Hey you guyssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

You should enter my Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web IV.  And don't forget to pimp it for an extra door prize entry!!

Contest Pimp - Play at the Plate Year Ender

Yo Yo Yo, Contest Pimp back. Tis the season, with the Super Bowl coming up and the end of the year literally days away. If you don't know about the contest on this blog, shame on you and go enter.  But if you want an even easier contest go to Play at the Plate. You can enter 1895 times if you want and it's easy. Here is a link to the page with rulz.

Stay tuned I'm sure I'll be back with some more contests to Pimp!!

Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web IV - Official Sign up Post

It's that time of year again.  Can't believe that the regular season's already over.  That just flew by.  But with the end of the regular season comes Collector's Crack Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web IV!!!  Man how great was it the the last game of the regular season meant something for a few divisions. And talk about some crazy games. I still can't believe my Packers made it in.

Like years past I just want you to tell me who's going to win the Super Bowl.  There are definitely a few teams that seem to be the front runners this year, but that means nothing now that it's win or go home time.
And since I'm sure a few of you guys will probably pick the same team to win we'll need a few tie breakers.  So in your entry also tell me who the opponent will be, total number of points, and total number of turnovers in the game (both teams fumbles and interceptions).

So your entry would look something  like this:

Seattle over Denver, 56 points, 4 turnovers

Here are your choices
NFC
Seattle Seahawks
Carolina Panthers
Philadelphia Eagles
Green Bay Packers
New Orleans Saints - Wildcard
San Fransisco 49ers - Wildcard

AFC
New England Patriots
Cincinnati Bengals
Indianapolis Colts
Denver Broncos
Kansas City Chiefs - Wildcard
San Diego Chargers - Wildcard

I know you're saying, "CB that's great, but what can we win?"

This year it's nothing but autos!!!

The Champion will get these two great cards!

 I picked up this great 1996 Laserview Inscriptions card of Jim Everett a while back and I had thought about holding on to it, but it really is too cool. The card is one of those acetate cards and it's even hand numbered to 3100!

 Next up is a great card of a not so great player, but the card is pretty sweet.  And if you happen to be a Vikings fan or if you're a Seahawks fan I guess your hoping you don't need him. Poor Tavaris really didn't get much of a chance as a starter and is probably one of those guys that will spend most of his career on the bench, but this is still a sweet card and it can be yours if you win.

Plus I'll throw in some cards from your favorite team. No promises on the greatness of those cards as most of my collection has been mothballed, but I can always raid Don's dime and dollar boxes.

But wait there's more.  Just for taking part in my little contest you can win this great card I just pulled from a hobby pack of Topps Strata.

You're probably saying to yourself who the heck is Mike Gillislee? like I was saying that a few moments ago. Well he was a Gator and after looking up his stats didn't do too shabby there. Unfortunetly this year he only saw playing time on the last game of the season with 6 carries for whopping 21 yards. And those are his rookie stats.  But the Dolphins are on the verge of....well the verge, so this could be a great prospect card. I'm just not going to be the one who's holding on to it.  Plus I'll throw in some extra goodies like always.
And don't forget if you pimp this contest on your blog I'll give you another entry into the door prize drawing!

Just leave a comment with a link to the pimp, you can do it with your entry or separate, I don't care.

Alright boys and girls it's on!!!
The contest will officially close at Noon Alaska Time, 4pm Eastern,  on Saturday Janurary 4th. The Colts - Chiefs game starts about a half hour after that. I'll be putting up reminders all week and I'll have an post with everybodies picks sometime on Saturday.  Good Luck and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.  CB out

Merry Holidays

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.

A big year end thank you

It's just like the Beatles said, "You complete your junk wax sets with a little help from your blogging friends." I'm paraphrasing of course, but over the last month I've had some immense help with some late 80's, early 90's Topps junk wax sets.  I'm now the proud owner of 1987, 1988,. 1989, and 1990 complete sets.

And the best part is most of the trades were with guys I'd never traded with. I love adding new traders to my notebook.

If you've ever traded with me you're in here. I know old school. But it's nice I have names, addresses, blogs, what you collect, sometimes I even remember to write down the date of the trade and what we traded, all in one place. I also tend to keep all my trade emails in a folder in my email account.

So while I don't have any pictures of those trades and what we trade for, because really it was just 80's Topps cards mostly, I do want to say thanks.  So thank you Bert, Edgar, Jeff, Chris, and Ken for some great year end trades and to everyone else who traded with me this year.. I'm hoping to have everyone's packages in the mail by the end of this week I promise.

