An epic set won this weekend

I haven't really been keeping up on this blog like I had hoped I would but I managed to win a monster set this weekend. I have become more and more interested in Star Wars collectibles, so much so in fact, that I broke down and bought the entire 1977 Topps set to include the stickers and the C3PO "GoldenRod" error card all at once. It was somewhat of a gamble to buy the whole set like this with so few pictures but it seemed like these would be in better condition than your average set that could be found on Ebay and this was the case when the cards arrived to me. I made the purchase on Ebay on the 24th and it arrived today in great condition.

While I'm a bit too young to remember this set or ever have any of the cards it really is the best and most iconic non-sports card set of all time and the one that opened the floodgates for many other Topps movie and non-sports related issues. Luckily I now have some doubles that I can give to some of my fellow Star Wars friends as I got a couple of cheap lots earlier in the year. This set had quickly become one of my white whales and I consider myself fortunate to be able to land the whole thing so quickly and painlessly.

Here's another EVEN BETTER broncos cards from 1960 Fleer

I managed to pick up this really nice card for about the same price as the Sam Salerno PSA 6 I got last month. This is the equivalent of a PSA 7.5. It's a beauty and looks even nicer in person.

On to the subject of grading, I toyed with the idea of getting a PSA 9 version of this card with a qualifier. The qualifier was OC (or Off Center). This was on sale for around 25 bucks. A regular PSA 9 was going for about ten times that. I read on some forums before I hit the trigger that a PSA card with a qualifier should be downgraded to about 2 grades below the real grade, if that makes sense. It's all what you as the collector want or care about. Some people don't care if the card is off-center, especially because this was a known issue with 1960 Fleer, a set not well known for quality control. I think after a while it would have bothered me so I elected to go with a lower grade card that was well centered. I don't think I will ever feel the need to upgrade this card so I'm happy with it.

The new Broncos Challenge!

I'm still building my sets but I thought it would be more interesting to build my favorite team's cards up from the very first sets on up. My team is the Broncos, has been since I watched them win Super Bowl 32. Although somewhat of a bandwagon choice at the time I've since followed them through thick and thin. Luckily we haven't had too many rebuilding years and we usually get rewarded by at least a playoff berth more times than not. I'll only be posting when I can get new Broncos cards for the hoard. I figured it would be easier to start from the beginning. Who can afford or even find all 3,000 + Broncos cards that will be printed this year alone? No one, that's who. Resigned to the fact that I'll never get them all  I figure why not start from the beginning; the year 1960 which is the year that Fleer released their AFL (American Football League) only release. The AFL at the time was in direct competition with the NFL. Teams like the New York Titans and the Boston Patriots all got their day in the sun in this release. You can really sense the age and the history of these cards as you hold them in your hand and look at the graphical simplicity of the layout of these cards. It was a different time in terms of printing technology and even the status of the game. Football wasn't really America's past time in those years. Sure football was televised in some areas and for some games but baseball really was king in this era. Football cards wouldn't gain much steam until the mid 1990s (which was when I started collecting) and there were minimal releases and minimal cards to collect. This 132 card set would have been fairly easy to put together within a year's time with a little luck and trading.

All in all there were only 17 Broncos cards to even be collected in 1960. This first one I picked up in a PSA 6 grade. This is the lowest grade card I have in my collection but to me it looks undistinguishable from a PSA 7 or even an 8. My untrained eye just can't tell the difference between grades and to me this looks like a nice example. This is # 6 in the set, Sam Salerno. It is also the only card that's ever been made of him. For comparison; Broncos scrubs like 2003's Cecil Sapp (who looked great at Colorado State but never did very much as a Bronco) has 81 cards. Today's prospects likely get 2-3 times the card counts even if they never play a down. These are just a difference in times and the difference in the industry. At that time cards were mainly a vehicle to sell gum. They were rife with miscuts, gum stains and centering issues. These days (and if you're reading this you are probably all too familiar with this), cards are a huge industry with boxes selling sometimes in the thousands depending on what product you get. Unless you are a true collector who has found your specialty, you probably aren't going to get much enjoyment out of all these new cards though. Sometimes a glimpse into the simpler past like this card is all you need to refocus your efforts and enjoy this hobby for what it is.

