The Top Griffey Pickups Of 2016

This year I decided to split my favorite Griffey 2016 pickups from the other cards because it really would be too difficult to try and combine all of the cards and come up with only a Top 10 list.

This year was a big year for my Griffey collection, I entered 2016 with 552 unique Griffey cards and I am currently at 1,255 unique cards, an increase of 703 total cards. I would like to thank the fellow collectors and bloggers who have helped me with my endeavor.

Because it is so difficult to pick out one Griffey card over another as which are my favorites I will instead just post them in release order.

1.      1987 Bellingham Mariners Team Issue

2.      1988 Best San Bernardino Spirit Team Issue

3.      1991 Topps w/ Jim Arnold NFL Back Error

4.      2001 Topps Employee Exclusives

5.      Upper Deck Authentics Reverse Negative Image

6.      2003 Topps Kanebo Japan issue

7.      2005 Upper Deck Reflections Dual Signature Sr/Jr

8.      2006 Konami base and Konami foil parallel Japan issue

9.      2010 Sega CardGen Japan issue

10.  2013 Topps mini Game-Used White Sox relic

Honorable Mention:

This 2003 Upper Deck Ultimate Collection relic is my first birthday card. I got it very cheap because of the border chipping along the left side.

The Top Pickups Of 2016

Last year I did a Top 10 Pickups of 2015 so I decided it would be a nice piece to follow up with at the end of each year. This year as I was working on my list I realized I had way to many cards so I decided to do two lists with one solely Griffey cards and one list of all the rest.

This one was very difficult because I did pick up some wonderful cards and I did add some very nice cards to my Ryan Bader, Jay Buhner and Steve Largent collections plus there were some cards I would have added to this list except I had intended to write a post about those specific cards so I decided to leave them off this list but the list is still some wonderful pickups this year.

1.      1955 Topps All-American Jim Thorpe

2.      1933-34 National Chicle Skybirds Manfred von Richthofen

3.      2012 Upper Deck All-Time Greats Kelly Slater Auto Booklet

4.      2015 Sportkings Vault Evel Knievel Memorabilia card & 5x7 autograph

5.      Wrestling Quadruplets

6.      1977 Topps Star Wars C-3PO Golden Rod Error

7.      Jeremy Bullock autograph

8.      2000 Upper Deck Ovation Ichiro

9.      2015 World Stars Toreka Isshu card

10.  2008 Rittenhouse Stargate Atlantis Danny Trejo autograph

 

 

Honorable Mention:

 

1977 Topps UK Star Wars Obi-Wan Kenobi

 

2010 Topps UFC Ryan Bader Ruby parallel #5/8

 



The Top Pickups Of 2015

With the year ending I was doing a mental countdown of my favorite pickups of 2015 and originally I wanted to keep it to a Top 10 and by the time I was ready to write the post I was up to 20 cards so I removed a couple of cards that were not as important to me and ended up using some creative manipulating and finished with my Top 10 list plus 2 Honorable Mentions

1.      Ken Griffey Jr. 1990 Topps Foil Test & 1991 Topps Desert Storm

2.      2010 Topps UFC Ryan Bader Nickname parallel

3.      1977 Topps Carrie Fisher autograph

4.      1988 Score Traded Jay Buhner XRC

5.      2014 Upper Deck Lauren Hill Heroic Inspirations

6.      1988 Topps Brian Bosworth RC

7.      Wrestling Trilogy

8.       Kenny Powers collection and customs

9.     1977 El Paso Sun Kings Kurt Russell custom

10.  2011 Leaf Family Guy LaVar Burton and Alfonso Riebeiro autographs

Honorable Mention

Randy Couture TTM

Macklemore TTM for my nephew