Two fat packs of 2026 Topps brought me good luck, which always confuses me

 I'm so used to having no luck at all with anything, so whenever something lucky happens I usually feel a bit stunned. If I get a lucky hit on a pack of cards, my immediate thinking is that perhaps this was intended for someone else. If I open a pack of baseball cards and my hair catches on fire, then that seems like it was more likely intended for me.

I had two crowns put in at the dentist the other day. Ouchie. I decided to reward myself for being a good boy and not fussing too much in the dental chair. I wandered down to the Eaton Centre. I live in the heart of downtown Toronto, which I guess is like living in Manhattan. I guess it's like being in Seinfeld or Friends, but more homeless drug addicts and terrible weather. 

The Eaton Centre is a huge mall, mostly for tourists, but also for bored locals. I rarely buy anything there because there are no good deals, so I mostly get something to drink and browse to kill some time and get some steps in. I decided to hunt around for baseball cards. I've had a helluva time finding 2026 Topps locally. One sports card store told me Fanatics ships very little to Canada. We are, however, in an era where even the silliest of retailers are selling sports cards again, and I run into them in the oddest of places now.

I check out a few stores at the Eaton Centre, but no luck. Lots of Pokemon and hockey cards. I leave the Eaton Centre dejectedly, wondering perhaps if good boys don't always get rewards. Across Yonge Street there is a Gamestop, which in Canada has alternated between being called that and EB Games. They used to have one in the mall, too, but it's a comic book store now that sells almost no zero comics and tons of Funko Pops. Junk.

I decide to cross the street and peruse EB Games. Or Gamestop, whatever. They barely sell video games anymore, and they have lots of oddball toys and collectibles, so maybe I'll get lucky with baseball cards.

Boy did I ever. I noticed at the back of the store there was a new glass showcase. It is absolutely full of sports cards, and the wall behind it is hanging full of packs. Like ripe fruit waiting to be plucked. It's so well stocked with current releases. I found a new spot minutes from my apartment where I can buy cards that aren't hockey. See, make sure you are nice at the dentist and you will be rewarded.

I stand at the sports card counter for a few minutes perusing their offerings. It's unmanned. The customer service desk has two employees checking other customers out. They glance over and see me standing there. They look disinterested. I don't blame them, since their employer seems to have them manning two customer service desks at once.

One of them rushes over to me and I select what I want. Two fat packs of 2026 Topps Series 1. I ask him how long this sports card desk has been here, and he says not long. He's not interested in chit chat. I check out with the other employee and they ask if I have their loyalty card. I ask what's in it for sports card buyers. She has no idea. "I dunno, it just helps track your purchases or something," she informs me. I decline. I'm not upset because working retail post-Covid in downtown Toronto is a nightmare.

I come home and open the packs. My luck continues!

 

I'm initially so confused as to what this card is. It's a parallel of some sort of Samuel Basallo, a rookie from the Orioles with whom I am unfamiliar. There are so many parallels that I have no idea what the heck this is, and I search in vain trying to figure out what the heck this is. I finally check Ebay, and it turns out this is a super short printed base card variation that is going for like $150. Geez. I get kinda scared now because now I feel as if I am going to have bad luck to revert my luck to the mean. This is the second valuable card I have pulled from packs in the past week. I also won money on a scratch ticket and have won four(!) free coffees at Tim Hortons. I swear, I'd better not get hit by a car.

 It's a Trea Turner Major League Materials relic card. Now, of course this is only worth a couple of bucks, but I'm just amazed that I pulled this card along with the Basallo parallel in the two packs I bought. For fat packs, relic odds are like 1:45. The odds of me pulling both of these cards in two straight packs must have been crazy high. I'm not a fan of relic cards at all (for the most part), so it doesn't do much for me personally. I'm just more amazed at my luck.

 

Each pack also had an Ohtani insert. I mean, if I had pulled these two cards and not the others, I still would have considered each of these packs a winner. I'm not an Ohtani fan at all, but I can't really complain about getting cards of such a highly sought after player. It just means I should be able to move these cards for something I really like.

