A Good Mail Day (In The End)

Sunday I was pretty lucky when I won a couple of pretty cool auctions. The first card showed up yesterday, when I opened the mailbox and saw the yellow padded envelope with the eBay shipping label I have to admit I got a bit anxious wondering which card would show up first. My daughter pulled out all of the mail and handed me the padded envelope. When I grabbed the envelope I felt a tear on the back side so I flipped it over and saw this…

 

The back side was ripped nearly the entire width and the tip of the card was sticking out. It looked as if either the card had fallen out and someone pushed it back in or someone pulled the card out to look at it and put it back.

 

Had the card been one of my normal pick-ups that cost a couple of dollars I would not have minded but this was one of those cards that I finally splurged a little on…

 

I have wanted a fossil card since they first made the scene but they were always pretty pricey, I finally gave in and chased one down. Two weeks ago I was in a bidding war for one of the Mammoth Femur cards and lost out by $1 when the auction closed. This time there was no bidding war and I got the Auroch Femur card for $5 less than the Mammoth card so that was pretty cool.

 

In the end, the seller had packaged the card securely in a snap tight case and there was no damage, not to mention these cards are quite thick and sturdy (about the thickness of an iPhone), but I am a little disappointed with how my mail carrier delivered it. She even placed the card in the mail box with the tear facing down and away from the rest of the mail in my box so you would think she knew of the rip. Oh well, all is well that ends well and I have now scratched another card off of my bucket list, next up is an Entomology card or Museum Piece card.

Fossil Cards

Last month I touched on the blurring of lines between sports cards and non-sports cards. I bring this up because I was reading a story on the Upper Deck Blog regarding a special 1/1 redemption card from the 2008-2009 Champs Hockey set.

In the 2008-09 Champs set Upper Deck included redemption cards for a very rare insert, actual fossils and other artifacts. These shadowbox cards, which are suppose to be up to 10 times the thickness of a regular card, contain various fossils including femur bones and teeth. The top dog from the set is a 1/1 Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth, the entire tooth, and as pointed out in the story the redemption card for this treasure is still out there in a pack somewhere on a shelf. With other fossil cards showing up on eBay ranging from about $90 and up you have to wonder how much this bad boy might fetch.

This is a cool insert, I would love to pull any of these fossils but I don’t see the connection between dinosaur fossils and hockey. What brought UD to create an insert like this for the Champs set?