2014 - State of the Blog Address

Wow another year has come and gone.  And to break up my Super Bowl contest posts it's time to look forward to the New Year and what 2014 might bring for me and for collectors in general.  If you're sick of these blogger New Year's resolution type posts I won't blame you for skipping this one. After all this post is mainly for me.

This year is going to be huge for me. But not in sport cards. No in a few short months I'm going to be a father.  That means that the meager fun money I had to play with and spend on trading cards and other doodads will sadly drop to just about zero.  That doesn't mean I won't be blogging. Of course it doesn't mean I will either.  After looking at my total post output for the year, it's apparent that I  hit  the 4 year slump. Yep this little experiment in creative writing turned 4 back in October and I hardly noticed. I might have to do something for the big 5.  But I definately slowed down.

I recently reviewed my 2013 goals, if you missed it you can find it HERE. I did OK is some areas.  This year will probably mark a big turning point for me as a collector.

1. This one pains me the most, but makes the most sense.  I still want to collect my Topps Baseball and Football flag sets. For as much crap as I give Topps those two sets are still the benchmark for set collecting. And I love building sets. But building sets from busting wax hasn't been economical for years now. Not when a jumbo box cost over $100. Sure you usually get a full set out of the box and the hits, which most of the time I sell off to help pay for the box, but that means my base set of Topps baseball costs me about $200 to build. I don't know if you ever check out Wrigley Wax, but he posts a monthly report on what set prices are doing with a running 12 month average.  You can check it out HERE. What I find interesting is that the last three years sets can be had complete for about $30 or less.  So sadly I most likely will be buying sets. I really do like the building of the set. The collating. The ripping open of packs. Checking out the cards and players. But alas Topps has priced me out. That doesn't mean I won't rip a pack here or there, but I think my box breaking days are over for now.

2. I would still like to attempt putting together the T206 Milwaukee Brewers team set.  I think my goal might just be getting one card for the set this year.

3.  Posting more.  Really? Am I going to have the time?  Hell if I know, but I've slowly been revamping my Robin Yount and Rollie Fingers Blogs.  Instead of just posting whenever I got a new cool card, I wanted to try and make the blogs more of a collecting resource for other like minded player collectors.  That means featuring individual cards and small tidbits about the card, the set, and the issue. I also wanted to be able to link my comprehensive collection list to a blog post that had a high quality scan of the card. Can I do that here? Probably not. When I first started this blog I had the idea of making it a place where the novice collector could come and learn things. I found that most of my visitors and readers are you well seasoned collectors. You don't need me to tell you to put a penny sleeve on a card before putting it in that top loader.

4. Reinvent the wheel? Probably not! Like I said up in #3 I revamped my Yount and Fingers player collection blogs. I don't think I plan to do that here. Over the last 4 years I've slowly found my voice, what I want to say, what I want to post about, ect, ect. And I've found I like having Collector's Crack be a clearing house, with a wide variety of topics covered. From personal box breaks, set reviews, trades, contests, you get the picture. So #4 this year is that I plan to try and stay the same.  And while I will confess I'm a terrible writer, blogging has made me a better slightly less terrible writer.

5. Sampler.  I've been hemming and hawing about doing this. I've seen other bloggers do something similar if not exactly the same. I'd like to put together a nice Topps Baseball sampler album. Starting maybe with the 1951 red or blue backs and working forward.

6. If you happen to read my Robin Yount blog, thank you.  You might have noticed I have a page dedicated to all the cards and collectibles I've amassed in my 25 plus years of collecting. Right now I sit at just over 950 items. I've been digging through a few of my oddball boxes, boxes I keep over sized items, and every now and then I find a card or collectible not on the list, but my goal is to reach 1000 unique items in the collection. Honestly this won't be too hard. I picked up 30 new cards from COMC's Black Friday sale alone.

7. Lose about 30 pounds. Because I need to and I'm feeling old.

All right I'm done. Back to Super Bowl contest posts.

cb out

2013 Year End Review

The past few years I have, like many bloggers, put up a list of goals. Some call it their New Years Resolution. Me I call it my State of the Blog address.  So in preparation for the 2014 address it's time to take a look back at the goals I set for myself and see how I did.

1.    I'm going to try and pair down my overwhelming inventory of cards I don't want.  By selling, trading and even giving them away and in the process picking up stuff I do want and making room in my man cave.

