Night Owl Cards

  Who am I kidding here? I can't evaluate the card year in 1995! There were 33 major releases in 1995. There were two sets with rounded corners! Two! Apparently card companies didn't hear that the World Series was canceled the year prior. But I did. I bought three packs of Topps in 1995. And then I exited, closed the door and didn't return to the hobby for a decade. My enthusiasm for this year in card collecting is very low. But it's not as low as for 1996 (foreshadowing). I'm incapable of an exhaustive breakdown of most of the sets from '95. I refuse to cover all 33. There were some suggestions to break it down in various ways, maybe cover the basic sets, and then a separate post for the premium sets and super premium ones. Yuck. I don't even like referring to sets as "premium" and "super premium." So this is the problem. I want to evaluate a year by old-collecting means that doesn't fit into those standards. In 1994, I tried to take...

  I've collected for a long time. It's kind of difficult to imagine someone picking up collecting for the first time in 2022. This very year. But I'm sure there are some newbies out there. I'd like to think they're the new kind of collector who goes to the store looking for packs to rip. But probably not. Probably a bunch of newcomers looking for a '54 Aaron to grade. I'm not sure whether 2022 is an ideal year to start in the baseball card hobby, and this is the thought I had that led to this post. I once wrote a post titled "the best years to begin collecting" six years ago (2016 is 6 years ago? 😳). This will be the opposite of that. This one will be more controversial, I'm sure. That's because collecting cards is super-subjective. What's good and bad, great and lousy almost always depends on the individual collector's frame of reference. Whatever year that collector started in the hobby was the greatest year ever, and that set/t...

Just to underline the wild fluctuation of card content in the big box of cards I received from Jonathan, I am opening a pack of 1995 Fleer that was contained within. OK, half my viewing audience just left. I don't care. I am the sole arbiter of what's interesting on this blog. I have never opened a pack of 1995 Fleer. I was starting my card collecting hiatus in '95. Once I returned, I was warned to avoid '95 Fleer. It looked strange. It smelled funny. You'll pick up bad habits, they said. You'll start hanging with the wrong crowd. So I stayed away. I received enough cards from the product through trades and such that I became aware of how bizarre a card set it is. It's not called "the acid trip set" for nothing. It's still difficult for me to grasp what designers were thinking in the mid-to-late '90s, and nothing is a better example than 1995 Fleer. One of my unrealistic goals on this blog is to discover someone who worked on t...

I keep hearing about some "PWE Appreciation Week" thing happening next week -- send someone some cards in a PWE and let the joy unfold, or some such pleasantry. I'm not going to be able to participate. There's a lot going on around here and even more next week. Package-sending will take a dive. It's ugly, I know. But that's the way it's got to be. Our summers don't last long around here, you know. Got to hit that while you can ... or whatever the kids are saying these days. Fortunately, it's pretty much PWE Appreciation Week every week lately. I've received them and have been sending them out like never before. I already detailed that in an earlier post . Why I just received four PWEs in rapid succession a couple of days ago. I don't have a lot of time today, so I'm going to show them quickly together with less-than-usual commentary. First there is this shiny Duke Snider cards from 2011 Lineage. Remember Lineage? I actua...