Joy of a completed set - 2012 MLP Pink Series Blindbags

My first completed set in 2012 and it's of cards inserted as an afterthought in packages containing figurines of tiny horses.

Actually it's not my first completed set of 2012. I've completed several older sets this year. It's not even a 2012 product as these My Little Pony bindbags were being sold in 2011. But I didn't really start buying the things until this year so that counts for something, right?

I have the complete set of cards but not the complete set of ponies. The last card came in a package from Flywheels that luckily had the only one I was missing from the set. I'm not telling you which one it is because I really really don't need the pony. I have enough of these little ponies on my desk right now to start my own ranch. Maybe I'll enter Applejack in the Kentucky Derby. Here's the whole set, paged out and scanned.

THE BIG SIX and three others. Note the main characters get their own font for their names. Everypony else gets the default MLP font. Also note that some of the ponies look exactly like the others, just with different colors. Get used to it.

Backs have a small write up, the card number, the cutie mark and a small picture of the pony. In later series, all this stuff is on the front of the card.

POD PONIES. Hasbro really likes using the recolored stock images for their toys. You see this stuff on their larger brushable toys all the time. It's kinda unsettling when you see it like this though.

The writeup for the random ponies isn't as in depth as the main characters. Roseluck is the only one on this page that's actually been seen on the show as far as I recall. Might be wrong though.

Firecracker Burst pyro pony is easily my favorite second-tier character in this set. At least until I take my extra Lily Blossom and attack it with acrylic paint and turn her into Derpy. Pegasi got the shaft in this set now that I've been able to look at it all together like this. There are only five in the whole set and two of those are Rainbow Dash.

The "Special Edition!" sparkly ponies aren't rare or anything. No inserts in this set! They're just clear with sparkly glitter sprayed on that comes off in your hand if you play with them too much. Ot hold them at all. Or breathe while in the same room as the figure. Hasbro made a WHOLE SET of the glittery ones too, one that you will see eventually assuming I can finally track down the past card for that set.

Happy Birthday

I just announced major changes at the blog so my first post after that is finding something interesting on someone else's blog, getting an idea at 10pm, quickly rushing around to scan everything and getting a nice little caffeine buzz to help me write the post. So basically what I've been doing for years. Tonight we have a package from Captain Canuck.

PRETTY PINK PRINCESS PONIEZ

So basically I told Canuck that I was way overdue in sending him cards so he was not to send me any more cards period I really mean it don't do it. So, he sent me this instead. Which honestly I liked better than cards. My daughter already has this coloring but but now I have one. Mine! All Mine! To color just the way I like! Yay! I think I shall color Cap'n Canook's favorite pone first:

Rainbow Brite. I feel ok with posting this package finally because the cards I've had put aside for Canuck are finally inside of a bubble mailer and ready to mail as soon as I fill out the customs form. With a little bit of luck (ie. if I don't sleep 'till 2pm tomorrow) I'll have it in the mail along with a few other packages. 

The other reason I feel compelled to post this is because apparently it's Dick Perez' birthday today! Happy Birthday Dick! I wish I could paint pictures of ballplayers half as good as Dick Perez. The reason this is at all relevant in a post about a pony coloring book is that Canuck very deviously snuck this card into the book in express disregard for my 'no cards' request. 

1982 Donruss Diamond King Phil Niekro autographed by Perez. Ok Canuck, you get a pass this time. Not much to say about this other than it's amazing. The '82 DK set is one of the best subsets ever made and here's my favorite Pre-Chipper Brave. Signed by the artist! This painting really speaks to me now that I'm trying to be an artist myself. One thing it says is: Cap logos are hard. Shoot, caps period are hard. I hate drawing caps. So this is a hell of a thing to sneak in a coloring book, eh? But wait there's more. 

Eeyup. Murphy too. In the grand pantheon of Braves cards going back over 130 years, this card right here might be in the top 10. If you know of 10 other Braves cards nicer looking than this one, I'd like to see 'em. And look at that cap! PERFECT. Oh hey, what's this here wedged in between the Fluttershy picture and the Pinkie Pie word search? 

OH HAI JOHN SMOLTZ. Yeah Canuck sent three of these signed cards. With another perfect cap! He really is the best Braves card blogger ever. I almost feel bad for bipping him wi- oh, um. Nevermind. No bipping in his package! Happy Birthday Dick and may Canuck's Man U win this week. (they'll win anyway but hey it's the thought that counts)

My Little Pony - Season 3 Episode 5 - TRIXIEPALOOZA

GUESS WHO'S BACK

BACK AGAIN

TRIXIE'S BACK

TELL A FRIEND

Trixie's back, Trixie's back, Trixie's back, Trixie's back...

Livestreams here.

For pre-Trixie entertainment, why not watch my terrible YouTube video of an Enterplay My Little Pony  Tin box rip. The video is really bad, but the cards are pretty good.

I'll probably dump a bunch of Trixie pics in this post too because Great and Powerful Trixie. After the episode is over I may present commentary assuming they didn't ruin Trixie causing me to ragequit the fandom. Kinda worried about this actually. Oh well, onward to PONY!