Well I did manage to trade some stuff away and I sold some on ebay, but to be honest this really didn't happen. This is pretty evident since I've been boxing up stuff to store and make way for our baby coming early next year.
Strike one

2.    Continue working on organizing and inventorying my Brewers team sets and cards and start working on organizing my Packers cards.  I made a lot of progress this year and I've almost completed all the Topps team set issues from 1971 to present and most of the traded and update sets as well.  Once that is done I want to focus on getting all the Fleer, Donruss, and Upper Deck flagship sets done and then I can start seriously working on all the rest.  For the Packers who have a lot more years of cards to acquire and some really expensive ones on the older end I'm not so worried about those.  I'm going to concentrate on working my way backwards through the years focusing on Topps first.

Well I can say while I've kept up with my Packers want list actually organizing my Packers team sets didn't go anywhere.  I'm happy to say that I have just about every Topps Flagship Brewers team set done, except for a few of the rarer early 2000's traded set cards I need.  And I still need to start focusing on my other issues.  I also still have a big box of random Brewers cards I need to go through.  So I'll have to call this one a draw.  Ball one.

3.   I would like to put together the oldest Milwaukee Brewers team set.  The 1909-11 T206 Milwaukee Brewers Minor League 4 card set.  I don't care what back the cards have, but I would like to have a decent condition copy.  Why spend the money on it if it's just going to have been an old spoke bait card?   And I would love if I could get all 4 cards for under $100 bucks total.  Impossible? Maybe, but I love a challenge and I'm patient.  

Well this one is a total fail. I didn't pick up any of the four cards in the set. I did make a few attempts at bidding on some on ebay, but never did win any.  Strike two.

4.  More trading!!  This year I was able to get about 30 trades done.  That's chicken feed for some of you guys, but for me it was almost a three fold increase from the last year and this includes the 4 months I pretty much was unavailable for trading so I'm very pleased. And I worked out some great trades, had a few people solicit me, and over all I'm really happy with what I got.

Well I did manage over 20 trades this year, which certainly isn't more trading than last year, but I did trade some more. So I'm calling this one even. Most of my trades came earlier in the year, since my late spring, summer and early fall was spent working away from home.  I did manage a flurry of trades at year's end to bump my number up a bit, but I probably could have done better.  I'll say that this is Ball two!  Count's even.

5. More contests?  Maybe. I still plan on doing the Super Bowl and World Series contests.  The additional playoff game this year really screwed up the window for getting a World Series contest together and factor in  a couple of the pennant races weren't decided to the last game of the season, well it makes for exciting baseball, but gave me a lousy lead up time to the contest.   Still I'll see what I can do.

This one's a wash too.  I still have my both my annual Super Bowl and World Series contests and I have my next Super Bowl Contest coming up.  More contests? Nope, but I didn't have any less.  Ball Three, counts full.

6.  I've been bitten by the minifigure bug and you best not get to close, I hear it's contagious.  Anywho at the end of 2012 I started yet another blog, The Minifigure Collector, mainly because the page on this blog that I had dedicated to Legos and minifigures wasn't cutting it.  So if your at all interested in that kinda stuff check it out.  My goal there is to keep tweaking it into a great little fan site. 

Well hell finally something I actually did.  I find myself falling in love with Legos all over again.  I bought quite a few sets this year and after seeing some of the previews of next year's sets I'll be picking up a few more. I really love the Marvel and DC Super Heroes line and the old universe Star Wars. I've found that it's really just as cheap to buy a set then try and pick up the minifigures separately, and to be honest while Legos aren't cheap for the price of a blaster of cards you can get a nice set and you don't feel like you got ripped off when you don't pull anything.

I'm still tweeking the blog, but overall I've had fun writing and building with my renewed hobby.  Plus I can justify the hobby by saying that I'm just stockpiling Lego's for my kids and holding on to them till they're old enough to play with them.  Easy single to left field, runner on First!

7.  Keep my set collecting in check.  Another hold over from last year, but a good one that will probably be in my State of the Blogs for the foreseeable future.  The sets I'll be going after are Topps Baseball Flagship and update, Topps Football, Topps Allen and Ginter and maybe Gypsy Queen, but I see that they are bringing back the SP high number cards.  I think I'll forgo Heritage this year, as 1964, while not a bad looking set is not one of my favorites and putting together the SP part is a bitch.  I'll try and stop buying so many random packs and put that money to just picking up team sets and individual cards I want. 

This is another goal that I can probably say I did all right on. I put together my Topps Baseball and Football flagships, started my Allen and Ginter, but only got one box so that's way behind.  Didn't do Heritage or Gypsy Queen, but did pick up a box of Heritage against my better judgement and I paid for it, by not getting anything worth a darn in it.  I also, against my better judgement started a Score football set. I was able to pick a hobby box up for almost as cheap as it use to be.  I had better cards come out of the Score rack packs than the hobby box.  Anywho I'm calling this one a successful bunt, runners on first and second.