These are the rest of the "hits". I really hate how team name looks on the 91 Topps insert. Why on earth did they do that? None of these are cards or players I care about and am looking to trade them all away, but I really had fun opening these packs.

Let's just hope my luck doesn't suddenly revert to the mean. 

The world grows smaller and smaller until it feels like a noose

Over the weekend I participated in a giveaway thread on Bluesky. The idea is that you post some cards you don't want, and you can claim some other cards that were posted that you do want. Kinda like a big group trade sort of thing.

I posted all of the Topps Chrome basketball cards I pulled. It was a dud box with not much I really wanted, and I was happy to give it away if it meant I could get some different cards in the mail.

A lot of the people that contacted me were American. That's cool, I didn't mind shipping cards south of the border. I mean, how much could it cost to ship a few little basketball card in a plain white envelope?

 I am so stupid. Like, really next level stupid.

When I got to Canada Post, they asked me what I was mailing to the US. I said sports cards. That's where my troubles began.

Sending any kind of product to the US is a nightmare. They told me I would need to fill out TWO custom forms for each package and that each one would cost $10 to mail! I told them that couldn't be right, since the cards were worth about a buck or so apiece and I was sending them as gifts. No money at all was involved, and I wasn't even getting anything in return from the specific people I was mailing to. 

It didn't matter. The clerk explained to me that any product going to the US for any reason requires TWO customs forms and is super expensive. Not only that, to fill out one of the two customs forms I had to download an app to my phone called Zonos Pay. I could not mail anything if I did not download that app and use it to fill out half of the forms. I immediately deleted the app off my phone after, because I don't trust anything from the US government.

I mean, it cost me $20 and probably about a total of a half hour to send out two plain white envelopes of worthless cards to the US. I'm never doing that again.

Think about the logic here. I am sending free gifts to the citizens of this country, and their government wants me to pay a privilege of time and money to do so. Huh?

The Canada Post people and I chatted while I filled out the forms. We all agreed that the United States is in a permanent downward spiral and Canadians need to avoid Americans from now on, no matter who they elect. This is daily conversation in Canada.

The crazy thing is that I like Americans! I like the USA. I want to do business with them. I wish more American companies were up here in Canada to compete with our companies to help drive down prices and increase job opportunities for Canadians. Geez, I'm even trying to send free cards to Americans. All of this is so unnecessary and is just bad business.

The world is getting oddly smaller when it shouldn't be. The web promised to bring us together, but instead has driven us apart and most of the business I do is with local companies and people now. It's like the world outside whatever country you're in doesn't exist as much as it used to. It's harder to ship, travel, and communicate with people outside your country. It makes me sad.

I recently signed up as a beta tester for a social media app called Gander. It's basically Bluesky, but for Canadians only. I'm not keen on the idea, but I wanted to see how that would work, as the world is becoming smaller and we may see more country specific social media like this in the future.

Going forward, I'll have to limit all of my trades and purchases to other Canadians. Maybe Europeans, too, but I've rarely met too many involved in the hobby outside of soccer (sometimes hockey!). But it's just too much trouble to do business with the United States these days, and even if the situation improves it will never truly be as good as it once was.

On another related note, I recently got back onto my Sportscardforum account. I hadn't used it in almost a decade. I looked at the signup date and it was from 2006. Wow! So much time has passed. Poor, young Jeremy. So many things I wish I could warn you about.

 

 

Card collecting and eshittification, a fairly tale of post-capitalist nonsense

 

Above is a card of Jaromir Jagr pictured after he discovered Ebay fees.

I had an interesting experience on Ebay yesterday.

No, it wasn't a problem with a buyer or seller. I was buying a card, and the seller was awesome.

It was a problem with Ebay itself.

I've been away from collecting cards for a few years. I tapped out when everything got silly during the pandemic, and I sold some of my more valuable cards because prices went through the roof.

I haven't used Ebay, COMC, Sportlots, whatever, since then.

Man, has Ebay ever gotten worse. And it was already bad five years ago. I mean, it was bad twenty years ago, but it was also bad five years ago.

