What Did I Get Myself Into?

So, I thought that I was being smart by going for the surgery option that had the best chance of getting every last bit of kidney stone out of my system. The only problem is that my doctor didn't say to me that I would be going home with a tube in my back that would be there for a week. Talk about inconvenient. No work, no digging through card to find stuff for potential trades, nothing more than some TV and oxycodone fuelled naps.

I have watched the Sox beat up on the Indians yesterday and the Tigers today. I busted all of the boxes that were purchased with my latest eBay sales. Mostly, I've been laying as still as possible trying to keep the pain away.

So, there you go. I apologize for any late packages and promise to get back up to speed once all of this is over.

You Gotta Know When To Hold 'Em

Know when to sell them on eBay.

The card in question: 2009-10 Bowman '48 Derrick Rose autographed card. Rose's cards are selling extremely high right now with his MVP Award, NBA All-First Team Award and deep playoff run. I think this might be the time to sell this card (as well as the Dwyane Wade auto from the same set). I don't know if Rose's non-rookies will climb much higher. I checked the gold refractor that I sold a few months ago and it is still selling for around the same price. Would you sell this card now or would you wait a couple of weeks to see if Wade can add an NBA Championship to his resume?

Sometimes Sorry Does the Job

One of the cards that I pulled from my Panini Basketball Hall of Fame busting spree was a redemption card for Cheryl Miller. Every now and then I’ll check into the Panini website to see if there’s been an update that I may have missed. I did so the other day and there wasn’t any new news so I sent a message to investigate into what I could possibly get as a replacement if I decided to stop waiting for the Miller card.

While on the site, I remembered that I had sent in a Chris Kaman autographed card that I pulled from some packs of Studio that I purchased one day on my lunch break. I checked in on that card and was surprised to find that it had been about 4 months since I had sent in the card to be replaced. So, I sent in a message checking in on the status of the card and asking why it had taken so long since I had sent cards in for replacement in the past and they had been returned very quickly. (I also jokingly told them that they could just send me a Blake Griffin auto as a replacement if they no longer had the Chris Kaman card since they’re both on the same team so it seemed like a decent replacement. I’ve worked in Customer Service and it’s a thankless job most of the time. I figured I’d try to make whoever was reading my question chuckle.) This is the response that I got:

I apologized for the wait and delay in responses to emails and voice mails . The Customer Service department has undergone big changes in the process of moving buildings.Unfortunately the same card is not available for replacement and found another card with a little higher value than your damaged card from the same team to replaced your damaged card along with some packs for the wait and inconvenience. This replacement card is ready to go out today. We appreciate your patience and understanding in advance. Thank you and have a great day.

I had completely forgotten about Panini’s change of address even though I read all of the posts about it in their blog. Even if they had just explained about the move and said sorry, I would have been fine with that. Panini went above and beyond though and along with the replacement card will be sending some packs. How cool is that?

I also find it hilarious that because of my joke I will be getting a card of another Clipper as a replacement for the Kaman auto. If this had been a chore like getting a replacement from Upper Deck, I’d be annoyed about not getting a Celtic as a replacement. In this situation, I don’t mind a bit. I know that there’s no way that I’m getting a Blake Griffin, but it will be interesting to see who I do get. I’m not sure if I could even name another Clipper at this moment.

A Quick Google Later: I completely forgot Ryan Gomes was on the Clippers now. I loved Gomes when he was in Boston. The Celtics could have used him this season, that’s for sure. Jamario M-O-O-N (that spells basketball) is on the team as well.

Kudos Panini Customer Support for a job well done.

 

Technorati Tags: Panini Hall of Fame Basketball,Basketball cards,customer service,Chris Kaman,Blake Griffin

A Card So Nice, I Acquired it Twice

Those of you who watched the video of my first replacement package that I received from Upper Deck might recognize this card. Well, it’s not this exact card, but it’s pretty darn close. I ended up taking a liking to the Jeff Green card that I was sent, but it wasn’t anywhere near close to what I should have been sent for the Michael Johnson. In retrospect, I should have asked Upper Deck if I could have held onto the Green and just sent back the other card in exchange for the Pierce.

