cases of this are praying they can get a fraction of their money back. One card per box, really? But people are buying this and supposedly it sold out, so I guess that's just more incentive for Topps to keep crap like this up.  That being said boxes on Blowout are going for about $370 bucks so you can expect to probably pay $400 or more in hobby shops, I just can't see getting back your investment with this product. And I'll be damned if I'm paying $400 for a Yount auto relic.  The cards look nice, but it's still just another low numbered baseball card.  Plus there's no good checklist for the set either. I know from looking around ebay that players have multiple cards numbered to just 10 and a gold ink 1 of 1 parallel, but I'm not sure how many cards per player.  They highest card number I've seen listed was up to 8, so maybe 10 per player?  Kind of like what Topps did with Sterling.

Next up we have High Tek.  About $60  an 8 card box.  Terrible configuration on a product that's got so many parallels and variations it boggles the mind.  I figure that each player has at least 144 base cards counting everything, including the 1 of 1's and printing plates.  With that being said I'm excited to see a couple of my player collections being represented, especially Robin Yount.  Looks like I'll be hunting Tek cards down for him for decades.  The other problem with High Tek is there is no pattern numbering on the cards all cards.  Even the autos are labeled HT-then the players initials.  No pattern or design number like the sets from the 90's.  Another issue is I know that each player has 12 design variations, but I'm not sure if they are all the same within the set.  What I mean by that is that the 90's sets had lots of designs, but not all were used on each player.  And I'm unsure if the autograph cards just have parallels or are there design variations within those per player too?  Who knows? I guess we have the coming weeks, months, and years to bitch about it and find out.

Here are some Yount cards I found up already.

Card sold for $799