Today's base card is... Kendall Wright

My singular addition for today is a Kendall Wright base card bringing my total up to 105/220 cards. I'm getting up to the halfway mark and that's only with buying one box and getting some base cards in a case break earlier in the year. The Titans lost embarrassingly today but that still hasn't stopped people from chasing Mariotta cards in the slightest. It's been a while since Wright's cards have been very high on people's wantlists regardless of the fact that he had over 90 catches in 2013. While not a particularly exciting card it's still one that I needed and am happy to add it to my 2014 Chrome collection today.

So where'm I at now?

Since last I checked in I was chugging along on the base set of 2014 Topps Chrome, all products of boxes or lots I've acquired in the search for a 2014 Topps Chrome Blake Bortles autograph. I'm still working the first box I purchased back in August but the base cards are nearly at an end. Here's my card for the day, a guy who was big time for the Baylor Bears but never quite made his mark (or any stats for that matter) on an NFL team. This Lache Seastrunk base card brings my total up to 104/220 cards or 47.27 % of the base set being complete. I'm fairly certain that I won't stop collecting the 2014 set if and when I ever find a Bortles autograph as new products just are not appealing to me very much. The 2014 class seems to have a huge amount of solid and upcoming players as well as the fun of collecting colored refractors and inserts that abound throughout the release. Getting as close to a master set as possible might be quite a fun project. Here's the card!

Topps Chrome Jeremy Hill Rookie

One of the better base cards I've added in a while this is one of the top rookies of 2014 to pull. He's has more fantasy and real world value than 95% of last year's draft class. Playing for the Bengals all the sudden isn't a bad place to be with their ridiculous 6-0 start this year. Hill luckily is one of those guys that you can pull autographs of fairly easily in this product (he's not short printed like Manziel and Bortles) and could be one of the saving graces for the 2014 class. This particular card is also saved by the action photo in uniform (and helmet) that you want to see on football cards. The uncluttered background, nice pose and photography and clean design makes this a perfect rookie card in any era. Could it one day be as iconic as the 1958 Topps Jim Brown Rookie card? Perhaps we'll see in another 57 years just what these cards become.

2014 Topps Chrome Jeremy Hill # 125A

One per case card of last week's fantasy darling

Today's addition is a rather nice Drew Brees 4000 yard club refractor that can only be found 1 per case of 2014 Topps Chrome. I pulled the Roethlisberger on my own but this one was part of the large refractor lot I got on Ebay. I've got 2 of the 8 in this very small set so this set's coming along pretty nicely. There has been a little bit of action on Drew's cards this week since he had a monster game against the Giant on Sunday putting up 7 TDs and 511 yards passing. I had him in one of my fantasy leagues and he only had 30 points ABOVE his projected fantasy point total. Needless to say I won that game. I'm a little surprised that these cards are not numbered but it's possible that there were so many boxes produced this year that Topps didn't want to tip their hand as to how many cases were produced. The formula would have been # of cards x 8 and that would produce the number quite easily.

  Here's the card for the day! 

2014 Topps Chrome 4000 Yard Club # 2 Drew Brees

Orange Montee Ball Chrome Refractor, a Halloween flavored card!

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. There's no presents to buy and no commitments to make, the only thing you have to do is have fun, eat candy and watch scary movies. This Sunday's card is a great addition and being an orange one is as Halloween as you can get!

Last night I enjoyed Halloween by watching the movie "Crimson Peak", a film by Guillermo del Toro and then Episode 1 Season 5 of American Horror Story. Both were pretty damn good and I recommend both very highly. This is coming from a horror movie aficionado and a pretty critical one at that.

Anyway, not a whole lot to report on Topps Chrome additions this week. I addes a few base including a CJ Mosely RC, a Kevin Norwood RCNick Foles base, Victor Cruz base and a refractor of Sheldon Richardson.

2013 Topps Chrome Montee Ball Orange Refractor #11 (Retail only)

2 more Chrome cards to the collection!

Today's additions are Patrick Peterson #39 of the Cardinals (base card) and the hit of the box, Topps Chrome #220 RC Autographs Damien Williams. At least he played some this season and there are many worse autographs to pull than this one out of the 73 possible cards.

Here's the cards! Peterson brings me up to 30% of the base set collected and Williams has me at about 8% of the RC auto set. I love the fact that this particular one is on-card, there's no way a sticker would have contained this sprawling autograph. Certainly we could have hoped for a game action photograph instead of this rookie premier stuff but perhaps that's getting a little picky considering how soon after the regular season started that this set was released. Both of these are solid exciting cards and get me that much closer to my set goal.