I'm Canadian, so shipping is a huge problem for me. Shipping almost always costs more than the card I'm buying, so I have to do bulk purchases, or use some sort of American address to consolidate my mail, or some other fancy footwork to save a few bucks. Even doing that, it's still expensive.

Canadians mostly collect hockey. I prefer baseball and basketball. It's odd, because the Jays and Raptors are both popular here in Toronto, but collecting cards of those sports just isn't. Everything is hockey. Fanatics doesn't even bother with the Canadian market, barely sending anything up here. A lot of the new sports card apps won't allow accounts from Canada. The world is growing smaller.

This brings me to yesterday's Ebay purchase. I found a seller who had a couple cards I want. A 77 Topps baseball card and an 89-90 Fleer basketball. He said he combined shipping. So, I placed the order. 

When I got the invoice, however, the shipping was individually priced for $10 each.

I messaged the seller and asked if he could combine shipping. He said he tried, but Ebay's international shipping program wouldn't allow him.

So, literally both the buyer and the seller want to make a transaction for a certain price, but the middleman controls the platform and we had to do what the middleman wanted.

Huh?

That makes no sense. That's completely contrary to any sort of market logic. It's eshittifcation at its finest. 

If the buyer and the seller both agree on a set price, then the middleman has no say. That's how markets work. For the middleman to get this much authority in a transaction, they have to essentially capture the market so that all participants are unable to go elsewhere and have to deal with the middleman's bullshit. Like the mafia.

Well, why not go elsewhere? So, I signed up to COMC. I checked their shipping prices to Canada. It's even worse than Ebay! If I bought a stack of cards on COMC and paid to have them shipped here, it would cost nearly $100 Canadian and would take like three months packaging time. That's not to mention the time it takes in transit. Holy!

So, COMC is doing the same thing as Ebay, but worse. They are trying to create a platform where it's difficult for buyers and sellers to move off once they are invested. At that point, COMC can charge what they like and get away with it.

The other thing with COMC is that it's clear they don't want to ship cards. They make fees whenever people buy and sell cards, and if the cards stay on their platform they can earn fees on the same cards over and over. But if cards are shipped, they lose those potential lost sales. So the cards stay on COMC and get sold back and forth as digital assets.

At that point, is it really card collecting? It's more like speculation on digital assets. That's really what card collecting feels more like these days. It's gambling by opening boxes, and then speculating on digital assets. None of this has anything to do with sports cards.

Really, what all of these card companies, gamblers, and speculators want to do is trade NFTs. Sports cards just feel like a way of marketing what end up being digital speculative assets. If they were all cat pictures, no one would care. But if you put a hot NBA rookie on a card, then it's a more attractive asset. It literally has nothing to do with being a fan of the sport, collecting cards, organizing, sorting, trading, and all that stuff us nerds enjoy.

We are at a point in our society where individuals have to work with one another to get around the shitty products and services offered by large companies. None of these companies exist now to make our lives easier. They only exist to bleed us of our money (and our attention!), using a million small tricks to disincentivize us from avoiding them. People call it late stage capitalism, but it's actually post-capitalism. Capitalism is what occurred between the seller and I. Scam economy is what occurred between us and Ebay. We live in a post-capitalist scam economy, and that's apparent as ever in card collecting.

 Anyway, my story has a happy ending. The seller was cool. He said he would edit his listing for one of the cards to include both, so he could ship to me for half price. I agreed. He deserved the sale and it was great customer service. It still cost me $10 to ship two cards up to Canada, but welcome to the human race.

Let's time warp back to the early 90s with WCW Impel cards

 

The United States defeated Canada in the Olympic hockey gold medal game this morning, so I am going to blog about WCW wrestling cards.

I'm a big wrestling fan. I have been since I was a little kid. I write a Substack that reviews old wrestling, which winds up being a personal journal of my own nonsense. My connection to wrestling is a bit like my connection to cards, comics, and video games. These are things I loved as a kid, and think about too much as an adult. But it's better than thinking about all the other silly stuff adults have to think about.