8. Writing more and better. Good luck with that.

Ahhhh, emmmmm, well I'll let you be the judge of that. I still find I write quick and still make middle school grammar mistakes and hit the Publish button up there way too fast before rereading my post.  

I'll call this a outfield pop up, one away.

9. Continuing to work on my vintage 1963 Topps baseball set.  Slow and steady.  Maybe saving up for the big one to add to the set.  You know who!

I know I probably picked a few 63's up this year, but I really didn't add too much to the set.  Foul tip.

10.  I  finally made myself pick up the brush and pens and start drawing and painting again.  While I had tried to make myself do something everyday last year, that didn't work out, so now I'd just like to be productive and maybe get to the point of showing some of my stuff in a professional show.  I've retooled the 13 Tenets into more of a showcase from my studio than a rant blog and I like where it's going.

I'm happy to say that while I didn't do a ton of drawing I did pick up my pencils and pens and get a few things done. Check out my art blog 13 Tenets of Cynicalbuddism to see what I did. It helped that I had a few commissions from friends and some wedding presents and other gifts to do.  While I like being able to draw what I like, it's also nice to have a goal and a theme presented to you.  Single to left, all runners advance, bases loaded.

11.  More TTM (Through the Mail) autos!  I was really bitten by the TTM bug this year and had some great success.  I'm planning on hitting spring training hard this year and I'd like to try and do 100 TTM's with better record keeping.  And I really want to hit my Brewers TTM project hard. Some of my big names last year included, Will Clark, Dale Murphy, Randall Cobb, and Jordy Nelson. 

D'oh.  Well as you can see from my sidebar where I was keeping track of my TTM's I never got close to putting out 100. And out of the 28 or so I sent I only got 5 back. That's Spring Training and regular season. Yikes that's pretty terrible.  I am pretty happy that Topps put out some rookie and first flagship issue cards for some players I really want to try and get next year. So I doubt my goals will be so lofty, but I'll be sending some TTM's out next year for sure.

Ground ball, into double play, the side is retired.

Overall, I didn't really get much done on my collecting goals. But after actually sitting down to write this review, I realize it wasn't as bad as I had thought.  And I have to remember these are just a nice guide to what I want to accomplish.  I'll have my 2014 State of the Blog address sometimes after New Years.  Will it look like last years? Maybe, but I can guarantee that with a baby on the way some things are really going to change.

State of the Collection 2011

2010 in review and an outlook to 2011

Well it's been an interesting year.  I've gotten a new job, moved, proposed to my fiance, bought a house, slayed a dragon, popped my trading cherry, officially started a new player collection (the Big Hurt), added to my current PC's, bought way too many cards, and participated in my first group box break.

So it's time to reflect on my collection and my collecting goals for the new year. Sorry for the lack of pictures.

The teams. 

After the big move which is still only a few weeks old.  I've come across things and cards I hadn't seen for months and sometimes years.  Always fun to find that stuff.  That being said I came across a large collection of Brewer and Packer Team sets, some I didn't even know I had.  One of the goals I had set for myself mid-year and one that will hopefully dominate is my Brewers super set.  I'm inspired by some of the great super setters around the Blogoteria, I decided to start putting together as many Brewers and Packers Team sets as possible.  The first step is to complete all Topps base team sets from the flagship.  This is fairly attainable since  Brewers cards have only been around since 1971 and the most expensive cards from the 1975 set, (Yount Rookie and Hank Aaron) and 1978 (Molitor Rookie), I already own making this fairly cheap.  Of course I'm going to be posting a complete  need list eventually and trust me I have tons to trade. 

The Player Collections.

As you can see I'm a big Robin Yount and Rollie Fingers fan.  I wouldn't have taken the time to make there own blog space if I wasn't.  This year was a slow year for Yount.  Mainly because there just wasn't that much out there and the stuff that was was fairly pricey.  Near the end of the year I finally decided to pick up some of the higher priced cards I needed before they disappeared totally.

Mainly his Topps Update bat barrels, Triple Thread Logoman, and Series 1 and 2 Hat Patch Cards.

He also had a card in the National Chicle which I picked up 3 of the backs, just missing the numbered Topps Umbella back.  I also have his Turkey Red from Update and the 1975 Yo momma cards, original back and regular, still need to find the 1985 cards without breaking the bank.  I also picked up his base #d to 250 Sterling card, a couple Tribute relic cards and his Series 2 variation.  Actually not a bad haul this year after all for a retired guy. 

