Ok, I have enough cards to make it worthwhile to post a want list. Help me finish this set before I start buying blasters until I pull a Presidential Patch card. (Note - I got a patch card from Howard B. Thanks bro!)
4 Edgar Allen Poe 9 F. Scott Fitzgerald 45 Samuel Morse 50 Elisha Otis 64 Gilbert Stuart 65 Benjamin Latrobe 84 Harry Houdini 106 George Washington's Farewell Address 111 The Treaty of Appoamattox Courthouse 114 The Treaty of Versailles
SPs: 127 Barack Obama 134 John McCain 137 John McCain 139 Barack Obama 140 Barack Obama 142 John McCain 144 Joe Biden/Sarah Palin 146 Barack Obama/John McCain 148 Barack Obama 149 Joe Biden
Celebrities: AC1 Jackie Mason AC2 BB King AC3 Erik Estrada AC5 Rip Torn AC8 David Cross
'52 Presidents (have) AP10 John Tyler AP26 Teddy Roosevelt AP29 Warren Harding AP41 George HW Bush AP42 Bill Clinton
Chrome (have) C6 C7 C34 C49 C56 C67 C88
2009 Topps Obama set 17 Pioneer at Harvard Law 24 Mr. Obama Goes To Washington 28 "I'm Running For President" 32 Victory's Within Reach 36 Rocky Mountain Highlight 37 Greek Theater, Denver Style 40 Hello, Michigan! 42 Cheering For Change 45 Thank You For Your Service 50 Hall of a Debate 59 The "O" Street Band 61 Kennedys For Obama 64 Obama Wins! 65 Not Your Typical Family Anymore 66 "Hello Chicago" 72 I Like It Here! 73 One President at a Time, But... 80 Burying The Hatchet 83 Life, Liberty, Happiness 84 Land of Opportunity 87 All Hands On Deck
Stickers 2 10 11 13 15
Anyone working on these sets or interested in specific cards, just let me know. I have tons of doubles...
It's Presidents Day so let's bust open a couple blasters of President cards. As always, before we go partisan here's some goodies for everyone on the right side of the aisle.
This is the Grover Cleveland card from 2008 Mayo. He was president back when the orginal set was released or something. Too lazy to look it up right now. I want to like this set so bad...
And the Presidents song from Animaniacs!
Ok, getting into the Obama stuff now. Dittoheads can go elsewhere if they choose or stay here and join the fun. It won't hurt my feelings either way.
If you want to build the 2009 Topps Obama set, you should really try to track down blasters. For one, there are 6 packs in the box for $9.99 so you get a free pack. The other reason is because packs in the box cannot be molested by human hands before you rip that plastic off. Now, in a set with no relics or autos for searchers to swipe, this might not seem like a big deal. Where I live, it is. Check out this loose pack I picked up at Target:
Notice anything about the cards? Click on it and look close. Every one of them is bent in half with a big crease going through the middle. Apparently a sore loser bent the pack in half and put it back in the middle of the rest of the packs. I've found about a half-dozen similarly trashed packs since I opened this one. Obviously I've stuck to blasters after that. I've put this pack in my binder in a page at the back. It's a good reminder of the partisanship that's prevalent in this country. I'm pretty sure if W got his own set I would have found some wrecked packs of them too if I looked in the right places. Follow whatever political ideology you want folks, just don't be dicks about it.
For brevity's sake, I'm not listing out the content of every pack other than the card numbers. As a set builder I'm often far more interested with the number than anything else on the card anyway. They've pretty much all got Obama on 'em except for a couple with Joe or Michelle, so who cares if it's smiling Obama or debating Obama or serious Obama. I'm tempted to lolcat this card and have it say SERIOUS OBAMA IS SERIOUS. Pack 2: Base: 56 1 10 69 77 2 Sticker 17
Here's the base set basketball card. If you want the short printed insert version you're looking at one in thirty-two odds of finding one in a blaster. If you think that's really tough odds, consider that the odds of finding the insert card may be 1:192 packs, but the odds of finding any specific foil Inauguration Date stamp card is 1:270. So the foil stamp version of this base card is actually harder to find than the '70s retro card.
Pack 3: Base: 25 38 19 49 68 86 Sticker 18
Yay! A baseball card! Boooo! They airbrushed the Sox logos off! Dammit Topps! 47 cards with this photo on it and the one I actually pull is airbrushed! @#$^%!!
