It’s Halloween again so that means some custom holiday cards. Last year I went with the Shadow Nightmares sketch cards and I decided to continue with some sketch cards this year, but I did a 180 degree turn going from scary to fun characters. This year I am going with the greatest Halloween special ever, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  

I only did two cards this year: 

Today is question day:

What rookie card, that you want/own, that is nearly impossible to find in Gem Mint 10 condition? 

For me it is the 1978-79 Topps Mike Bossy #115 rookie card, so many are off center or miscut. There are some decent centered cards but even raw copies can still run $50 and up and a graded PSA or BGS is closing in on the $100 mark.

I have this BCCG 7 in my collection but the front is significantly off center but the top-bottom and back centering is nice, still I would like to replace it with a better copy eventually.

Thousands of years ago there was a lot of water in what is now Northern Arizona and it has affected the landscape in odd and wonderful ways with the most popular being the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon but in my immediate area there is an area of small canyons that have the most unique features created by running water. 

In the early 90s Taco Time and the Mariners joined forces and Taco Time released several promotional cards and sets in conjunction with Alrak Enterprises. The Sonics also had a deal with Taco Time and there were Sonics promotional sets released too around the same time.

These two gold foil cards were from 1994 and are both post card size. The team card has a standard post card back while the Griffey diving card has two images of Griffey, one at bat and one close up, which is a pretty common image from those Alrak sets.

A couple of months ago I downloaded the Batman Arkham games series (Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Origins & Arkham Knight) on my computer and played through all the games. I really liked Catwoman, which you get to play as her in certain areas of the games, she is just the perfect anti-hero.

I ended up picking up a couple of Catwoman cards that are based on the New 52 version, which is the version in the games. The coolest pickup being this Totally Fabricated Catwoman relic from the 2013 Cryptozoic DC Women of Legend release. The Totally Fabricated relics are manufactured relics by Cryptozoic but because they are for comics/cartoons I am ok with them.

A 2012 Topps Under Armour Trey Griffey autograph finally showed up for auction, ending yesterday at a unbelievable $51.01, especially when you consider that he was undrafted and is on the Dolphins practice squad. Jameis Winston and Dante Fowler Jr are both in the same 2012 set with the Fowler autograph selling around $25 and the Winston autograph around $70 so we know that Griffey’s selling price is not based on potential, but on his father’s legacy.

I was expecting the card to end around the $15 range, with about $10 of that being based on his father, but this final selling price has made me sad. I really was hoping to add this card to my University of Arizona collection, but I will not pay anything near $50 for the card.

Awhile back someone, sorry I don’t remember which blog, posted about picking up some cards that had gum stains on them. When I was a kid in the early 1980s a gum stain on a card was a mark of death, it was destined for the spokes of your bike or to be drawn on and defaced, nobody wanted them. 

Now Topps makes it a variant of the base card in their Heritage releases, like we need more parallels, but in collectors who collected when the gum stain was a bad thing now sees it in a different light. It now transports us back to flipping cards against the wall in elementary school and leaves us wondering how many 1980 Rickey Henderson and 1981 Joe Montana rookie cards were tossed in the trash over a stain.

I caved, I had to find a Griffey gum stain for my collection, which is kind of difficult because by the time his cards began showing up gum in packs was quickly becoming a thing of the past but I did find a 1989 Bowman rookie card with that mark. I have picked up a couple of Griffey damaged and error cards over the years, things like this make each card unique.

Because of a delay with my insurance company my second spinal injection, which should have been two weeks after the previous one on September 14^th, got pushed back until today (5 weeks). I had the second round of injections this morning, three shots, and hopefully there is no delay for the third round.

I am in tremendous pain so I am posting a post that I had previously partially written.

Because the back of the card is blank and the seller had no information about the sticker I have no idea what set it comes from. The image is from the movie Game of Death, which was halted when Bruce Lee died during the filming of the movie, but was eventually released in 1978. If you have a keen eye you will notice that the man he is fighting in this scene is extremely tall, 7'2" to be exact, and is none other than NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

A little six-degrees (five degrees actually) of separation I have with Bruce Lee. Beginning in 1964 Bruce Lee trained with Ed Parker, the founder of American Kenpo. Ed Parker trained Bruce Denton in American Kempo in the 1980s. Bruce Denton then took on Loren Holmberg as his student in the early 1990s and in 1998 Loren Holmberg took me on as his student.

