101st Clinton Portis Card

So it's not my "White Whale", (a term collectors use to describe a card that eludes them, much like Moby Dick eluded Captain Ahab in said tale.) but it will do! Might make a trip on over to Mike's Stadium Sports cards tomorrow to see what cards he's got hiding over there. Mike has tons of cards in the display case but he's got tons of base cards and singles in boxes that would take hours to sort through. That and a big screen TV makes it a great place to hang out for any sports fan.

This card is from 2009 and is card # 164, from Upper Deck First Edition.

On another note, I know not many people in this world are die-hard metal fans, but for those of you who get it, I highly recommend Devildriver's 6th studio album "Winter Kills". This is a great soundtrack for getting drunk and popping someone in the mouth about a thousand times. Or making sweet love to the woman of your dreams. Either one.

The Century Mark has been Hit! 100th Portis card in my collection!

Yep, it's just a base card. But the 100th unique card is pretty special in any player collection. This means you've really put some dedication into it, or you bought a shoe box full of their cards online. While that can happen originally I set out to get only autograph or jersey cards. With many of his autographs being less than 10 dollars apiece right now this player is much more affordable than when I first started out in 2002. His first card that I got was a 2002 Topps Rc card, the staple of any collection. I have not seen any Portis cards produced in 2013 and only 2 cards produced in 2012 so the tide has stemmed so to speak so it's time to get my hands on the other 3,095 cards that have been made so far. The 1/1s will be very difficult and of course I won't worry about the ones that are out of reach due to unrealistic seller expectations on Ebay. Seems like you see the same 1/1's listed at outrageous prices for months on end and you have to wonder what's going through the seller's mind by doing this.

Anyway card 100; 2010 Score Clinton Portis #295....

Another Day, another Portis. This is getting fun!

Here's the 99th unique Portis card in my collection. Tomorrow will be magical as I'll hit 100! I really forgot how much fun it is to work on a player collection. You see so many variations of the same card with different numbering, photos, a different color, a chrome finish or jersey swatch size. It's kind of cool to see how the card companies create 15-20 different variations of the same card. I'm sure this is done because player collections are much more common than the set collections. I enjoy putting together the base set for some brands. I did it for 1999 Spx (this set took me years to complete), the 2000 Spx set and the 2008 Spx set. All of those brands have tons of other types of cards in them such as the "spectrum" parallels, various jersey card sets and the like. Player collections allow you to get rare cards that would be extremely difficult to put together as a set. I don't know how you'd even put together a set of cards that was numbered to 25 unless you started hard and fast right when the product came out.

99th Portis card...

The newest Addition to my Portis Collection

This here is the 97th unique Portis card I have in my collection. Just added this one today, got myself a large lot of Portis cards too keep this rolling. Back in the day I had the SP Authentic Gold RC Jersey numbered to 25 copies. I purchased this back in his second year when his cards were through the roof. If I ever find this again I will definitely be making a run for it. This is just a base card but for a player collection it will do just fine...

Another Topps Finest football addition, but from a different decade

Here's the key card I would imagine to the whole 2002 Topps Finest Football set. I don't typically like college jerseys on a pro football card but the fact that these are hard-signed and there is so much white area in the card helping the signature to really stand out makes a huge difference. People complain about the weak draft class this year but take a look at 2002 and you'll see a huge dearth of talent in that draft class. This was the class that featured Joey Harrington, Patrick Ramsey, David Carr and a bunch of other who's who in the draft bust rotisserie. Portis might have been the biggest star I can think of in this class although Julius Peppers still comes to mind, a great defensive player that's still making an impact with the Chicago Bears.

I got a few other Portis autographed cards in this bulk lot and they will be featured soon. Enjoy!

2013 Finest, my vote for brand of the year!

Here's my card for the day, a 2013 Topps Finest Joe Flacco #1. Unfortunately the Ravens have really fallen off this year but we all knew they couldn't lose Ed Reed, Ray Lewis, Anquan Boldin and Paul Kreuger and be any damn good. We knew it. Even with the bullshit coachspeak coming out of the front office saying they'd be fine, that they would be even better this year. I guess they can't ever just tell the truth. Anyways, not a big card day today obviously but I got some sweet Clinton Portis autographs on the way...

Why not start off the month with a couple of Topps Finest cards!

Yesterday's card was a 2012 Finest Gold Refractor numbered to 50 of Cyrus Gray of the Kansas City Chiefs. Today's is even better. You can't get much hotter than Peyton Manning right now and I could probably even sell this at the local card store since we're in Denver and all of his cards are selling well right now. I never imagined when we signed him that he would be this successful. Manning's playing out of his mind right now and I bet we're going to go deep into the playoffs with the team we have. 

This card is one of the many many versions of refractors. There are two unnumbered versions of refractors, regular and this X-fractor version which has a distinct pattern to it. You also have the gold, blue, red and my favorite, the cammo refractors numbered to 10. I was lucky enough to pull a Vernon Davis, this will be shown and posted soon. The Broncos are on a bye week so I'll probably be watching some other games this week. Redskins and Vikings is probably the one I'm going to tune into for sure. I really enjoyed the Bengals and Dolphins, it was a much more exciting game than most people would have thought and ended in a surprising fashion.

Any Manning cards are great but rare parallels are even better!