That being said I have amassed  a lot of Yount cards over the years I'm still working on a finally count of unique cards but it's over 700 for sure.  That being said cards I need or want for the collection are slowing and that allowed me to focus my attention and collection dollars on my other player collections.  I have added a lot of sweet cards to the Fingers collection.  It's amazing how cheap I've gotten some of these great relic and auto cards for.  Some of the highlights this year was my completion of the 2009 Topps Tribute Rainbow for Rollie.  Snagging the Red 1/1 was a highlight, as well as, 2 printing plates.  I also finally added a Goodwin Champions Magician back mini #d to 8 to the collection.

My Reggie Jackson collection is coming along nicely.  While I'm pretty fanatical about the Yount and Fingers collections, going after cards sometimes with careless abandon, I'm much more opportunistic when it comes to Reggie and the rest of my PC's.  The one major goal I'm setting for myself this year is to acquire a 1969 rookie card for Reggie in excellent or better.  I have lots of base and oddballs from the 70's but have not gotten around to picking up his rookie.  I also haven't tried very hard.  I could always break down and buy the one at Don's Sportscards but I do love the chase and possible bargain of buying online.  I do however have his  Milton Bradley rookie card so that eases the pain somewhat.

Switching gears a minute to football.  My Brett Favre collection has slowed down.  I've still been adding new stuff regardless of uniform over the last few years but mainly just from packs I've busted.  I have a feeling after he retires prices will plummet until he's elected to the HOF and this will be a great time to pick up new stuff.  One of my continuing goals for this collection is to complete his Flight to 420 set from Topps.  Probably just the base set not the Chrome but maybe I might get crazy who knows.

I'm going to lump Bo Jackson and Frank Thomas together.  Both of which are fairly passive PC's, meaning mostly pack pulls and the like and I've been collecting their cards since their rookie years both I'm hoping to add a few more cards to over the next year but like Reggie it'll probably very opportunistic in nature and possibly through trades.

The Sets.

Since I started collecting card in 1987 I've tried to put a Topps Baseball set together from packs.  There are a few years missing in that timeline but I've done pretty well and am on the way to filling the holes. 

This year I ended up buying so much Baseball that I put 2 sets together, Series 1, 2 and Update, and still have a shit load of extras, I also put together a football set.

I'm looking forward to the 2011 set of baseball that'll be Topps' 60th.  Seem like lots of cool cards to be put into wrappers.

This year out of boredom to my chagrin I tried to put a Heritage set together, which I still haven't finished.  I put together a Score football, which would have been 200 dollars cheaper if I'd just bought a factory set, but I did pull 2 autos.  I also put a Panini Rookies and Stars base set together and Prestige base set, still working on the rookies.  I'm working on a Score hockey set for the first time ever and I like it.  I also finished my 2010 Allen and Ginter set, with the help of my favorite LCS, Don's Sportcards. And tried to put together a T 206 and National Chicle set both of which are unfinished but I'll probably post a needs list sooner or later.

I've been trying to finish the Turkey Red inserts from 2009 and this year and I'm close.

whew.

Next year since I just bought a house and will be a little cash strapped, I'm planning on holding to my guns but still plan on putting together at least one set of Topps Baseball and Football, because for all the shit I give Topps I still like a lot of there products.  This is going to be hard after having opened a few packs of Topps Magic, that set is beautiful.

Looking into 2011....

My goals are pretty simple this year. After moving into my new house, I realize how much shit I have. 
One of my goals is to consolidate and reduce my inventory of cards I don't want, through trades and selling.

I also put up my Yount collection at the Yount Collector and I'm slowly uploading scans of each card to photobucket and linking them to each card. I also plan to do the same thing with my Rollie Fingers collection and I hope that I can have that completed by the end of this year, taking my time so as not to get too overwhelmed.

Organize my Brewers and Packers Team sets.  One of my long term goals is to put together a Topps team set from 1971 to present.  I do believe I have 1971 complete so on to 1972!!! You can check out all the action once I set it up at Miles from Miller, my Brewers blog. I guess as a completist I would love to get a team set from every set but I'm just being reasonable.

I spent way too much money on cards in 2010 so I'll be scaling back a bit on boxes but I love to bust open a few packs of new stuff, so I won't deny myself that pleasure,  I think I'm probably going to try and complete the Kimball insert set in 2011 Baseball, I love mini's and inserts and retro so this is a no brainer, they'll go nice with my turkey red sets from 2009 and 2010.

ONTO 2011.......hiddy ho.

cb out

Oh and check out and enter my Superbowl Contest 3 days left!!