8th Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web - Official Sign Up Post

It's here!  We made it!  Kind of a lack luster final week with the exception of a few games.  Anyways.  Here we are again the end to another season.  Sadly my team had a pretty rough year, but there are some interesting match ups possible this year and I'm curious to see all your entries!!

The contest hasn't changed in 8 years.  All I want you to do is tell me who's going to win. That's it pick the winning team.  But of course more than one of you might pick the right team, so we have to have our tie breakers.  So I need who opponent will be, how many total points combined, and to round it out how many field goals will be made total.

So your entry should be something like this

Jaguars over the Eagles, 54 points, 3 field goals.

What will you win?  Like the past couple contest I'm not sure yet, but it'll be something cool and of course I'll try to put a nice stack of your favorite team together.  Plus there will also be a door prize just for playing.  And like usual you'll get an extra entry if you promote the contest, either on your blog or other social media platform of your choice.

Here are your choices:

NFC
Philadelphia Eagles
Minnesota Vikings
New Orleans Saints
Carolina Panthers
Atlanta Falcons
LA Rams

AFC
New England Patriots
Buffalo Bills
Pittsburgh Steelers
Jacksonville Jaguars
Tennessee Titans
Kansas City Chiefs

You have until Saturday January 6th, 12 noon AKST, 4pm EST to enter.  First game starts around 12:20 my time.

And don't worry I'll be bugging you all week with reminders.  Good luck.

8th Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web - Mark your calendars!!!

Wow seems like this season just flew by.  Most of the divisions have been won, but there wildcards to determine and of course who's going to take home the NFC South, with both New Orleans and Carolina with 11-4 records?!?

That being said as soon as the last regular season game is played and all the playoff teams have been decided the contest will open. 

The contest will be the same as always. I just want you to tell me who's going to win.  Of course there will be tie breakers too.   Like usual I'm not sure what the prize will be, but I'll come up with something and there will be a door prize as well.  Alright see you all after the last game on Sunday!

I miss competition in the marketplace

When I have a little free time I've been working on cleaning up, verifying, and adding teams to baseball set checklists over at the Trading Card Database.  Part of that involves verifying that cards have the right card designations.  Meaning that if the card has a prefix or suffix it gets added.  So a few  month back while working through a bunch of the 2004 sets, and there were a lot of products released in 2004 with lots of inserts and parallels, I came across this Genuine Insider auto set.  One of my go to places to verify card numbering is COMC and I couldn't for the life of me figure out where the autograph was for these cards where.  I figured that maybe these were book cards.  I also found that the Brewers had a card in the set featuring former Brewer Scott Podsednik.  And what's more COMC had one for cheap.  I figure I'd pick one up just to see what these cards were all about.  

Much to my surprise the card was not a book card, but had a slide out autograph.  The mid-2000's were awash in trading card products, especially baseball and football.  Companies were trying everything and anything to get you to buy their products.  Of course after seen the card and playing with it a little bit it dawned on me why the set is called the Genuine Autograph Insider!  For a guy who didn't collect much between 2001 and 2004 rediscovering these great gimmick cards if a lot of fun and even more fun when you can add one for cheap to your collection.

The Blackest of Fridays

I don't go out on Black Friday.  I do however open up my laptop and hit COMC.  It's been an annual tradition since pretty much COMC started doing their big Black Friday events.  To be fair not all the cards shown were bought on Black Friday.  As a matter of fact some of them where bought almost a year ago.  I've been slowly picking up a card here and there as they pop up and deals present themselves.  The deals seem to be fewer and farther between nowadays on COMC, but every now and then I find some gold.  I did manage to find a few deals on Black Friday as I needed to hit the minimum card threshold for the free shipping.  

This past Monday I finally got my cards in the mail.  I was able to finally add about 20 new Younts to my main PC and a nice smattering of cheap relics and autos for my team collections.  And I didn't even have to get out of my pajamas.

It pays to Play

I'm not adverse to a little gambling here or there.  I do love to play poker, blackjack, and craps.  And lets be honest the way trading card products are made these days it might as well be a form of legalized gambling. But for my money, just under 50 cents to be exact, I like to dabble in the no purchase necessary, or NPN, offers that trading card companies are forced to provide, especially for the higher end products.  I have no idea how many index cards I've sent to Topps and Panini over the years, but it's usually send it and forget it and I don't win.  But every now and then I get a surprise package in the mail.  I've never been lucky enough to snag an auto or relic, but I have gotten a couple decent parallels and inserts over the years.

Well last Friday I was surprised to find an envelope from Topps in my mail box.  And inside was a  nice Museum Collection purple base parallel of Astros rookie phenom Yulieski Gurriel numbered to just 99.  Not too shabby way to end the week.

Tales from the card shop.

It had probably been close to 2 months since I last stopped in to Don's Sportcards here in Anchorage, Alaska.  I had met a group of friends out to watch the Packer game and to celebrate the Packers narrowly escaping with a win I stopped down at Don's shop. 

I'll be honest currently I've not been buying much new stuff. OK in the last 3 months I've bought no new products. And I didn't end up buying any packs today either.  And I managed to get out of the store for less than $20, found a new card for my Yount PC, and whole slug of cards I needed to help almost finish my 2017 Allen and Ginter Sports Fish and Fishing Lures set, a bunch of Brewers cards and a few new Favres.  I also managed to walk away with a couple great relic cards for cheap. 

When I walked in a guy had just broke a box of 2017 Triple Threads and hit some pretty sweet cards.  As I was perusing the store another one of Don's regulars came in and they two guys decided to dual a box of Triple Threads too.  Ah the days when I had that kind of money to throw around.  But it was nice to talk cards and sports for a few minutes.  Nothing amazing came out of that dual, but one guy walked away with a stack of Triple Threads.

I ended up finding this Ryan Braun Black Prizm Refractor #/25 in the 50 cent boxes.

I also found this gold foil stamped Yount Rediscover Topps buyback in the 50 cent boxes.

It's seems pretty insane to me how much people want for some of these cards.  The gold foil is the middle tier of rarity for these buyback and for 50 cents it was going home with me.  I also found quite a few other Brewer's buybacks.

One of the features I love about Don's is his Drop Board.  It's pretty much two peg board walls with cards all over it and they each have a price.  The price usually starts a little below book value and keeps dropping every week until it reaches a dollar.  I've picked up some sweet cards over the years off that board.  

Here are few of one's I picked up today. Most were a buck and none were over $3.

Not a bad day out and about.  And I even managed to find part of my wife's Christmas present.