Awesome Mail Day

Serious card collectors depend on the mail. From hobby newsletters, trades with fellow collectors and mail order packages back in the olden days, to eBay auctions and redemption cards today, collectors have always been impatiently hovering by the mailbox like Ralphie waiting for his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder Ring to arrive. I'm no different, I'll peek out the window every five minutes until the mail truck arrives when I'm expecting something good. Today (well, yesterday now that I've finally finished this ridiculously long post) I received a trifecta of packages that covers the buying, trading and redemption card aspects of the hobby. I know, this blog is narcissistic enough what with all the endless galleries of beat up cards without subjecting the readers to detailed minutia of every single card I get. I won't make this a regular thing, but I thought it was interesting enough to warrant a post.

First up is an eBay auction I just kind of stumbled upon while searching for something else and wasn't really looking for, but bid on anyway because it was cool. Those are often the best finds, the ones where something neat pops up out of the blue. I was looking for a Mark Teixeira Goudey card and this auction for all three of his UD Elements cards came up in the search for some reason. Elements is basically a cross between Upper Deck's old UD3 set with three different technologies featured on the cards, and the Topps Finest mini box concept. Each box of Elements has three mini boxes, each featuring one type of card. One has shiny foil cards, another has plastic cards, and the third contains Light F/X cards. Each mini box has some kind of auto/relic hit in it because they couldn't charge and arm and a leg for it otherwise. I'm not interested at all in the set, but all three cards of Tex is worth the two and a half bucks I paid including shipping. Then again, prices for Elements boxes are dropping like a rock especially now that all the MLB prize redemption cards have expired. I might be able to pick up a complete set for $2.50 soon.

The cards came in one of those super thick toploaders with a nice shiny sticker on top. I always wonder who actually uses those toploaders. You could jam a whole pack in there if you mooshed it a little bit. They're too wide to secure anything other than a bat barrel or some other insanely thick relic card without having the card slide all over the place. If I had a relic card that was big enough to fit in there snugly, I'd probably opt for the screwdown instead. I'm pretty sure there aren't any base cards that are printed on 400 point card stock. Now that I've said this, I'm sure the Upper Deck Marketing department is feverishly working on the 2008 UD Big Ass Hunk 'O Cardboard set, where pack searchers look for the skinny pack to find all the game used cards.

Any of you guys remember when I pulled this redemption way back here? Well I finally redeemed it and it came today. No this isn't another horror story of a redemption card taking forever to process, I'm just real slack about sending the things in. It actually took around two months or so. I'm not sure if Jeff is a decent prospect or not, but the autograph is real nice. It's actually readable and I like how he merges the J in Jeff with the l in Clement. Now that's snazzy. The Clement auto books for 12 bucks in the Beckett with the Turkey Red Pujols painting on the cover. That set hasn't held up too well, it's not a good sign when the non-short printed Mickey Mantle card is the best card in the set. That's what Topps gets for putting out a tribute to an ugly set made uglier by production goofs and stupid design decisions. You coulda done a '53 Bowman set that would be worth more than $40 a box right now, you big dummies!.


The best is saved for last. I got my cards from the Ben Henry Mucho Grande Goudey Trade Off. Yep, now you all know who Dave from Acworth is. Not a bad trade at all, I got the 2007 NL MVP for Marichal and I'm just lucky to get anything for the crappy Buice card. I've been obsessively buying Goudey packs for weeks now and I only need about a dozen cards for the non-short printed set. Even so, Ben (or one of his magical card-elf minions) somehow managed to send me two cards I actually need for the set. How cool is that! Cantu features the only card in the set with the special Linda Blair green background, and the grandstands behind Matt Holliday appear to have been blowed up by irate Diamondback fans. Now I have to decide whether I put them in with the rest of the set, or I put them in with the insert cards as exclusive "Ben Henry touched" relic cards. I wonder if I can play CSI and pull a fingerprint off them. Then I could get all Mission Impossible, create a fake gel Ben fingerprint, frame him for a horrific crime and take over his blogging empire! Muahaha! Wait... I shouldn't really be typing all this out should I... Especially since his elves are apparently spying on my Goudey checklist.

I'm amazed I even got the cards at all, the first time I mailed off my cards and the SASE it came back postage due despite the fact I had the letter weighed at the post office before I sent it. The next time I mailed it, I used up some old useless 33 cent stamps thinking that would cover the extra postage, weighed it again and still came up 9 cents short. I sent it off again and realized after the fact that while the envelope going to Ben had the extra postage, the one coming back didn't. Guuuuh. I saw the post detailing my trade yesterday and resigned myself to the fact I could at least download the images of my cards while the post office dead-lettered the actual ones for being two cents short on postage. Plus Ben dropped a toxic snark bomb on Upper Deck which is always cool. But they showed up today with all my other goodies along with the promised bonus card:

Sweetness. 1982 Fleer Joey McLaughlin. But wait, there's more:


Aww yeah! Now that there is a classy logo. Plus it's on a sticker so when I send this off to PSA, they can't give me the dreaded MK qualifier because it's not actually written on the card. I'm going to go find my official Jerome Walton Fleer Soaring Stars magnet and put this beauty up on the refrigerator.