2014 Topps Chrome Rookie Autographs #220 Damien Williams

2014 Topps Chrome # 39 Patrick Peterson

The newest Chrome card awaits!

Today's card is an insert from 2014 Topps Chrome called the "1965" variant. These "tallboy" cards are pretty fun to look at although the Chrome technology ruins any illusion of it actually being an old card. The famous Joe Namath rookie, one of the better football cards to own comes from the real 1965 set. This Aaron Murray card could be a beast one day if he ever gets the chance to play. This card was pulled from the box I bought in August and is finally being revealed today. It's the third one in my Tall Boys set; the two others were pulled in my January case break at the local card store. I really like the colors and layout of this although I, like many other collectors are somewhat annoyed by odd sized cards as they make storage and display more difficult than the standard 2.5" x 3.5" trading card size.

Sunday will be part of a new series, 2013 Topps Chrome Montee Ball Rainbow!

Every Sunday I'll be adding a new Montee Ball 2013 Topps Chrome card to my collection. I purchased  a huge lot of cards from one seller that will help me go very far in this series. With today's addition I have 5 out of the 63 cards needed for a Master set of Chrome. I've got them sorted from least difficult to most. Every Sunday I'll add a new card. I'm also on the look-out for the extremely rare cards that can be found at a fairly reasonable price. Many of his cards have not come down to earth because of ridiculous sellers on Ebay (You know the type, they are everywhere) but some can be had for what they are truly worth. I think this will be a great master set to try to complete because it's Chrome, I love the Broncos and with Ball being cut at the end of training camp these will be very reasonable and easy to come by. Here's what I have so far....

Last Sunday's addition, Rookie Relic Refractor 2/5 (Not even in Beckett Organize)

1986 Topps Chrome 1986 RCs

Base Autograph /600

Base RC #11

Today's addition Refractor RC ( found at the odds of 1:3 packs)

2 more cards from my box

Today's addition consists of two cards since I didn't have time to add or post anything yesterday. The cards are a base Michael Crabtree #32A (can't believe they made a shortprint of this guy but hey everyone has their fans) and a 1963 Minis of Logan Thomas #31. Neither one of these cards are earth shattering by any means but it's not every day you can get a 1/1 autograph of your favorite player like I did earlier in the week.  I do really like the 1963 minis as any retro design in a chrome product is pretty awesome. Just wanted to give a shout out to my readers from outside the USA as I thought this would be a very American based blog but turns out I got a few people from Russia and Europe that check out my ramblings and base cards for each day. Thank you for checking this out!

2014 Topps Chrome 1963 Minis Logan Thomas #31 (3/45, 6% of this set complete)

2014 Topps Chrome Michael Crabtree #32A base (65/220, 29.5% complete)

The 100th Topps Chrome card in my collection (Broncos Rookie Autograph!)

This is no Blake Bortles in terms of either rarity of price but in terms of the cesspool of last year's checklist selection this is a pretty good card. Roby is part of a stunning Broncos defense this year that might go down as one of the historical greats. This card isn't commanding much more than some of the scrub autographs but this might be due to the lack of defensive player love in the hobby. To me this is a far better buy than the only other Bronco rookie auto in this product, Cody Lattimer. If there's one guy I see tons of autographs being pulled of with no on-field production it's Lattimer. People are still asking top dollar for his cards with little to no justification. I bought this specific card outright for around 5 dollars online but I would have been pretty happy to hit it in a box too despite the low value that most collectors are giving it right now. I love it when I can check off a Broncos PC item as well as a set item at once. This particular one is an on-card autograph making it that much better.

2014 Topps Chrome Rookie Autographs #209 Bradly Roby

(5/73 Rookie Autos, 6.8% complete)

Card # 99 in my 2014 Topps Chrome Organize (and it's a refractor /99 too!)

Today's card is from a lot I got on Ebay that had a bunch of numbered refractors as well as some retail only parallels (orange and purple) that I'd never get otherwise. This nice little refractor is the 1963 minis parallel # to 99. My particular copy is 58/99 but you get the idea. This is the first one of these I've gotten so that brings this set up to 2 % (44 more to go!)

When I searched on Ebay it looks to me like he's one of the most sold players on the market. I don't think anybody wants a Terrance West card. He was massively overproduced in every single product I saw last year, seems like every case had a TW autograph in it. This year he's on the Titans and hasn't started a game this season. If you're in his cards to invest you can pick up autograph after autograph for 99 cents plus shipping so for the penny stock collector this
might be the player for you!

