In lieu of Heritage

Qypsy Gueen drops this week so I'm commemorating the event by showing off all the 1963 Topps cards I picked up instead of buying new packs of 2012 Heritage. I don't know what I'll do next month since I can't afford original Gypsy Queen cards from the 1880's. This will keep the blog busy all week while I'm obsessing over a Pretty Princess Pony Royal Wedding.



No, really, I'm disturbingly geeked up over this thing. Vinyl Scratch is in it! DJ PON-3 in the hizzouse! Plus Twilight Sparkle looks adorable as, um, Flower Foal or Best Mare or whatever the heck she's supposed to be in the wedding party. If The Great And Powerful Trixie shows up as a wedding guest I'm gonna lose my shit. The blog might be renamed The Great And Powerful Trixie Junkie by this time next week. This is not out of the realm of possibility as Trixie is actually getting her own toy in this fall's MLP line from Hasbro. You all may laugh at my pony addiction, but my crazy antics have apparently caused an actual girl to become interested in watching My Little Pony. Think about that for a minute.

Ok, so what I done did dood it? A week or two ago (you can probably find the exact date on my Twitter feed) I hit the card shop and bought some vintage '63s instead of ripping packs of Heritage. Because I'm one of those troublemaking never satisfied collectors who eschew carefully planned marketing strategies and buy what I damn well please. I picked up some old, beat up singles that cost about the same as maybe three or four packs of the new stuff. I'll let you all decide if I made the right choice. I'm going to show them off in the order in which I scanned them, which is to say, completely randomly.

Here's number 56 from the set, the rookie card of Phillies pitcher Dennis Bennett. I sadly discovered about a minute ago that Mr. Bennett had passed away less than a month ago. This card is from the first series set. It's one of the series I'm focusing on completing along with the first series of 1960, '65 and '71 and the third series of '72 Topps. It's also the first series I actively tried to work on, as I bought up every 1963 Topps first series common card at the old Atlanta Sports Cards in the mid-'80s. I refused to buy them unless they were unlisted in Beckett and I could get them for twenty-five cents a pop. Dennis here, being a rookie card, didn't make the cut back then. The price a couple decades later didn't go up all that much as I picked this one up for a buck.