Million Card Giveaway Haul

Forgot about this until I saw them amongst some undownloaded scannage still sitting in my inbox.  Here’s what I ended up with:

1983 Cubs Team Leaders Leon Durham/Fergie Jenkins, 1984 Ge(J)orge Bell, 1985 Ryne Sandberg, 1972 Roger Freed, 1960 Al Schroll, 1976 Davy Lopes

Pretty nice haul considering how little I had to work with.  No complaints about condition either.  Only the ’60 and ’72 had any damage, but except for a certain 1965 card from a recent-ish trade and some pack fresh ’83s, I don’t know that I’ve ever even seen anything from before the junk wax era that was minty fresh.  Hell, a lot of current cards don’t even seem to come out of the pack minty fresh.  So yeah, these are fine, even centered nicely.  Davy Lopes is only has the slightest corner ding, otherwise he’s in perfect condition.

I didn’t have much luck with the MCG, either pulling them from packs, or turning them into vintage once on the site.  In fact, I’ve already pulled more Diamond Giveaway chances than I pulled MCGs all of last year, and with better vintage success (close to 50%).  Freed and Schroll were the only two pre-1975 cards from the MCG I scored myself without have to trade for.  Schroll was was great to get myself as a Cubs fan, but he was the only pre-1970 card I hit at all.  I’ve already somewhat duplicated the vintage Cubs feat this year, hitting a 1970 Don Young, that I will most likely be keeping, and hit have hit two pre-1970 cards (both ’69s, one I traded for a ’67) so far.

I really enjoy the idea of these “giveaways”.  They definitely haven’t perfected it, but it’s a fun way to score some random vintage cards (and other goodies), and really, who can argue with random vintage (and other goodies)?

The backs..

Freed and Lopes are available for trade.  Seeya.

Vintagevintagevintagevintage, its… VINTAGE.

Gridiron Giveaway

So it turns out I did do the pimpin’ of  promising young blog Too Many Grandersons *thumbs up* in a timely-enough fashion to get a Gridiron Giveaway code.  And so I took the giveaway code and waited a pleasingly short time until the list looked fairly promising for something vintage.  I have very little pre-1980 baseball, and even less football (about 4 or 5 cards total I think), so I wanted to kick it old school.  And kick it old school I did:

1978 Saints Team Checklist

Man those are some sad team leading statistics, but whatev, it’s vintage, and Chuck Muncie was actually pretty good back in the day (and his glasses are badass), so I’m happy.  And you can’t really hope for any better than that in either of topps’ Million Card Giveaways.  Otherwise you will likely be sorely disappointed.

Anyway, thanks much for the code!  And I hope everyone else gets something they like with theirs too.

PS: @TOPPS- Your Gridiron Giveaway site doesn’t seem to be able to properly process multi-player cards.

Until our next…

Always Listen to Jackie

I’m sure blogger Dean of Vintage Dayf or Dean of Vintage Dodgers Night Owl could’ve told me that, but when I saw that lone cereal box at K-Mart with Jackie Robinson staring back at me, I… ignored it.

"If you don't buy me now, you'll be sorrrrry..."

I thought my luck at actually pulling some  stinkin’ Million Card Giveaway codes might have changed by now, and maybe I could pull two or three.

Yeah, no.  Went 0 for 5 again, bringing my total to about 1 for 15 or 16 (including two fat packs) pulling Million Card Giveaway cards.  I suppose it wasn’t a total loss, I did pull three Red Back Minis I needed from the Target Packs, bringing my total to 6 of the first 15, so I’m almost halfway finished with that set.  But dang it, I wanted some codes!

So I went crawling back to K-Mart and Jackie, humbled and ashamed and an unnecessary $10 broker for ignoring him.  But Jackie is a classy fellow and forgave my foolish ways.  And thus the purchase was made.  Within the box bearing his likeness contained, the 40-some base cards I have no place to put (Seriously, I’m sick of this mess if cards and want 90% of my collection gone!  Want to start over!  More on this soon…), the promised mishmash of low-level inserts, plus an original back Yo Momma card of Eddie Murray (1:3 cereal boxes) and a When They Were Young of… someone.  Johnny Damon maybe (1:2).  The Platinum Refractor was Ty Cobb.  I’m not sure if pulling maybe the meanest jerkass in baseball history out of a box bearing the classiest dude in baseball history is ironic or not.

Not classy...

(Jackie box & Cobb pics box yoinked from ebay)

And then, what I came for, my golden ticket, my sweet sweet Million Card Giveaway redemption code.  Surely Bob Gibson wouldn’t let me down the way Mike Schmidt did.  I planned to hold on to my little piece of cardboard gold till it started raining ’50s again, but I saw it was dropping almost entirely ’60s and ’70s, with intermittent ’50s when I checked in shortly before starting this post.  So I logged in my card and what did I pull?

La... LaCock?!?

To be fair, though I was impatient and went for it immediately, I was apparently only one code late on redeeming a 1962 Richie Ashburn… I got LaCockblocked!  All that trouble in really freakin’ cold weather to pull a LaCock (insert immature giggle here).  I bet Cobb was behind this.  That bastard. 😡

What a serious waist of money.  I’m an idiot and I hate myself right now.

March & April are Gonna be Busy

Especially if there’s enough interest to make the opening day group break possible.  I’m pleased to say that the turnout is looking fairly promising so far, so this might actually happen!  If anyone out there could be so kind as to promote it, I would greatly appreciate it.  And anyone interested, let me know in the comments!

That’s not all though.  I saw a retweet from The Wax Wombat on twitter yesterday afternoon about Breygent Marketing looking for some artists to contribute to some upcoming sketch card sets, which is pretty dang awesome of them.  Well, almost immediately after checking out the link, I sent an email, and less than an hour later, was officially signed on to do cards for two of the sets.  Unfortunately, they are the two with the shortest deadlines, but those are the ones that piqued my interest, and I’m confident that I can get them done on time with the required degree of quality.

Still, though I’m excited, I’m also extremely nervous, because though I’m confident I can be timely on this, I’m just not so awesome when it comes to deadlines (most of those who’ve traded with me can attest to my general slowness).  This is essentially the first paying job I’ve ever had (not just artistically speaking here), and I really don’t want to screw it up.  Hopefully I can plan things out some and be fairly prepared, maybe try to tweak a little old school into my style while I wait on the cards and to see if I can get enough interest in group break to go through with it.

After I signed on for the sketch cards, I started thinking that there’s no way I’ll be able to do both the them and the group break, but the more I considered it, I think I can do both without messing up either.  I have the group break pretty well planned out already, so that shouldn’t be a problem.  The sketch cards may just push the group break’s shipping back a little, but basically I just need to be smart with my time, and things should work out.  The only thing left I need to know for the group break is to figure out how to do the team randomizing thing, because it’s gonna be random teams I guess.

Enos!

Why close out the post with this card?  Well, I just wanted to say thank you to the person that offered the ’75 Enos Cabell for my ’05 Grady Sizemore on the topps Million Card Giveaway site.  Awesome. 🙂

Until our next…