Just Zistling around

Here's the question:

What does a card collector when he/she has no new cards to organize or catalog?
He/she organizes/catalogues old cards!

This is why I'm planning to spend some time in the coming days/weeks in adding new cards to my collection on Zistle.
I hope this will make easy to find and setup new trades with members of the website, even if I already have a detailed wantlist in form of checklists available on this blog.

I decided to embark in this epic quest today, after a collector on Zistle said that a trade would have been very hard to arrange if he had no visibility of what are the cards I am looking for.
This is as obvious as it can be, except for me apparently.

Having all these checklist here isn't much useful for possible new trading partners that do not use Blogspot, but instead are very active on Zistle... and in order to ease the activity of verifying what could help me fill in some gaps, I decided to replicate on Zistle the wantlists.

When I first joined Zistle I decided to use it mainly to virtually replicate my collection, and to make it more easy and keep track of everything the rule was to add cards to the virtual collection only for the completed sets.

I broke my own rule today as I started to massively load all my Allen & Ginter cards (the non auto and non relic ones at least) and generating the corresponding wantlists by exception, so even faster than I thought.

If anybody reading this blog is interested in a different sight at my wantlists, and a partial look at my collection, can have a look at my profile on Zistle, Italiancomplestist.
Also feel free to add me to your contacts and message me!

But wait, what kind of Baseball Cards blog has a post without pictures of Baseball Cards?
Not this one fur sure, so here are some more cards patiently waiting in my mailbox at COMC.





2009 Topps Unique Jumbo Jersey Relic of CC Sabathia #'d to 40

Thankfully this card, despite the set name, isn't just plain jersey, but rather has a nice chunk of patch from his days as a Brewer.

2012 Playoff Prime Cuts Century Gold Justin Upton #'d to 25

Another nice patch featured on this card, unfortunately it's pretty hard come by cards from this set on ebay (at least for a reasonable price), so this came from a deal I got on Instagram.

2016 Topps Museum Meaningful Material Prime Relics Ian Kinsler #'d to 50

The super long name of this set essentially stands for "nice patches", this came together with the Chapman I showed in my previous post, and again was an Instagram deal.

I am very happy of this second post in two days, it looks like I'm getting back to normal activity on this humble little blog.

Keep collecting, CIAO!

Breaking the silence

It's official, the summer is over!

Well, not the summer that ends on September 21st, but the summer that equals Holidays!
I've been back at work since Tuesday, and since I'm the only person in the office (sigh), what better way to spend the lunch break than posting something on this blog, after almost three months of complete silence?

I spent my Holidays in Paris, and despite there were (obviously) no card shops to visit, I had a great time there.

I've also picked up some cards from ebay, not as much as I did in the same period of last year, but still a lot of cool new additions to the collection.

On one hand I picked up several new cards for my 2013 Tribute WBC sets, and all the scans are already available in the dedicated sections, and on the other hand I picked up some nice things from other sets, some vintage cards and other that will soon have a dedicated page, and that I'm not going to show here.

So if you had enough of all this bla bla bla, here are some nice scans of cards that I hope to receive soon from my mailbox at COMC.

First let's show some vintage cardboard....

1950 Bowman Gus Niarhos

1952 Bowman Joe Collins

Maybe the second card is a little creased, but hey these cards are more than 60 years old!

And also consider that I paid 2 cents (yes you read right, not dollars, but cents) for the pair, so unless someone is willing to give cards like these away for free, I don't think I could possibly get a better deal!

Then I'm showing off a couple of cards depicting pitchers, one of them unfortunately left the Yankees for a chance to the postseason, while the other is having a great season with 13 wins already...

2015 Topps Tribute Jose Fernandez #' to 189

2016 Topps Museum Aroldis Chapman #'d to 99

I really love the encased cards in Tribute products, almost as much as I love sick patches from great players, so this pair of cards deserves a spot in my post.

Both these cards came from deals I got from Instagram users, that proved to be a very interesting alternative to ebay.

I jump back to the vintage section of this post just because I was able to snag the following two cards from ebay for the insane (in my opinion) price of a dollar each...so here they are!

1949 Bowman Earl Torgeson

1949 Gene Hermanski

I really love the way these old cards look, they usually have a clean back and great front pictures, and they prove that cards can be totally cool even without autographs or 4 color patches!

The last cards for this posts came in a bundle from an Instagram user that gave me a sweet deal on these cards, and two of them are autographed by players that I included in a list that I recently prepared with (almost) all the autographs that I'd like to add to the collection.

2010 Topps Tribute Cliff Lee #'d to 50

2010 Topps Tribute Matt Kemp #'d to 75

2015 Topps Museum Max Scherzer #'d to 99

The two autographs that I was looking for are Kemp and Scherzer, not that I don't like Cliff Lee, but the first two are something I decided to actively chase.

That's it for today, I promise that I will recover from these three months of silence by going back to the old rate of posts on my blog.

I hope your summer was great, and possibly still going!

Keep collecting and CIAO!