Here I am, a much younger and healthier Corky in my Kenpo gi, when my kids were younger they liked it when I wore it around Halloween. My son went as a ninja for 3 years in a row because he wanted to be like his "ninja" dad (as he put it). On a side note, I would be the worst ninja ever even challenging Chris Farley.

My Jay Buhner PC has been a rather easy collection to build because of the availability of his cards. There are a couple of limited cards but a majority of my collection has been picked up on COMC for under 1 dollar. It helps that his career checklist is pretty much limited to official release base cards and Mariners’ SGA sets, because most collectors consider him a semi-star (To me, most Mariners fans and Frank Costanza he is a super-star) he just doesn’t show up outside of base cards too often.

This month’s Art Gallery Display comes from an artist that I am unable to identify. I have checked through lists that I can find, even comparing styles, and I have had no luck. The set is 2007 Topps Heroes and is of the main bad guy Sylar.

Sylar was the ultimate bad guy, he was able to steal the abilities of other characters but he had to tear their head open to do it. He was one of my favorite characters but after the third season I was not able to continue watching because NBC had destroyed the show well beyond repair and I lost complete interest, even the attempted reboot Heroes Reborn in 2015 couldn’t bring fans back.

Today is question day:

Would you rather have a larger collection of common base/inserts or a smaller collection but with more rare base/inserts?

I used to collect everything, if there was a card or product I bought it, but my collection got overwhelming and difficult to organize because something went in this collection but I needed this card for a team set and so on. Over the years I started to cut down what I collected, first it was to stop collecting certain sports and then it went a step further and I stopped collecting sets. Now I focus on just a couple of PC collections with some cards from outside my PC that I enjoy. 

I would say I prefer a smaller collection with more rare base and insert cards. I am building my Griffey collection one card at a time so there are plenty of base cards in my collection but it is the more rare and special cards that I display.

Mick Foley has been one of the most entertaining wrestler over the past two decades so adding his autograph to my wrestling autograph collection is a no brainer. I think part of what made him so entertaining was that he had multiple personas besides Mick Foley. I was a fan of Mankind and Cactus Jack was ok but I was never big on Dude Love.

This card is from the 2014 Leaf Originals Wrestling release. Leaf has done a number of Originals releases over the last few years and I am happy to see that wrestling is getting the attention not to mention reasonably priced autographs.

Last night I came across a tweet regarding a Damian Lilliard autographed photo on eBay, here is the auction link. What made this an interesting tweet is that it was being retweeted by Damian Lillard who said that, even though it was verified authentic by Beckett, the signature is a fake signature. When compared to other authenticated Lillard autographs it is very obvious that the one up for auction is not real.

The 1949 set started with Category “A” being Boxing Champions and there were 24 fighters in this category. James Corbett is card #2 and John L Sullivan is #3 on the checklist and what drew me to the cards, besides being unique vintage cards, is that both men fought during the bare-knuckle age. When Corbett and Sullivan fought in 1892 they wore gloves with Corbett winning the championship with a 21^st knockout of Sullivan. This made Sullivan the final bare-knuckle champion and Corbett the first gloved champion.

The Magic cards of this era are condition sensitive with many fading over time and some nearly disappearing completely. Both of these cards are probably a mid-point of the condition sensitive range with some nice dark areas and some detail (more with Sullivan’s card) but there is some fading. I have put all three of my Magic cards in to a binder so hopefully that will halt any further fading.

The categories in the 1949 set includes Football stars (Category C), Actors (Category F) and Aviation Pioneers (Category L) with the big names being Jessie Owens, Clark Gable, Ty Cobb and Amelia Earhart. 

 I have sent out the last of my padded mailers this morning, the final contest prize and a pack of custom cards. In the past 10 days I have sent out a dozen mailers and I think that the employees at the post office are getting tired of seeing me.

Trey Griffey played at the University of Arizona so I am looking for this card for my U. of A. collection. He is signed with the Miami Dolphins but he is on their practice squad so this is currently his only card and unless he gets activated to the active roster I don't expect to see any of his cards in the near future. 