 These WCW cards were released by Impel in 1991. Impel was a company that made a lot of non-sports cards that I collected when I was young, including some GI Joe and Marvel cards. I didn't have these WCW cards back then because WCW was never popular in Canada, but I bought a couple packs at Fan Expo in Toronto last summer.

Here are a few cards I pulled, not everything. 

 The cards are pure 90s bliss. The borders, the colours, and WCW itself screams early 90s gibberish aesthetic. Sting in his surfer garb is also iconic 90s pop culture. He's rocking the pink face paint and a flamboyant jacket. I preferred surfer Sting to crow Sting, even though he spent decades as the latter.

Here's Ric Flair in a lime green robe. Flair would quit WCW in 1991, around the time this set was released. He was the best wrestler in the world during the 80s and among the best during the early 90s. His behaviour outside the ring is gross, but as a performer he can't be denied. That goes with a ton of wrestlers from this era, by the way.

The card says it's the Steiner Brothers, but only Scott Steiner is pictured. He looks jacked even then. Later he would gain fame as Big Poppa Pump, but by then steroids had cost him most of his amazing athleticism. The Steiners in WCW from 89 to 92 were one of the all-time great tag team. They had a short run in WWF, which had a few highlights, but wasn't great. WWF didn't push tag teams, and after that their work really declined.

 I'm a big fan of Brian Pillman. I he lived, he would have been a major star during the Attitude era in the WWF. His passing was unfortunate. He was ahead of his time and if he came along nowadays he would likely be a main event performer, too. What held him back in WCW was his size, but he still managed to get over. I suppose timing really is everything.

Last but not least is Arn Anderson. I included a picture of the card back, which has a brief bio and a clear headshot. I like the simplicity of the card back. Anderson was always entertaining, and one of the most underrated promos of his era. He's way younger in this picture than I am now, which is so weird to me because he will always look like a middle-aged Dad to me no matter his age (or mine). 

So, those are five cards from the 91 WCW Impel set. I have a bunch more, maybe about thirty cards in total. I'm going to complete the set. I should have just bought the full set outright because it's cheaper than building it, but it was fun opening a couple packs and building the set is more fun than just buying it.

Are you into wrestling cards?

 

I Foolishly Bought a Box of Topps Chrome Basketball

 I haven't bought a new box of cards in many years, probably since before Covid. Prices have gotten so ridiculous that even retail boxes cost too much for what you get in return. Usually what happens is that I spend too much money and end up with a pile of cards I don't want.

 However, I also happen to be an idiot, so I recently decided to buy a blaster box of Topps Chrome basketball. Topps recently regained the NBA license, and Chrome is their equivalent of Prizm. It's pretty popular among people who are even bigger idiots than I am, should any exist. 

I wasn't really sure what to expect and thought I would get at least something interesting, even if I knew that I would never get real value and would be better spending my money on something else. Really, I was paying for the experience of ripping some packs for the first time in years.

 This was my favourite card from the box. It's a common insert, but I'm a Raptors fan. Vince Carter is one of the team's all-time greats. The card itself is okay, and I was happy to at least pull a decent Raptor.

 

This is the total of what I pulled. Some base rookies and a few parallels. No numbered cards. It was a pretty bad box. Other than the Carter card, there was nothing else that I really wanted, and a lot of these cards are so worthless they aren't even worth flipping. I should have saved my money.

Collecting cards is kinda weird because when it comes to ripping, it's not really the same thing as actually collecting. There's really nothing in common with opening boxes and actually collecting cards. People that are ripping seem mostly like gamblers as opposed to collectors. Which is totally cool, if that's what you want to do. But it's not for me.

I think that if I get the urge to rip again, I would just find some cheap junk wax packs and get kind of a nostalgia trip from cards when I was a kid. Otherwise, maybe I could buy a box where I wanted to collect the base set, so all the cards that I pull I actually want.

Topps Chrome feels like a gambler's set. I do, however, like a lot of the parallels, as some of them are really great looking. I didn't really pull any parallels here I liked, but there are singles from this set that I would have been better purchasing with the money I dropped here.

How often do you open boxes?