A little baseball flavor

Here's a card I got as a bonus, pretty sweet one at that. It's not too often that you get bonuses in the mail that are actually worth more than a dollar and looks like I got 2 that were worth around 5 dollars each. Both in toploaders and ready to go. While they are baseball cards and I haven't really gone for baseball cards since I was a kid these would have been great cards for me at the time. I used to really be into Yankees cards back in the wood borders 1987 Topps days (Don Mattingly was the guy I would be happy to pull). I'd go down to the local 7 11 and grab some packs for 50 cents each and hope for Yankees. I can't seem to find any info on the insertion rate of this card but it was a part of a 50 card insert set in 2011 Topps Series 1. Topps Baseball has a huge following in the card collecting world and this would have been a card I would have been happy to pull from a pack.

T60-26 from 2011 Topps

Card of the Decade for me!

I've been quietly working plugging away at my 2014 Topps Chrome (perhaps master set) on my way to that elusive Blake Bortles Autograph. I've got 29% of the base set done, 4 % of the refractor set done and a few inserts here and there. I did pick up a very cheap lot on Ebay with a super rare blue wave refractor autograph (numbered to 20) for about a quarter of the cost of a box. Primarily I'm a Broncos collector and more specifically I love Terrell Davis. Watching him play when I just started to watch the game were some of the best moments, especially when he rushed for 2008 yards in 1998. I wasn't specifically in the market for another autograph as I had a few of his already but this one I just had to have the moment I saw it. The price was fairly reasonable too as there is a slight bit of damage on the back right hand corner. Being that it's a 1/1 though? I don't really care as there's not another in the world. This is my first 1/1 autograph in my collection and may have surpassed all others in terms of being my favorite. Enjoy!

Manning, Brees, Culter oh my!

I'm adding a flurry of cards today because I've been dormant for a few days and it's honestly probably not worth making a post every day that a base card is pulled for the Blake Bortles Rc Auto Challenge. I'll just quickly sum up the fact that I'm up to 17.7 % of the base set and these are the cards that I've added to my collection since the last post.

Another one down for the base set

Today's card is a nice card of Matt Forte, RB for the Chicago Bears. I thought I'd showcase the Spx Rookie card that I have of his since it's always fun to pull a base of players where you've already got some cool autograph of. I'm now up to 15% of the base set and I have about 5% of the rookie autographs all from a cheap auction where someone had listed some no-name players a while back for around a dollar a card. Sadly that's about the price you can expect to pay for many of these autographed cards (or happily if you're a buyer completing the set).

On another note I'm really enjoying all of the Topps Digital card apps that you can play on your phone. I'd say the thrill of opening packs in the Bunt, Huddle or Star Wars Trader apps is nearly as fun as opening a real pack and you can do it for free which adds to the appeal. They even have a soccer player card app and I'm on all of them collecting my daily reward and busting packs. If you have not tried it I highly recommend checking any of these apps out to see what suits you.

Matt Forte Spx Rc /599 #171 (from my finished 2008 SPX set)

2014 Topps Chrome Matt Forte #46 (Base set 15% complete)

3 more base cards for the set..

To keep it short and sweet here's 3 more base cards for the 2014 Topps Chrome Base set. All of these are vets so they fall within the first 110 cards. I'm slowly building up the base set from the group break I did in January but I'm coming to the end of the cards that I got from that one. There will be some nice rookie and base inserts to get added in a few days or so. Once I add these I will purchase box 2 so I'll always have a ton of cards in the pipeline even with all the duplicates.

2014 Topps Chrome Base cards, Jordan Reed # 4, 

Jordan Cameron #69 and DeMarco Murray #110

 Base set 14.45% complete

2014 Topps Chrome Blake Bortles RC Auto Challenge (new Base card)

      Today's card features a player that I don't have any autographs of. He was a rookie in 2008 and I did complete the 08' Spx set but it didn't feature this future star player. He was a part of National Treasures (a horridly overpriced brand that I don't understand the draw for) but also Contenders. They don't go for huge money but they are pretty cool. I wasn't even sure if Garcon had any RC autos or not.

I realized my calculations on the base card percentage completion rate were off, each card is not = .5% exactly, it's about .45% so over time the percentage gets thrown off. Got some cool cards in the mail today but I don't have any doubles yet so they won't come to light for a while.

2014 Topps Chrome # 18

Base Set 13.18% complete