A come back + a little bit of complaining.

Hey guys.  I have decided to try and post again on a semi-regular basis.  My scanner is not fully operational at the moment, so you will not be getting pictures for a little bit.  I should have it fixed very shortly.  Honestly I just never really needed it when I wasn't blogging, so replacing it was a very low priority.  But I guess that means until I get that problem fixed, I need a thousand words for each missing picture.  

Just a quick idea for what I intend to write about.  It will mostly be Rockies, but I do plan to break out a couple of my old features and go forth with them.  Rating the Rookie Cups was one of my favorites to write and I will definitely be bringing that back on hopefully a weekly basis.  I have actually maintained and improved my Cup database.  I m such a dork that I have a full rotisserie setup for each position for full season and career comparisons.  I know a lot of you are not into basketball, but I am.  I won't be talking hoops much, but I will on occasion.  For some it will be a learning experience it will be a day to skip past the Quarry.  

 

I won't be doing any type of comprehensive custom card sets like I did for several years, but I will occasionally show off some fun customs I will and have done.  I do still have a 60-70% complete 2015 Quarry Unlimited set that I worked really hard on and will show off.  I also have a fully 100% complete 2015 Quarry Unlimited NBA set to show off as well if there is any interest.  Both sets are based on 1976 Hostess with team colors being used instead of the RWB bicentennial scheme of the original.  Personally, I like the NBA version more just because there is a bigger variety of color there, but they are both fun.

Now that the fun stuff is over, let's talk about 2021 Topps Series 1.

As a Rockies collector, I have gotten used to being beaten down by Topps.  On occasion, they will surprise me in a good way.  As bad as 2020 Update was, the Rockies still had Chris Owings and Phillip Diehl make their Rockies debut in the set.  And there were a couple of other underrepresented Rockies like Jairo Diaz, Jesus Tinoco, and Drew Butera in the set.  Several new Rockies like Daniel Bard and Matt Kemp were missing, but I figured they would be in Series 1 for sure.  So as bad as it was, at least there was something positive about it. 

Then I see the checklist is being released and I get super excited as usual.  Will the Rockies get the 11 cards they should get in the 330 card set?  Will it be the first Rockie cards of Bard, Kemp, or Mychal Givens?  Will likely starting catcher Elias Diaz get his first Rockies card?  Will Antonio Santos be the ubiquitous team rookie that most fans have never heard of?  Will the recently waived rookie Ashton Goudeau get his only Rockies card?   So many questions. 

Then the list came out

24 Nolan Arenado
33 Yonathan Daza
68 Charlie Blackmon
73 Colorado Rockies Team Card
76 Jon Gray
107 David Dahl
129 Daniel Murphy
177 Ryan Castellani RC
206 Wade Davis

Of the 9 cards, there are only 4 players currently on the Rockies roster, and of those only 3 actually played for the Rox in 2020.  The team card is useless in my opinion and should be used for another player.  Put team cards in Update if you need them, but not in a 660 card main set.  I can give them a pass on including Arenado because that is a recent trade (one that I am still not comfortable talking about).  I can also give them a pass on Murphy because he retired the same day the Nolan trade happened and at least he will get a full stat "sunset card."  David Dahl is somewhat okay simply he did end the season with the Rockies even though he didn't play much last year.  Yonathan Daza is a head scratcher because this is not his rookie card and he didn't play a single game in 2020.  In my opinion, there were a lot better options than Daza for that spot.  The other one that just befuddles me is Wade Davis.  Wade Davis was released before the 2020 season was even over.  Why is he there?  It is ridiculous that he is there instead of Daniel Bard or Mychal Givens or any other Rockies reliever.  

So to recap the answers to my questions were no, no, no, no, and no.  Sigh.  To top it off the Dodgers got a 20 card team set along with a 30 card Bellinger insert set.  Double sigh.  I really wasn't expecting much, but I was at least hoping for just one new Rockies player on a card and I didn't even get that.  Oh well, at least there is the 86 Topps insert set that I plan to build in full.  I may try to build the silver pack chrome version as well.  

Sorry for the bitter complaining, but it's better than not posting at all, isn't it?