There are unnanounced foil stickers in the set for all you parallel lovers. It would have been nice to put the odds on the pack, but they look good at least. I think they fall somewhere around one on four to one on six packs. This was the only one in this box.
Pack 5: Base: 26 9 53 12 3 31 Sticker 1
This is a pretty neat photo of Obama with Bishop Desmond Tutu. I'll be the photographer made damn sure they were standing in front of that 44 address.
Aww, cute. One day someone my age will be elected President and there will be a picture of them hauling ass on a Big Wheel. Or maybe vegging out in front of the Atari 2600 playing Pitfall.
For 10 bucks you can count on getting about a third of the set, 6 stickers and a few foil parallels. If you want a set, you're looking at at least 4 blasters due to the notoriously bad collation in non-sports sets. If you want a set and are smart, you'll get one off eBay. But what fun is that? The inserts fall 1:32 boxes for the retro basketball card and 1: 64 boxes for the puppy redemption card. You'd be better off just buying them individually. The scary thing is a full master set of all the inserts and stickers and foils would probably be doable if you wanted to blow a pile of dough and chase foil cards for a couple months. I'm not that nuts, I want a set to give to my grandkids and then I'm done.
So you guys stuck around this long? You get a bonus! Another card, another video and another blaster!
Here's a Topps World Series Program card with a lot of Presidents on it.
And of course, I couldn't let Presidents' day pass without The Presidents of the United States of America.
Here's a second blaster, just the bare bones totals this time.
0 doubles in the box 12 doubles between the two boxes
I actually did pretty good here with only 12 dupes between the two blasters. 55/90 cards isn't shabby. One less foil stamp card was countered with one extra foil sticker. No inserts though. If anyone is collecting this thing or just want some let me know, I've got doubles to share.
I've got some packs, I finally found a blaster (the only way to go on these packs as you will see) and I have a binder and 13 pages to put 'em all in. And yes, Even though the Yea on Obama Cards referendum only won by two votes they will all be shown on here. I'll probably only post 'em late at night when I can't sleep, and I also promised to show the people who don't like Obama a random cool card from the archives:
Ok, now to the cards, if you don't like Obama, now's the time to skeedaddle.
Pack 2:
62 Sad Farewell to Toot
This is not the saddest part of this pack, although it's PRETTY DAMN SAD.
79 Economic Team takes the Field 7 Loving Nurturing Grandparents
both dupes.
Sticker 5 of 18
"We are the ones we've been waiting for" always sounded like a line from act three of a Samuel Beckett play to me. The environmental tip on the back of the card refers to one of the absolute dumbest things to come out of the stupidest Presidential campaigns in my lifetime. The whole "Inflate your tires to save gas" brouhaha. Why Obama was attacked over THAT I'll never ever understand. Of course inflating your tires to the proper lever saves you gas and saves the bloody tires as well! Anyone who has ever maintained their car knows that. Also idiots who let their tire pressure get low, end up wrecking their tires and then have to shell out 200 bucks for new ones like yours truly find that out real quick too. Ugh, I'm going to stop before I start ranting uncontrollably.
81 The First Granny
Another double, but at least it's a chance to show you the back with the picture of her instead of Michelle.
12 The Newlyweds 3 From Hawaii to Washington
More doubles. 5 out of 6 cards in the pack were doubles. In the SECOND PACK. Even Barack is sad about this.
Pack 3:
46 Ready for Prime Time
Obama's chillin' with Great Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown on this card. The picture on the back shows him chatting with the Tory leader David Cameron on the back in a nifty photo in front of Big Ben.
85 I Love This Country
If I get a double of this card I want to send it to Fox News just to let 'em know. They'd probably be incapable of understanding what it meant and treat it like an Anthrax scare. Then I'd end up in jail for terrorizing Right-Wing pundits. Oh well, no cards for Fox.
90 Checklist
While the last pack was a great example of the negative side of non-sports cards, this is one of the positives. BITCHIN' CHECKLIST CARDS!
Sticker 9 of 18
I have to admit, I love how completely over the top some of these stickers are. True story: Sophomore year in college my roomie in the dorm was an evangelical atheist. You know, Ayn Rand objectivist society type. He had little atheist tracts he'd use to torment the fundies on campus. However, at the time I was one of those fundies (I grew out of it) so as an act of rebellion I bought a Martin Luther King poster at the poster fair and hung it up in the room. Man, I was a JERK in college! I miss that guy, he got me into Rush and I turned him on to Frank Zappa. The Enviro-tip on the back advocates low-flow showerheads.