That being said, I ended up with this card cheaply on eBay ($7) and I think I like it even better than the card that Upper Deck sent me. That card had green foil which kind of got lost in all of the other green on the card. This card has gold foil which I like with these colors a lot. The only other difference is the numbering. The card that I was sent was numbered to 49 and this card is numbered to 199. Really not a huge difference. Everything else about the card is the same. I’m just glad they didn’t pull an SPx with this card and have one of the windows empty on a lower numbered version of the card. This is an event used jersey so they could wrap the whole card in material and still have plenty.

I know this is a higher numbered version of the card, but I think that the acquisition cost of this card helps back up my feelings that Upper Deck didn’t send me enough for the Michael Johnson redemption card.

 

Technorati Tags: basketball cards,Jeff Green,Upper Deck

A Bunch of Babies

I’m going to stick with the parallel theme for one more post. I’m all for picking up parallels cheaply, but I won’t break the bank for them. I definitely enjoy picking them up in batches because it makes the whole process a whole lot easier.

Here’s a trio of 2007-08 Topps Luxury Box Glen “Big Baby” Davis rookies. First up is what I think is the base card which is numbered to 699. The base card has some nice team color stuff going on in the design. I’m guessing that the other two parallels are the bronze (/249) and silver (/75) which leads me to believe that there is also a gold version out there as well.

The best part of this acquisition is the story. This package was mailed from the Philippines back in January. It got lost somewhere along the way and then had another postmark from April 29th when it got back on track and then it arrived to me in May. I had long given up on these cards so it was a total surprise when they showed up. I’m usually not a fan of buying cards from the Philippines for this very reason, but I took a shot when the three cards sold for a dollar plus three dollars shipping.

 

Technorati Tags: Basketball cards,Glen Davis,Big Baby,Topps Luxury Box

1999 Topps Stars: Piazza Constellation

One great thing about people busting up cases or collections is that you can sometimes grab a group of cards together that would sometimes be a pain to gather individually. This was a good example of that.

I’m not sure if this person busted a lot of Topps Stars or decided that they weren’t going to collect Piazza any longer, but I was happy to add this small stack of cards to my collection. The Super Novas card is an insert and the other five cards are all different variations of the base card. At the top left is the base version of the base card. Below that is the one star version. Continuing counterclockwise, you see the two star, three star, and four star versions. The picture gets closer and closer in each and the background changes a little. There are also different colored foils used on the cards from bronze to silver, gold, silver holofoil and gold holofoil. It’s cool to see the cards all together. If only these parallels were serial numbered then this constellation might rival a Masterpieces rainbow.

 

Technorati Tags: Mike Piazza,baseball cards,1999 Topps Stars Baseball

A Cool Upper Deck Mailday

So, I busted a box of 2009/10 Upper Deck Basketball Draft Edition back in December. That was the awesome case that produced a Michael Jordan autograph and a ton of base cards that nobody wants. Some of the autographs did very well on eBay and then I was surprised when some of the autographs that wouldn’t sell for a dollar on eBay went for a few bucks on CheckOutMyCards. Well, that case produced a few cards to be determined. There were seven Jordan Classic jersey cards that took four months to be redeemed and my Michael Johnson /99 non-existent card that had to be replaced twice. Wanna see what I got in the mail? I had a lot of fun opening these up. Each envelope had an advertisement for Evolution so now I’ve got enough of those to wallpaper my mancave.

I’ll start off with the Brandon Jennings card because he’s the only player that I only pulled one redemption card of. It was slightly frustrating to pull seven redemption cards and only get 4 different players, but at least I got some good players.