I'm glad I was able to get a few in before my man cave was totally disassembled.  I've been slowly moving boxes and boxes out to the shed.  Not the ideal place to store my collection, but I've got no choice. My wife was nice enough to allow me a large shelf to put some stuff on inside. So that'll be occupied by my PC's and a few boxes of sets I'm working on and a box of my  other non PC or team set cards that are too valuable to put out in the cold.

But if I don't post before Christmas, Happy Holidays to everyone. And remember after next Sunday the 4th Annual Almost the Easiest Super Bowl Contest on the Web will start.

Cheers
cb out

2014 Donruss Baseball Preview

Update 2-7-14 - Added a few new teaser photos from Panini's blog.

I was actually excited to see that Panini was bringing back the Donruss name with it's new lower end baseballs set in 2014. Like a lot of other collectors I was a little disappointed that they decided to have a very reduced base set of only 200 cards.  It's one thing Panini has yet to try to do with it's MLPA license and that's try to put out a real flagship set.  I'd pondered why Panini didn't try to do what it did with basketball and just put out a Panini Baseball.  And I suppose Panini has the option of putting out an even lower end set with Score Baseball, but bringing back the Donruss name also allows to bring with it the Donruss heritage. That means, Diamond Kings, Rated Rookies, Elite inserts, Dominators, ect, ect.   Maybe this is just Panini getting it's toes wet. Panini has put out some nice higher to mid range sets featuring Hall of Famers, and Panini has put out it's own version of Chrome too.  I guess we'll have to see how big of a hit these cards are, but Panini has done a pretty admirable job with it's baseball products considering they can't use MLB logos or team names.  Lets have a look at some of the teasers Panini has put out via their blog.

 I like the base design.  I think the picture could be a little wider to add a little more of the background in. The base design looks like a homage to the 1987 Donruss Set with a little 1978 Topps thrown in.

You get 24 packs per box and 8 cards per pack that come out to 192 cards per box.  The base set is 200 cards and according to the Panini's blog the first 30 cards are Diamond Kings and the next 15 are Rated Rookies. The other 155 cards are vets, that's only about 5 cards per team.  So out of the 192 cards, you get at least 19 inserts based on the above box break, I didn't include the Diamond Kings and Rate Rookies since they're numbered into the set or the Box Topper.

The Diamond Kings look almost identical to the 1984 DK issue. In years past the DK's were reserved for those guys that made the All-Star team.  This time Panini has issued a card to a player from every team.  And it also looks like they've gone away from the art card, opting for photos.  Maybe Perez has retired?

Panini has also brought back Studio as an insert. I was never a big fan of Studio at least the early issues. But the mock up of the Puig card looks pretty nice.

Panini has also added this Hall Worthy insert. It kind of harkens back to the Heroes of the Hall inserts, but looks nothing like them.

There are also a ton of other inserts Panini hasn't provided images for yet  like the No-No's, Breakout Hitters and Pitchers, Press Proofs, Stat Line, Career Stat Line, Rate Rookie base, and The Rookies, but we've got a few months and Panini is always good about putting out teasers and drool galleries on their blog.

You get 3 hits per box with two autos and one relic.

The relic cards are pretty ho-hum, but I wonder if there will be other levels to them.

There are at least three autograph issues in the set.

The Power Plus Signatures, which I think there is also a base insert version of these.  This set is obviously taken from those 1985 Action All-Star  over-size cards.

There are also these Donruss Signatures.  I have no idea if this is based on an old issue, but I don't remember ever seeing anything like this before.  But not my favorite of the bunch either.

And last image we got teased with were the Elite Signature cards

 

Back in the 90's the Elite inserts were some of the most sought after cards in the hobby. Featuring some of the first serial numbered cards and the hottest stars of the day, pulling an Elite was like striking gold.  

Panini mashes two inserts together here with the Elite and the Signature Series.  As the Signature Series cards were like diamonds.  And were some of the first ever inserted autograph cards and they were a tough pull.  

Overall I like the designs. This seems like to me a mix between a flagship product and a vintage heritage like product.  Something old mixed with some new things.  And while I don't think I'll be buying boxes and boxes of this stuff, I'll most likely pick up a few packs to try it out.  Anyone else excited for a little Topps competition?