 I'll figure out the sources for these pics later. Yeah, I'm a lazy sod. Maybe 10 people will see this post anyway.

ARHGWTRGEARFGVARTEGVVREF#$TR#FQVQ#%$RTG$%^TY H%^WH$%YW^R

BEST EPISODE OF ANY TV SHOW OF ALL TIME PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE THROUGHOUT ALL MULTIVERSES

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Season Three Premeire

Premiere's in 10 minutes! Go here and find a stream!

Happy Nightmare Night!

Time to go out and get some candy! But don't let Nightmare Moon get you!

Better dress up in a costume to fool her!

Maybe Batmare or Harrison Foal! I dressed up as a middle age guy trying to keep up with his daughter as she cut through people's yards. I was apparently too pathetic for Nightmare Moon to gobble up.

But make sure you get the candy!!!

And try to get there before Pinkie does! It's a miracle that there's any candy left in the whole town...

And if Pinkie gets there first and there's no more candy? Well, it's time for some tricks, see...

BUT NO TRICKING PRINCESS LUNA. She's nice now and this holiday always makes her a little edgy. Remember, she's as powerful as her sister and she'll send yo ass to the Sun if you aren't careful.

Also, don't bother going to Fluttershy's house. She does NOT like Nightmare night and she does not have any candy. After that assertiveness seminar she took, she'll also kick you in the face if you cross her. She likes Dia de los Muertos though, so invite her over tomorrow for a sugar skull.

Have fun on Nightmare Night everyone!

I'm doomed.

My Little Pony trading cards.

Coming out in July from EnterPlay.



Yep, I'm doomed.

Card Show Post-Mortem

Card show's over. It didn't go exactly as planned, but I was able to pick up a few doozies. I went with Quality over Quantity this time picking up 16 cards in total. Not enough for a Top 20 list, but once I post the Top 5 from the last show next week I'll do a Top 10.

Here's how my card show goals turned out as illustrated by ponies:

1) I have a very short list of cards that I will blow my whole wad on if I can find one.  Didn't blow my whole wad but CHECK

2) Pick up at least 1 card I need for my 1953 Topps set.  CHECK

3) Attack my Vintage Braves team set needs. CHECKITY CHECK CHECK CHECK

4) Snag a pile of cheap fillers for my '54-56 Topps sets. FAIL 

5) Look for cards for my '60, '63, '65, '71 and '72 sets. - Mostly fail except for one huge CHECK

6) Find one really good non-sport card. EPIC WIN

7) Grab an unexpected bargain like the '58 Musial I am too lazy to link. CHECK

8) Be on the lookout for cards for my fellow bloggers. FAIL. I tried, but couldn't find anything before time ran out.

So all-in-all a good show and he'll probably be coming back by August or September. Since you made it this far through a gauntlet of Ponies, here's one of the pickups from today:

1967 Topps Woody Woodward. One of those dang high number cards you have to have for a team set. Picked it up cheap and in pretty good condition. You'll have to wait for the rest, I gotta get some sleep tonight.

Old School Heritage and New School Ponies - Part 12

The My Little Pony Royal Princess Wedding is happening RIGHT NOW, and I'm embarrassing myself trying to coach little league baseball whole I have a splitting headache from waking up a 4 in the morning with heartburn and not getting any sleep and after the game I get to go to Costco oh joy. So I don't get to see the wedding live online, I have to wait for YouTube. Wanna piss me off for posting ponies? Watch the episode and post spoilers to Twitter and my blog. No that isn't just a sneaky way of getting you to watch ponies, really I swear.

In the meantime until I'm able to watch the show I'm going to assume the wedding went off like this. I want Pinkie Pie's shirt SO BAD.

Here's the last of the '63s, Hall of Famer Billy Williams. This guy is so underrated it's stupid. I swear, if I had a pony for every time someone said Billy Williams isn't a Hall of Famer, I'd have... well... even more ponies than I already have. AND THAT'S A LOTTA PONIES. Just check out this Gem Mint specimen. Scuffs and scrapes all over the card, but not enough to scrape off the 49 year old wax. Perfectly rounded corners. Creases everywhere. And last but not least, SIX - count em - SIX staples were used to mount this thing to some object that was instantly beautified by its presence. Can you imagine the work it took to get this card looking like this? It doesn't just happen by itself, this kind of wear takes effort. Go ahead, take one of those newfangled Heritage cards you've been opening up by the handful and make it look as good as this, I dare ya.

UPDATE: My family abandoned me to ponies so I got to watch the episode when it aired. Holy crap was that good. At 44 minutes, it was slightly rushed in points but they squoze as much epicness in as they could. Celestia knows how the hell they're going to top that in season 3.

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.

Best episode ever?

MLP:FIM Season 2 Ep 16

Woooo! It's Saturday morning and I'm not hungover! Much!

Rainbow Dash learns to read today! Hooray for Literacy!

Fluttershy finally gets an episode in season 2! WOOOOOO

An overly excitable fanbase throws their weight around and solves a problem that may or may not have existed in the first place! Wheeeeeee!

It's episode time and I don't have any goofy pony images or drawings to post! Derrrrrrp!