Talk again later.

A decade.

Hey everyone, it's been a while.  Today marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of Cards from the Quarry.  Although, I don't know if it is fair to really call it an anniversary.  That would be like a married getting separated, but not divorced after 4 years and then celebrating a 10th anniversary.  Kinda weird, huh?  I know some of you from back then have gone right along and kept churning out really good stories and talk about cards and baseball in general.  I have kept the blog going technically as I have been constantly updating my want lists for the Rockies, but I have done so quietly.  Nevertheless, I felt like today I should check in with something that was a big part of my life for several years and just say hello if nothing else. 

I'll start with what I have been up since my last real post in June 2015.  I have maintained my presence in the hobby.  In fact, I have experienced nearly all aspects of the hobby which I will go into for anyone curious.  I was part of a Breakers community for over a year.  I was a "big hit" eBay seller in that time as well.  I was also part of the Beckett trading community for a while, but only with basketball.  More recently, I have been a Sportlots buyer/seller for the past 2+ years.  I have also recently gotten back into the blogging community via the great group breaks at Cardboard Collections and Nachos Grande.  Let's take a look into my opinion of the pluses and minuses in each of those parts of hobby.

Breakers

I spent a lot of late night time in 2016 and 2017 on the Breakers.tv website, specifically a break room called Card Collective.  I was drawn to it because it's a fairly small break room that focused more on the lower end and mid range stuff as opposed to most break rooms which would shut down without ridiculously overpriced like National Treasures or the rest of the high end stuff was unavailable.  But CC always had a nice mix of cards including non-sport stuff that I even started liking a bit.  He did hit drafts, team auctions where you bid on teams and could get stuff on the cheap, and stuff like division breaks where you got all the teams in a division for a set price.  I stopped going there because I was basically losing a lot more money than I realized.  It was fun, but it was not the same fun as here.

 

Pluses -  Lots of cards to see and acquire.  I got a lot of really nice cards there that I would have never seen otherwise.  Lots of time to chat about cards and sports in between breaks.  Very diverse when it comes to collectors and cards, some very good people.  I learned a lot about hockey, football, racing, non-sports, and other parts of the hobby that I had ignored completely.

Minuses -  Can get sneakily expensive.  It was very easy to overspend there.  Most collectors there weren't collectors at all.  They were the mojo buyers that didn't care one iota about the cards, just the value.  Even the people I liked were more into the money side of things than I was.  

 

eBay

Everyone knows what eBay is, so I am not going to bore you with a description of the site.  My time spent as a "big hit" seller sort of coupled with my time as a breaker.  On Breakers, I focused on the Rockies for myself, but I also got a lot of other stuff that just didn't fit with my collection, so I just did what came natural.  After I started selling on eBay, I tried buying groupings of cards (such as a lot of 50 parallels from a set) and selling them individually as well.  Which worked fairly well.  I stopped selling on eBay around the same time as leaving Breakers mainly because eBay stopped supporting the listing tool I was using and it became far less user-friendly for me.

 

Pluses -  Large audience.  Very secure money and shipping.  You really can make a lot of money there.  Could be fun at times such as searching for the lots. I would keep the ones I wanted and sell the rest and usually make a decent profit.

Minuses - I ended up with a lot of cards that didn't sell and I didn't particularly want to keep.  I still have a lot of them to this day as well.  Not a very interactive side of the hobby.  I like talking cards as much as collecting them and when you sell to an anonymous person, it's just not there.  

 

Beckett

I have noticed that one of the most divisive words in the hobby that can really set some people off is the word "Beckett."  Some people love it, but some people think it is one of the worst things about the hobby.  I am somewhat in the middle.  I do not care about Beckett's "book value" of cards at all, but their trading community was surprisingly nice.  I joined the Beckett trading community several years before I even joined Blogger, but I left once they started forcing you to buy price guides in order to trade there.  I did rejoin in late 2017 with the intent of trading away my inventory from my Breakers/eBay stay.  Although I only ended up getting my basketball stuff on there, I did make quite a few trades.