Buy a Coffee, Get a Card: Tim Hortons' Latest Hockey Card Release

 

It's Olympic hockey time, and Tim Hortons has done their usual Team Canada themed hockey card release. It's the first time NHL players have been back in the Olympics in I dunno how many years, and Tim's has certainly taken advantage of the opportunity to release a card set.

If you don't know what Tim Hortons is, it is more or a less a coffee shop chain on the level of Dunkin Donuts that is themed around Canadiana. It was originally started by the hockey player Tim Horton, but has since been sold multiple times and doesn't even have Canadian ownership now. The feeling among most Canadians is that it used to be a good brand, but now it sucks. Tim's mostly exploits its Canadian roots as a marketing tool rather than being an authentic Canadian company.

Nevertheless, they usually do a couple hockey sets a year. Usually one that has an NHL theme and another with a Team Canada theme. Up until about a decade ago, McDonald's always did an annual hockey release in Canada. I liked the McDonald's cards a lot. Canadian Tire, which is a department store chain, also did hockey cards a few times and they were really nice. Of course, all of these cards were made by Upper Deck. 

The Tim's cards are probably the most popular cards of the year when it comes to broad public knowledge. Like, even people who don't know about hockey cards know about Tim's hockey cards. These cards are just kinda everywhere for a few weeks.

I do get annoyed, however, that all of these Canadian companies focus solely on hockey. I'm more into baseball and basketball, and I know so many other people in Toronto who prefer those sports over hockey. I feel like with how popular the Blue Jays are, that these companies are missing out on partnering with Topps on a Blue Jays themed release. Topps seems completely disinterested in the Canadian market, though, which is so frustrating if you are a baseball fan north of the border.

The Tim's Olympic cards are nice. Sometimes in the past Tim's cards have been a bit cheap, with crappy card stock. These are decent, at about the level of Upper Deck Series 1. It's about what you expect in terms of player selection and inserts. A mix of current and retired players, all pictured in a variety of Team Canada jerseys.

I bought a bunch of packs, and they actually sold out quickly at the Tim's closest to me. I live in downtown Toronto, however, and there are Tim's on every single block, so it wasn't difficult to walk another three or four minutes and find more.

The cards are three in a pack for $2, or only $1.50 for the first pack if you also buy a coffee. You get an insert in each pack, and they printed a ton of these cards, so these inserts tend to drop off in value rather quickly as people complete the set in short order.

 Here are some highlights of what I pulled. All of it is for sale or trade.

These Maple Leaf Immortals are 1:100 packs. I definitely did not buy 100 packs, so I got pretty lucky here, especially considering Mario Lemieux is an all-time great. It's a pretty nice looking card that I will flip on Ebay. If I get a decent price for it, it actually means I'll end up making more money than I spent buying these packs. Wow, that never happens. It also means I'm not buying anymore of these packs because I won't get this lucky again.

This is a Duos card featuring Brendan Shanahan and Steve Yzerman. They both played for the Red Wings. The card has a lenticular design similar to old Sportsflics baseball cards. This card was about 1:20 packs, I think. Despite its rarity, I'm not a fan of this card because I never liked the lenticular design gimmick. I always thought it was trashy and gives the card a cheap feel. Obviously others disagree because companies continue to make these as inserts.

Some Northern Stars inserts. The best one is the Patrick Roy. The rest are kind of whatever. This is where you get into the cheap inserts that end up being about as worthless as base cards because millions upon millions of these cards are printed. They look okay. I don't feel one way or another about them.

 Four cards from the Program of Excellence insert set. I mean, I feel the same way about these cards as the Northern Stars inserts. A lot card companies make these repetitive insert sets that have such a vague theme as to be almost meaningless. Like, really, what's the difference between 'Northern Stars' and 'Program of Excellence' here? Not much.

These are the Gold Medallion inserts. They are the lowest level inserts in the set, I think 1:2 packs. That means for the people who are buying like a hundred packs, they end up with stacks of doubles for this set. I dunno how I feel about landscape cards. I think they only work if the photography is awesome. Hockey is a hard sport to photograph because if you take pictures from too far away, it's difficult to see the player with all their gear on. But if you take a photo too close to get a good shot of the player's face, you can't really see much else. Plus, almost half of this card is dominated by the medallion design, which to me adds nothing. So I don't think the landscape design here is a winner.
 