Wooooo! I found a RD drawing I probably haven't posted already!

EPISODE STARTED!

Pinkie is Linda Blair!

RD just busted her ass!

Commercials!

RD is crippled!

Twi makes the squee noise!

Reading is for eggheads! Y U SO DOUCHEY DASHEY??

RD is an egghead now! NOOOOOOOOOO

Indiana Pony!

Wait, is that a Littlest Pet Shop crossover?! WHY DO I KNOW WHAT THAT IS

Battleship is now canon!

Ha! RD loves reading more than her friends!

Time to go Dashie! No socialized medicine in Equestria and your insurance ran out!

TIME TO GO CRAWLING TO TWI, EGGHEAD

NINJADASH

IN YER HOSPITALZ

STEELING YER SLIPPERZ

Barking pony is best pony.

RD admits she's an egghead. Time to go to prison now!

Hooray! RD gets to read the rest of the book!

What the hell is that freaky blue jackal thing anyway? And who is voice actor doing the doctor's voice? I swear I've heard it before.

Spike! Write that letter! I'm too busy REEDING!

(oh yah. spoilers)

Wait... did that tiger have a mace?

My first card of 2012

Ok, a quick note on the New York Times autism My Little Pony screw up that's gone viral. You see, what... what had happen... is the author of the piece was interviewing the girl in the story on her way to school. The girl was listening to Pony electronic dance music on her iPod on the way and one of the songs included Fluttershy going 'yay'. This could describe about 63.7% of all Pony remixes, but here's a possible candidate for the song in question. In the interview that morning, Winter Wrap Up was discussed including Twilight Sparkle's role in the episode. THE PROBLEM: the author wrote down Fluttershy's name but not Twilight Sparkle's in her notes. So when The article was written and it was time to name the nerdy pony trying to fit in, Fluttershy's name was in the notes so Fluttershy's name was used. Tiny mistake. Could have happened to anyone. Kinda like when the Times left out the "don't" in the Iraq WMDs story that one time. I find it interesting that a Pony remix song is the cause of the whole mess since I've got well over five gigs of this shit on my hard drive and MP3 player right now. Kottke.org links to some Pony music in their article on the story but if you want good MLP dubstep forget Skrillex, Alex S. is the real thing.


Dubstep is nice and all, but I prefer Pony trance, techno and weird glitchy stuff.

Ok, enough ponies. You want cards! Have I shown off a single baseball card all year? A real one from a licensed company? Or even unlicensed! One that wasn't completely defaced that is? No! I haven't! THIS CHANGES NOW. Here's my first card acquired in 2012.

Topps206 Mini card of Casey Kotchman. Kotchman has become one of those players that cause fans of a certain team to turn pale and twitch involuntarily when hearing his name. Like Ernie Broglio. Or Larry Andersen. Or Ivan DeJesus. Maybe even Doyle Alexander but I have a different feeling when I hear his name. Casey's the dude the Braves got in return for Mark Teixeira because they were too chicken to risk offering him arbitration in the offseason so they could get draft picks when Tex inevitably signed with the Yankees for 70 bazillion dollars. Picks the Angels were able to turn into Mike Trout. Oh yeah, the other dude we got in the trade, Steven Marek, just signed with the Blue Jays. Guuuuuuuuh. Did I mention that the slew of prospects we gave up to get Tex from Texas were a big reason they were in the World Series the past two years? Ok, I winced slightly when I saw this card come out of an envelope from Adam this afternoon. There is a happy ending though....

CYCLE! Me likey Cycle backs. Me No Likey that Topps always short prints the crap out of them. Numbered to 99! What's the point of a Casey Kotchman card numbered to 99? The number 29 is significant though... It's the number of games Casey played for Boston in 2009. After the Braves traded him for Adam LaRoche. Who if we kept as our first baseman instead of trading him away to the Pirates for Mike Gonzalez in 2007, we never would have needed Teixeira in the first place. GUUUUUUUUUUUUH. Mike Gonzalez is another one of those names. I've had a few Red Sox cards set aside for Adam for a few weeks but I haven't mailed them off because I haven't gotten around to creating his sketch card yet. The Holidays threw my procrastination schedule all off. I'm sure to get to it this weekend, as long as the Pony Madness of a new episode tomorrow doesn't derail me again.

To cap off this post here's some Boards of Canada, who along with Ponies and Baseball is my other big Obsession right now. Happy Cycling!

Sketch Card #10 - Angel Bunny

Whelp, no better time to post this one... Nope, this is the perfect time.

This here is Fluttershy's pet, Angel Bunny. I made a trade with Laurens over at Card Buzz and sent a bunch of Angels cards in exchange for a Julio Teheran Liquorfractor. Since Laurens is an Angels fan, Angel Bunny seemed like a perfect fit for a sketch card. I just cannot resist the puns. I boogered the sketch a bit, as Angel's head is way too small. Nothing worse than an off-model parody sketch card. Ok, there are worse things. Let's just play this off like it's Angel's older brother, the sports nut.

Fluttershy is unavailable for comment as she is out trying to cheer up all her Cardinal friends. Poor little birdies...