The downside of this set was that many of the top rookies from this set aren’t included in the base set and also don’t have autographs to be pulled. You won’t find Blake Griffin, Tyreke Evans, DeMar DeRozen or Brandon Jennings, but three of those players were included in the jersey card set. Of the 13 cards in the set, there are three different Brandon Jennings, three B.J. Mullens, three DeRozans, two Evans and two Jrue Holidays. So, chances are that you’re going to get good players since there aren’t many options. The frustrating thing for me was that I got the exact same number card for each of the players that I got duplicates of. It would have been nice to get different cards from the players that I pulled twice, but that wasn’t the case.

Here’s DeMar DeRozen with a teal swatch. When I searched eBay, every card from this set that I saw listed had one of these teal swatches and so I assumed that they all looked like this, but there are more ot these jerseys than just teal. I would find that out fairly quickly.

Bank error in your favor. Collect $100. In my case, collect a different DeMar DeRozen card that I wasn’t supposed to get. As you can see, there’s a different picture on this card and a very cool jersey swatch with a couple of different colors. I guess this is the closest you can get to a patch on something like this.

Here’s a plain teal card of B.J. Mullens. It kind of seems strange that there appear to be so many teal jersey swatches out there because when you look at the jerseys that are in the pictures, there sure seems to be a lot more dark blue or black then teal in the jerseys.

Oh, hello darker jersey swatch. Yes, it’s the same picture as the other card, but it has a completely different colored swatch within the card. It might make for an interesting lot on eBay if I list both cards together or I can just publicize one auction in the other’s listing.

Here’s a different looking card of Tyreke Evans. He’s the only player from this year that ended up playing for the red and white team. There’s no guarantee that there players all participated in the Jordan Brand Classic in the same year since different amounts of time spent in college would put them in different JBC games.

Here’s another card with the same picture, but a different jersey swatch. This one is mostly red with a little bit of white in the bottom left corner.

It’s pretty cool that even though I pulled a lot of duplicate jersey cards, I didn’t end up with any similar looking cards. Whoever picked out my redemption cards at Upper Deck did a good job of making sure that I got a variety in my redemptions. I’m pretty happy with what I ended up getting.

Here’s the first card out of the two that Upper Deck sent me the second time around as a replacement for the Michael Johnson autograph. I figured that if the Bulls end up winning the NBA Championship this year then this card could do pretty well on eBay. I’m not really a big fan of Noah and he seems like a bit of a crybaby complaining about Garnett, but he is a monster on the boards.

Then I turned the card over and saw the following. The bottom left of this card is completely folded up on the back. There’s also a notch in the middle of the bottom edge, but only on the back. The damage to this card is strange. The corner damage isn’t like what you’d get from dropping the card since only one layer of the card is wrecked. You can’t even notice the damage when looking at the front of the card. So, I’ve contacted Upper Deck about sending this card back for replacement.

When Upper Deck offered me this card over the phone, I wondered why they didn’t just send this originally since Pierce was on my list of players that I sent them. I guess there was some disagreement originally on what the value of the Michael Johnson card would be. I explained to them that you couldn’t base the value on a Beckett price because that would be based on the fact that the card was never produced. You have to base it on what the card would be worth if it had been produced. I suggested a value of $100 and they ended up agreeing with me. I guess this Pierce card books for $60 which isn’t too shabby.

Book value aside, this is a great card because it is hard signed and well designed. What do I love on cards? Team colors. These cards have team colors. There’s a big picture of the player and plenty of space for the player to sign the card. This is the gold version of the Pierce card and it is numbered to just 34 copies. The Noah card is the silver version and is numbered to 50.

That’s one more beautiful looking Paul Pierce autograph card in my collection. This is the first one that I’ve picked up in a long time. Most of them were acquired before I was a dad and had given up on busting boxes and spent my trading card money solely on singles.

The Draft case is now finished for the most part. I’m very happy with these final additions. I get a great card to add to my collection and some cards that might sell for a few bucks on eBay or COMC. Right now, I’m leaning towards COMC since there aren’t any of these cards on there.

Thanks Upper Deck. Bok Bok.