52 Michelle Speaks Out
This card shows Michelle's speech to the Annual General Baptist State Convention in North Carolina. Obama won the state, so it must have helped...
69 Joe the Vice-President Elect
There's a few cards of Biden in the set, but this might be the one that focuses on him the most. Joe pissed me off with that lousy bankruptcy bill but he looks like he could be a decent Veep. better than the alternative *ahem* Sorry, got something in my throat then.
77 The First Spokesman
Here's White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs with Obama in a photo with some weird perspective. There's been a lot of weird perspective coming from recent Press Secretaries, so why not.
The next two packs will be up whenever I can get to 'em. Soonish, probably.
The poll results are in and they are... weird. I checked on the results from time to time over the past day and they started off with a quick lead for Yea, 24-12. Then this morning Nay started sloooowly creeping back, getting about a vote per hour. With an hour left, Nay had passed Yea 29-28. Then with just under an hour to go, Yea got two quick votes to jump ahead 30-29. Then the weirdness happened. I looked back with 20 minutes to go and Yea was up 33-31. I refreshed with under 10 minutes left and it was back to Yea 30-29. What? That's some serious Ken Blackwell mess going on right there. I closed the tab and opened it back up after the poll closed and it's back to 33-31. Then I opened another tab to check the comments on the original post and that poll says 30-29. Two tabs, same blog, same closed poll, two different results. I think Firefox is having cache amnesia. At any rate, the people have spoken, The SuperDelegate has made his decision and my Obama cards will be featured on the blog.
Now, I know Obama is not universally loved and some people are just not into politics and don't want it mixed in with their card fix. So, to make everyone happy and to try to keep the trolls from wandering in and whining about how this isn't what the blog is all about and they'll never come back ever blahblahblah this is what I'm gonna do for you:
Before every Big O post I am going to post a random card from the image vault:
And also post something wicked cool. In this case, a 13 year old girl playing Rush's YYZ on the drums. Warning: There's a big obnoxious flash ad full of bouncing mammaries on that page, but Rush played epically by a girl cancels out the blatant sexism. The 3000 hits that site just got because of that description... well I can't do anything about that sexism.
There, you got your dose of coolness. If you don't like Obama or don't care about his cards, please go away now.
Pack 1:
79 Economic Team Takes the Field
The striking thing about this card is that Topps was able to turn around an event from 11/24/08, Obama announcing his economic team, and have it ready on a card for release by 1/20/09. The design is very simple, but effective. No foil, no nonsense, just a full bleed photo with a small blue band at the bottom with the card name and red stars on either side. The back is well designed too:
A photo takeing up about a third of the card on the left, the title at top in a red stripe, a paragraph about the photo on the front and the card number and legalese on the bottom. Very well designed card for something that had to bave been slapped together really quickly. Imagine this design on the 2010 Topps base set? Hmmmm?
7 Loving, Nuturing Grandparents
This card makes me sad and I don't want to talk about it.
54 Bill Lends A Hand Inauguration Day foil stamp
This card is actually a parallel, although it's almost impossible to tell from the scan. In the bottom left corner above those three stars there is a gold foil stamp that says "Inauguration Day *2009*". I massively tweaked the scanner settings to get the best image I could of it.
It's a parallel. Not a particularly necessary one. They are one in three packs and for the purposes of my set, I just don't see that foil at all. Foil, what foil?
Sticker 17 of 18
Here's the one per pack sticker. It's die cut around the white border so you can just slap that part on your notebook. The backs are kind of cool:
Each back has an environmental tip and some history behind it. This back advocates cleaning up pollution and references Lady Bird Johnson's "Keep America Beautiful" campaign. Again, for a set that had to have had a really quick turnaround, this is very well designed.
81 The First Granny
I don't quite understand this photo. The card is supposed to be about Barack's mother in law, Marian, but it's got her out of focus looking at her daughter on the front of the card. There's a really nice picture of her on the back though, not sure why they didn't use that one.
12 The Newlyweds
Awwww ain't they cute.
3 From Hawaii to Washington
Here's Barack in full blown MIB bad ass mode. Why can't Topps get a picture of Derek Jeter or Jimmy Rollins as good as this one? Oh yeah, this was taken by a professional campaign photographer.
Up soon: Desert Storm pack. Then packs 2 and 3. I'm going to spread 'em out so you don't get Obama fatigue.
