Some Recent Card Show Purchases

I attended a local Ottawa card show last Sunday, and am going to share a selection of my purchases from the show.

I would say the highlight of my purchases was this autographed Bernie Kosar card.

This is my fourth Kosar autographed card, and the first one on a sticker.

Topps kind of mailed it in on the back.

Another interesting "hit" that I bought at the show was this card:

 

One of the local dealers found this card in Toronto, and bought it, correctly guessing that I would want it.

He wondered what sort of material from the rookie premiere day was in this card. He thought it might be part of a glove. I looked at it, and guessed part of a shoe.

Looking for the card on the Trading Card Database, with the serial number it has, it was part of a 2012 Panini Limited Blue Chip Shoes insert set.

Woo hoo! I was right!

Nearly a couple of weeks ago, I commented on a fairly new football card blog, Cardboard Canon, that I enjoyed the Panini Illusion cards that showed modern and older players on the same card. I found one at the show.

It matched up O.J. Howard with a fellow Alabama Tight End, Browns Hall of Fame player, Ozzie Newsome.

Coincidentally, Cardboard Canon is a Buccaneers supporter, so this card would probably fit in his collection too.

I also bought other new cards of two different Browns players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

As well as a couple of other favored veterans.

Personally, I believe that Clay Matthews should be in the Hall of Fame. This Panini Phoenix parallel is numbered out of 35.

This Panini Prizm parallel of Earnest Byner is numbered out of 49.

And I bought a bunch of cards from last year's rookies.

I'm hoping that the Browns newly rebuilt offensive line will help Judkins and Sampson have good rushing seasons.

And I'm hoping that better quarterback play will help Fannin develop better.

Mason Graham had a good rookie season even though he played the final part of the season with a broken rib.

It will also be interesting to see how his play is affected by missing this guy on the line with him:

I'll miss Myles Garrett as a Browns player. However I understand the various reasons given for his trade. It's too bad he won't spend his whole career with the Browns.

Finally, a non-sport card dealer that I buy a lot of stuff from had something interesting in one of his bins. 

Okay, a lot of you will recognize this as being a photo slide.

There were sheets with over a hundred slides in them. When I looked at the side and saw the writing, I realized all of them were from New England Patriots games. Of all of them, this was the only Browns slide.

A lot of the slides were very similar shots to each other. The photographer must have clicked in sequence for consecutive shots, waiting to see which shot turned out the best.

I don't know if the photographer was trying to capture photos for cards, but it was something neat to grab.

Being the only Browns slide, the dealer gave it to me for free. He did say that when he bought them, that he thought there were plenty more that the seller had. He said he'll look to see if they are all Patriots if he gets to see them again.

Now, the lighting for my scanner didn't get to show the action on the slide, so I decided to hold the slide up near my kitchen window and take a photo.

Okay, I really like this action shot!

I'm pretty sure the shadows on the bottom of the field are actually the bottom of the window sill that I was looking out.

Such a neat item to get. I will definitely be adding this into my 1999 Browns binder.

Being a unique item in my collection, I think that I was happier to get this than the Kosar autographed card at the beginning of the post.

What do you think of the slide?

Surprise PWE from Crazie Joe

I came home on Monday night to find a surprise PWE waiting for me from Crazie Joe's Card Corner.

I don't know how he does it, but Joe posts daily, and I always find it interesting to see what cards he finds in the various card lots that he goes through. 

I've been aware for years that I was missing this 1994 Score Mike Johnson card, but just forget to look for it. When I filter card sites for Browns cards, I forget to look for this one that shows him having moved on to the Lions.

I'm very happy to finally add this card to my collection, but still have to remember to find the gold parallel.

Over the last couple of months, I decided to sit down and compare the cards in the binders and boxes of my Browns collection to what I had recorded in the Trading Card Database.

As it turned out, I was missing about 70 cards, nothing of too great a value. (A very small percentage of the over fourteen thousand cards in my collection.)

Some of the missing may be phantom cards, created when I didn't adjust my collection when cards were changed to a different parallel than they should have been. I know I had a couple of cards that I probably didn't own the hobby version, and do have the retail version. But I'm assuming that over the years most of the missing cards were just misplaced into my doubles boxes.

In any case, since I was going through my collection, and knew that I would eventually go through my doubles, I figured to fall in to the variation rabbit hole for various things like the letter variations for printing, and for the different backs on some of the stickers. I figure that I will have many new cards to add to my collection by pulling them from my doubles.

However, this envelope contained two of these variations that were not in my collection already.

The first was another Mike Johnson, but this time a sticker from 1988 Topps Stickers.

Mike Johnson shares this sticker with Eric Martin of the Saints. 

The back of this sticker is the variation to what was already in my collection.

Al Toon is on the back of this one, while my binder already contained this sticker with Curtis Adams of the Chargers on the back.

There are also Mike Quick and Gary Clark backs to find for the Mike Johnson sticker.

Moving on to the variations of letters on the back of cards, I also needed this Tommy Vardell card that was in the envelope.

There are four different variations to this Touchdown Tommy card. I previously had the E version in my binder 

This one is the F version:

I still need to get the E* and F* versions.

I forgot about the mini stadium photos at the bottom of these card backs. 

It is nice to see Muni stadium with its mixed use playing field.

I'm sure both sets of players (baseball and football) were happy when they finally got stadiums that were exclusive to their sport.

The next card in the envelope also has a different back variation but I already had both versions in my binder.

The 1990 Topps football cards had versions with and without Topps disclaimers on the back of their cards.

I'm always happy to get any Browns cards in the mail but Bernie Kosar was always a favorite of mine so I always smile when I get another one.

The last card in the envelope was a 1988 Topps card of safety Felix Wright.

Wright signed with the Browns as a free agent in 1985 after playing three seasons with Hamilton in the CFL.

There are no variations to chase for 1988 Topps.

Thanks, Joe, for the great Browns cards that you sent me.

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Earlier in the post, I commented that I had gone through my whole collection. In doing so, I forgot how nice some of the cards were. I may start doing some short posts showing some of these cards.