Wednesday 6 July 2011

My first printing plate



I picked up this plate about a month ago from a guy at Blowout. It was a little higher than I wanted to pay but since the majority of the Lind plates I've seen lately have been going for around $50 I actually got a pretty good deal on it.


This is the Cyan International plate, not to be confused with the regular printing plates. Not sure why Topps/Bowman felt the need to include another 4 plates on top of the normal 4 that they normally put out. I guess its just a way to make more money.


Anyway this is my first ever printing plate and I think its pretty cool looking. I had read about them on other blogs/forum but other peoples opinions on cards don't usually match my own.


You can see that the plate has been well used as there are red and blue ink stains on it and also finger prints.


I wouldn't have been able to get hold of this plate if it wasn't for Randy over at Way Off Base. The seller wouldn't ship to the UK so Randy thankfully agreed to have the card sent to him before sending it my way. So huge thanks to him!

Sunday 3 July 2011

Reaching for 200

It was about a year ago that I decided to broaden my collecting habits and pick a player or two to 'supercollect'.

At that time I had quite a large amount of cards that I was trying to chase down, such as Heritage or A&G minis which are both tough sets to attempt. Anyone who has collected either Heritage or A&G knows how competitive bidding on eBay can be for certain cards in the sets and also how difficult it can be to trade for the rarer cards, so it took up a lot of my time and felt like I was missing out on other cards because my collecting habits were so streamlined.

The players I thought I would go for were, in this order :

Will Clark
Bobby Thomson
JT Snow
Jeff Kent
Bill Mueller
Adam Lind

I started strong with Clark and traded for around 40 different cards on my first day of collecting him and that was it. I think I've added 2 more cards since then that have come to me as free extras via trades.

Bobby Thomson is still active in my collecting goals but is very slow going. I have picked up a nice couple of cards such as vintage, GU and auto. I only add to this collection when I see something cheap on COMC.

JT snow lasted 2 cards before I lost interest. One auto and one GU.

Jeff Kent lasted 1 card. One GU.

Bill Mueller... Well this collection didn't even start.

Adam Lind, my last choice and as you can see the only non Giant player on my list. The only reason he was on the list was because he did really well on my fantasy team the year before.





This was the first card I picked up. Cant remember what I traded for it but I know that it came with the lot of Will Clark cards that I mentioned above.

Its a 2007 Fleer mini Die-cut and once I received it I just threw into one of my boxes and didn't look at it again until a few months later.

As you can see from the card it is slightly smaller than a regular sized card but not as small as a normal ginter mini. I also picked up the normal sized version a few months after that.

So that was the first card that I got for Lind. Lets take a look at my most recent pick up. Well when I say its my most recent its not, its just the only one that sticks in my mind.


This is a 2010 Topps 206 mini Gold Piedmont back numbered out of 50. This card has been on my main hitlist for a while now and this is only the second one that I've seen since the product was released, which is very strange since there are 50 copies.


This card also brought to my attention other Lind collectors. Nearly every Lind card that I've been bidding on or watching are ending much higher than what they would have a year ago. I guess this is due to his improvement on the field, which is great for him but bad for me!


The Gold T206 represents my 193rd different Lind card in my collection, so I only need 7 more to reach 200! Is there anyone out there can help me? Do you have any you want to trade? Please check my Lind page for all the cards that I HAVE. I you have something that's not on that list then please get in contact with me.