Another Big COMC Buy Part 1 - 1995 and 2004

With all my COMC business, I find it pretty easy to find a few cards for my collection here and there.  Add those to the cards I buy for others, and I'm pretty quickly at the 100 card threshold for a $5 COMC credit (they give you $5 the next month to spend on more cards - yay!).  A few weeks ago I hit that threshold again, and for the next few days you guys will get to see the spoils of the stuff I kept!

The first card is probably the card I'm most excited for.  It's a card of minor leaguer John Clifford, aka the son of one of the 4th grade teachers at my elementary school:

This is the guy who came to visit his Mom in 1995 after being drafted who then signed autographs for us all in the lunch room.  I wasn't in his Mom's class (my 4th grade teacher is my favorite teacher of all time so I guess that worked out), but we still all got to get autographs.  You can check mine out in the John Clifford collection link to the right of this post.

The other batch of cards in this post are all of Madden 2004 great Corey Alston (Well...actually he's one of the worst WRs in the game...but he was awesome on my teams, which is why I collect Alston!).  They're a little...weird.  I'll let the fronts do the talking:

 

For those keeping track at home, those are the Hobby Red Back version, Premiere Date version (non numbered), Shadow version (non numbered), and Retail version.  On here, it looks like two identical cards, one with a stamp, and one in black and white.  The backs explain it a bit better:

The red back is obviously top right.  Top left is the premiere date...I'm not sure if a true premiere date set was ever released, as the one I grabbed was either backdoored or is a promo version.  The bottom are the shadow (right) and retail (left) varieties with the black and white backs.  They both feel very flimsy...almost like a weird kind of vinyl or something.  The shadow should have a /25 numbering typically, but obviously doesn't, so again we're looking at a backdoored or promo card - early 00's Pacific was weird.

I grabbed one other Alston card in this purchase, and it's a lot more straightforward.  It's his Bowman Chrome entry, which really pops:

It's out of 1999 too, and it's actually stamped unlike the Pacific ones:

Shame he never stuck around the NFL - he had a nice little career at Western Michigan even if he kind of died down after his freshman year.  That's even more impressive when you consider he was just 17 when he started his freshman year - so 761 yards with 8 touchdowns was no small feat!