Best Mail Week EVER Part 6: Random Cheapness

These next six cards cost me $3.67 total. They're random, but well worth the cost to me!

The first is one of the cheapest relics I could find on all of COMC. To find good deals I searched words like "patch," or "logo," or "auto" and started from the lowest priced item to see if anything good popped up. I forget what I typed in to find this Bela Karolyi relic, but I do know the card was just $0.69, and numbered 196/500:
I'm sure some of you are vaguely aware of Karolyi. Back in the 90's the world was interested in the U.S. Gymnastics team for 10 seconds, particularly when Keri Strug hurt herself on a landing but then went ahead and won the Gold anyway. There's a famous picture with some dude carrying Strug afterwards, and that'd be Karolyi, the coach. I thought it was neat to have a card of the guy behind that brief national enthusiasm so I grabbed this card. I also think the image + relic placement is HILARIOUS on this card. Right in the middle of the crotch - makes me think this could be an underwear relic!


Another cheap and potentially far less gross relic was this Martin Nance jersey piece I picked up. I know from past trade bait drafts that Nance is a nobody (his auto went SO late when I had it available), but it's hard to turn down a three color patch for just $0.89:
There were a bunch of versions of this card available (I still count three left) but only one of the patches was this cheap (the others are $3 and $7.50 respectively). And well I'm not going to become a Martin Nance supercollector or anything, it's nice to add some patches to my hits binder!


The other hit from this post is actually the cheapest, at it was just $0.4o for this Jay Walker autograph, #'d 80 of 7,730:
Jay Walker was once nominated for the GSNHOF, so it's nice to finally have a card of his, especially since it's an auto. This card also cracks me up for two reasons. For one, it's serial # is 80 out of THOUSANDS. Usually cards like this I get some random high number, but here it's some two digit card from low in the print run. Could you imagine having card #1 of 7,730? That'd be awesome.

Secondly, the card design is horrible in an awesome way. That epic column down the left side of the card kind of screams 80's-90's shooter game, sort of in a Duke Nukem or Doom way. And then the bottom reads "TFT RAD" in huge block letters. I'm sure there's a reason for that, but without looking it up the image just makes me chuckle. So I probably won't ever look it up :-).


I also grabbed some semi-random non relics. For $0.95 (big spender!) and $0.25 respectively, I was able to round out Corey Alston's base card master set:
Corey Alston has been discussed here occasionally, and I even toyed with super collecting him for a bit (it'd be easy, he only has 11 distinct cards!). But I'm so focused on my Seneca Wallace collection that I would rather just stop at Corey's 3 base cards, ignoring the 8 parallels of his Bowman and Impressions stuff for now (the Upper Deck Top Tier card on the left has no parallels). Maybe someday I'll complete the master set, but for now I'm still probably one of the only people who intentionally collected Corey's 3 base cards - so I got that going for me.


Finally, I picked up this Lamont Brightful card for just $0.49:
Brightful is another in a long line of the guys who "technically" play a position (in this case CB) but really just exist on the roster as a returner. The NFL seems to be shifting away from that with most teams, with guys like Jacoby Ford, Lerod Stephens-Howling, and Devin Hester getting more time with the offense, but I always like to remember a simpler time when returners played 99% special teams, Brightful's career was a quick 3 years, and works out quite simply:

In 2002 he had 15 punt returns, 1 of which was a 95 yard touchdown, the longest in the NFL that year.

In 2003 he returned 45 punts, most in the NFL, but was cut by the Ravens following the season due to low yards/return.

In 2004 he played two games with the Dolphins. In game two he fumbled three punts away and was cut. Interestingly, Brightful was replaced on the roster and in the return game by "some guy named Welker from San Diego." So in a way the end of Brightful's career signaled the beginning of Welker's, which is an interesting piece.

Brightful later went on to the CFL, and then some coaching. I mostly knew him (you probably could have guessed it) as my KR/PR of choice in Madden 2004. He made a pretty decent 4th cornerback as well!

Up Next: The Last COMC Card is Possibly the Best One