Introduction, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

Al Bundy, for no reason.

  

Hi, my name's Jeremy. I'm 41 and I live in downtown Toronto.

I started this blog because I collect sports cards (duh). I've collected off and on since I was a little kid, stopping at times for a few years and then getting back into it for one reason or another, and then stopping again.

I grew up in southern Ontario, in a small town kinda halfway between Toronto and Detroit. This was back before the internet and streaming and all that stuff, so we really could only watch whichever sports were on television. Most of the people I knew were fans of Toronto teams, but there were a lot of Detroit and some Buffalo fans, too.

I used to go to card shows and shops with my Dad. There were tons (shops, not Dads). During the junk wax era, even in rinky-dink little Canadian towns in the middle of nowhere, you would find a card shop. We collected hockey and baseball. All we really watched was hockey and Blue Jays baseball. It's not like we could see Premier League, or even most NFL or NBA.

I was a huge Jays fans because of their two World Series wins. Toronto kinda felt like the center of the sports universe for a while because the SkyDome opened, and we got WrestleMania VI and two World Series titles. I'm a wrestling fan. I'll also always remember where I was when Joe Carter hit the homer to win the 93 Series.

As a kid I had a huge collection of Jays junk wax. I also had a lot of junk wax hockey because hockey was the most accessible sport to collect in Canada. It still is, which is really frustrating because most people don't even bother with baseball up here.

I stopped collecting when I became a teenager, and then started again when I was in university at Western in London, Ontario. I would start up again off and on throughout the years. My degree is in history, so I'm always interested in the history of things and collecting old stuff. For that reason, I definitely prefer vintage cards, and I don't really care about value or anything.

These days I don't have a big collection. Maybe less than 25 PC cards, and a couple of sets. I want to do more vintage set building. I'm interested in vintage baseball, hockey, and basketball, as well as cards for Toronto-based teams and older wrestling cards. Joe Carter is my favourite ballplayer, and always will be. Often, however, I like cards because of their design and aesthetic rather than any loyalty to a team or player. I'm drawn to the old and beautiful.

Besides sports cards, I also have small collections of retro video games, old toys, comics, wrestling magazines, and lots of other junk. I also own a few hundred books. I'm one of these goofballs who stops and starts a lot of stuff without ever making progress on anything. It's something I want to improve as I grow older.

I've blogged before, maybe close to 20 years ago. I'm not sure why I started this back up. I am on social media, but there is really no interaction or community there. It feels like it is mostly chasing dopamine spikes from getting notifications rather than any actual social aspect.

I do have an Instagram for my cards @nowherenearmint. I thought initially I would post there and write about cards in the caption, but that just isn't how it works. I'm also on Bluesky @jeremywall.bsky.social.

I always love reading other people's card blogs. I like it when the blogs are messy and imperfect and feel like a personalized scrapbook of someone's journey through trading cards. I'm always looking for excuses to write about the nonsense I enjoy. And I legit want to collect with others. To me, the dopamine hits from social media feel muted. Turns out that nerdy middle-aged men aren't the main target for social media.

Nevertheless, my intention is to use this blog as a sort of rambling journal of my sports card collecting. Maybe I'll show off my games and comics, too, who knows. 

I decided to use Blogger as a platform, even though it feels a couple of decades outdated because it seems like it is what most card bloggers still use. It's good to see there is still an active community of card bloggers. I had thought about Substack. I write a wrestling Substack for fun, but most of the sports card Substacks are more about speculating on modern card values. That community is not something I care to be a part of.

Because I collect mostly vintage stuff, it's hard not to go down a rabbit hole of nostalgia. I am trying to do less of that in life because I think too much nostalgia is an unhealthy drug to distract from current, real life problems. Starting a sports card blog definitely won't help with that since collecting is often nostalgia bait. Nevertheless, I'd like to find a healthy balance between living in reality and enjoying the past.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog, and I'm happy to have you as part of my collecting journey.