I am kind of surprised that Upper Deck didn't try to get Ken Griffey Jr.'s son in to one of their recent college sets. Topps too, Trey was drafted by the Mariners in the 24th Round of the 2016 MLB Amateur Draft and if they could get Manziel as a Padre in the 2014 Bowman Chrome Draft set they could have gotten Trey as a Mariner in a Bowman Draft set.

All of the prize winner’s envelopes have been sent out with the shipping of JediJeff’s Door #3 prize this morning. I just got the address for the last prize so I will be shipping that off shortly.

Yesterday the fire department was doing controlled burns outside of town and there was smoke in the air which left some people concerned not knowing about the controlled burns. Which reminded me that I had some photos on my phone that I had taken two weeks ago when I was traveling through the burn zone of the Goodwin fire. It has now been almost 3 months since the fire and we had a significant amount of rain between mid-July to early-September and it is amazing to see how the area has already begun re-growing rapidly, which led to the controlled burns.

These pictures are from the main area of the fire and while you can still see the burned trees and bushes you can see how quickly the prairie grass and some of the smaller bushes have really flourished.

I was going to make these wallet card pictures but I didn’t want to hold the card outside the window to take the pictures while we were moving.

In December 2014, I posted about a couple of Civil War uniform cards that I picked up that was part of their 2013 Cult Stuff Civil War Chronicles. There were four uniform pieces in the set plus a bullet redemption, two dark blue and two sky blue. The two I picked up were the more common dark blue wool but I finally came across two of the sky-blue wool relics, which are rarer with the larger pieces being #/60.

Cult Stuff released a Civil War Chronicles Vol. 2 in 2015 where they continued the relics set. The second set includes three uniform relics and documents, six in all. I found a seller selling five of the relic cards, the sixth card is extremely rare and I have seen only one show up as part of a master set.

The Vol. 2 relics include a dark wool relic, a gray liner relic (from inside a soldier’s uniform), a map from the November 1864 London Illustrated News, a piece from the Quartermaster’s invoice from Fort Ward in May 1865 and revenue stamps. The sixth relic is a dual blue wool and gray liner card.

I would like to replace the map relic with one that includes lines from the map as well as picking up one of the bullet cards. I need to look further in to those though to see what kind of bullet is on the card because I would want an unused one, I don’t want a bullet that injured or killed someone in my collection.

With this question I am not asking about autographs, that is for another question day, to play devil's advocate what about trimming a PC card so that it is centered and has four sharp corners? What about coloring in those chipped edges? 

What if you have no intent of ever selling the card, or given away for that matter, but you do it for your own personal appreciation of a beautiful card?

I don't like the idea of trimming/coloring cards for the simple fact that even though I have no intent on selling or giving away the card that does not mean that it will not get out to the collecting world some day. If the card is unmarked as altered someone may put big money in to buying a card and sending it to be graded and expecting a Gem Mt 10 but get back a card with an "evidence of trimming" sticker.

I have been reading stories about people working on clearing their debt and one thing that always comes up is stop using money to buy non-essentials. With most people, this is heading to a coffee joint instead of making it at home or stopping by Chipotle for lunch but with me it is buying cards. I haven’t spent a lot on cards this year but when you tally up the cards I have purchased for a dollar here and a pack there it does add up.

My medical debt has begun to creep up again because I have met a number of new doctors over the past few months and they all want to run various tests that relate to their specialty and tests like MRIs, X-rays and blood tests add up fast, my co-pay for an MRI I had two weeks ago was $175 and I have another MRI for my knees and hips that I will be doing in December or January.

So as part of my So You Don't Have To experiments, for the month of October I will not purchase anything outside of those things necessary; food, medical/medicine, gas, bills, etc. Not a penny will go to my collection, which will be difficult because I enjoy searching eBay and COMC daily. I will continue to sell cards on eBay but any money from those sales will remain in Paypal

To determine how much I will save, each time I find a card that I would normally bid on I will move that much money over to my savings account. Since this year has been slow in purchases, I bought only 3 cards in September, I will determine the amount as if I really wanted to purchase the card and ignore my circumstance of paying off medical bills. 

I am certain that by Halloween I will be jonesing for new cardboard.