 

Pluses - Practically every card ever made in all genres is on their database.  You can't ask for much more than that.  It was very easy to find both owners of cards I wanted and more importantly people that desired the cards I had.  It was also easy to find team/player collectors to trade away not only the "good stuff,: but the common cards as well. 

Minuses - The cost is the biggest minus.  You have to buy a price guide subscription in order to trade there.  As large as the community was, it wasn't really that active.  Most trades I completed were ones I asked about.  Very few offers came toward me.  I enjoyed finding the right home for a card I had as much as getting something for myself.  I just didn't feel that many people shared that vision.  

 

Sportlots

Since 2018, I have found a home with Sportlots under the name "zebuflew" which is a portmanteau of my eBay ID "Richmond Zebu" and my ID everywhere else of "hiflew."  I have been regularly selling there for over two years and have built up a decent amount of credibility and a few regular customers there.  It started relatively slow maybe selling enough to buy a couple of blasters or few trips to COMC  a month, but once the pandemic hit, my sales skyrocketed.  I don't want to get into the numbers, but let's just say this summer I was selling a lot of expensive cards.  The rookie card boom and my selling coincided very nicely.  As a collector I hate the rookie card boom, but it really helped me as a seller.  It has since leveled off somewhat mainly due to my inventory of big rookies being depleted, but I am still pulling in decent sales specifically with basketball cards right now.  They are just super hot.

Pluses (as a seller) - A great place to unload unwanted cards in turnkey fashion.  I basically check the site once a day and if I have no orders move on.  If I have orders, I print, package, and am usually done in 10 minutes or so.  You get paid altogether by the site at the beginning of the month, so the amount is greater than expected most of time and I can buy bigger things without having to save for myself (something I have never been good at).

Minuses (as a seller) - Only getting paid at the beginning of the month means you need to keep a small bankroll to pay for shipping the cards because you don't see that money until the beginning of the month as well.  It takes a long time to inventory all your cards.  In fact, I have most of my basketball listed, but baseball is limited to 2012-2019 right now.  Eventually I plan to list everything I have, but it takes time.

So I have been a very diverse collector over the past 5+ years.  I have also been a regular commenter on several sports and card websites under various names.  The one thing that has not changed is my Rockies collection is still thriving.  I am currently around 24,000 unique Rockies and my personal inventory database is nearly complete.  I have everything catalogued except multiplayer Rockies cards.  I have 23,033 plus an estimated 800 multiplayer cards right now.  I also have a bunch sitting in my COMC mailbox since April, but the less said about that, the better for now.  I should pass the 25,000 mark somewhere around March.  Considering when I started this blog, my Rockies collection was around 250, I should thank a lot of you for helping me get to the current insanely high number.

I may decide to post regularly again.  The reason I stopped was a crippling case of writer's block and by the time I finally got over that, I just didn't think anyone really missed me that much.  I'm not "pity-partying" here, I just didn't feel what I was doing really mattered that much to people.  But I digress.  I have ideas, both old ones that went unfinished and new ones that I have not seen done anywhere.  So I may come back to explore them along with showing off my collection and maybe trading some as well.  I don't want to promise, because I don't know for sure right now, but I really do want to catch the writing bug again.  

Anyway, thanks for reading if you are around.  I know my number of followers remained around the same so I assume I was just hanging out at the bottom of most of your blogrolls for a long time.   Either way, thanks for reading and maybe we can talk again later.

Miscellaneous Insert Set Want List

 

 

1986 Big League Chew Home Run Legends - COMPLETE

1998 Upper Deck Blue Chip Prospects 
1, 4, 5, 8, 10, 13, 15, 18, 20, 25, 26, 27, 29 

2000 Fleer/Tradition Hall's Well

5, 9, 10, 11

 

2003 Topps/Heritage Chrome

1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 23, 26, 27, 29, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 51, 55, 56, 65, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 97, 99

2004 Topps Presidential Pastime - COMPLETE

 

2005 Fleer/Tradition Diamond Tributes - COMPLETE

 

2009 Topps/Update Propaganda - COMPLETE

 
2009 Upper Deck/O Pee Chee Face of the Franchise
30

 

2012 Topps 1987 Minis

127, 150

  

2020 Topps/Allen & Ginter Down on the Farm - COMPLETE

 

2020 Topps/Big League Defensive Wizards - COMPLETE

 

2020 Topps/Utz
8, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37, 40, 45, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58. 62, 65, 69, 70, 73, 74, 78, 86, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 100

2021 Topps Double Headers - COMPLETE 

 

2021 Topps/Update 1992 Redux - COMPLETE

 

2023 Topps/Allen & Ginter Only In... Minis

18

 

 

2015 Mountain to Climb - Insert Sets Want List

2015 Insert Goals


pending arrival = red


1998 Upper Deck Blue Chip Prospects 
1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29 

2003 Topps/Heritage Chrome
1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16, 17, 23, 26, 27, 29, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 51, 55, 56, 65, 67, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 99

2004 Topps Presidential Pastime 
1, 4, 10, 16, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41

2009 Upper Deck/O Pee Chee Face of the Franchise
5, 6, 7, 17, 19, 27, 30

2014 Topps/Archives 1986 Design
101, 208, 213, 217, 220, 224, 227, 231, 232, 234, 243, 245, 246

2011 Topps/Allen & Ginter Ascent of Man - COMPLETE

2013 Topps/Allen & Ginter Civilizations of Ages Past - COMPLETE

2015 Mountain to Climb - Parallel Sets Want List

2015 Parallel Goals


5 Set Total - 150/335 = 44.8% COMPLETE

pending arrival = red

2000 Pacific - 23/102 = 22.5% COMPLETE

2000 Pacific Ruby

146, 154a

2000 Pacific Gold

141, 142, 143a, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154a, 154b

2000 Pacific Copper

140, 142, 143a, 143b, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154a, 154b

2000 Pacific Emerald Green

140, 141, 142, 143a, 143b, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154a

2000 Pacific Platinum Blue

140, 141, 142, 143a, 143b, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154a, 154b

2000 Pacific Premiere Date

140, 141, 142, 143a, 143b, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154a, 154b

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections - 13/45 = 28.9% COMPLETE 

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections Purple

3, 112, 129, 240, 279

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections Red

3, 129, 240, 250, 267, 284

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections Blue

3, 112, 240, 250, 267, 279

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections Turquoise

112, 118, 129, 240, 250, 267, 279, 284

2005 Upper Deck/Reflections Emerald

3, 118, 129, 250, 267, 279, 284

2005/2006 Topps/Turkey Red - 36/68 = 52.9% COMPLETE 

2005/2006 Topps/Turkey Red Red - COMPLETE

2005/2006 Topps/Turkey Red White

39, 270b

2005/2006 Topps/Turkey Red Black

19, 39, 47, 61, 72, 261, 270a, 270b, 365, 388, 492, 527, 554, 596

2005/2006 Topps/Turkey Red Gold

19, 39, 47, 61, 72, 245, 261, 270a, 270b, 365, 388, 432, 492, 527, 554, 596

2008 Finest - 25/48 = 52.1% COMPLETE 

2008 Finest Refractors - COMPLETE

2008 Finest Blue Refractors 

147

2008 Finest Green Refractors 

122

2008 Finest Black Refractors 

13, 69, 85, 122, 139

2008 Finest Gold Refractors 

9, 13, 69, 79, 85, 122, 139, 147

2008 Finest Red Refractors 

9, 13, 69, 79, 85, 122, 139, 147

2012 Bowman/Chrome - 53/72 = 73.6% COMPLETE 

2012 Bowman/Chrome Refractors - COMPLETE

2012 Bowman/Chrome X Fractors - COMPLETE

2012 Bowman/Chrome Green Refractors - COMPLETE

2012 Bowman/Chrome Blue Refractors - COMPLETE 

2012 Bowman/Chrome Purple Refractors - COMPLETE

2012 Bowman/Chrome Gold Refractors

56, 118, 150

2012 Bowman/Chrome Orange Refractors

56, 69, 118, 119, 150, 156, 168

2012 Bowman/Chrome Red Refractors

56, 69, 118, 119, 150, 156, 168, 207, 216