Trade with TMM Part 3: FOOTBALL

This is the final post of this recent Dennis trade, and I think its always fitting to finish with football since that's a large part of both of our blogs.  It's becoming less of a problem now, but early on in blogging for me (like 2010-ish) it felt like there were all baseball cards and one or two guys who collected football on the side.  So it was nice when Dennis came around with football to trade, and I'm glad we continue to be able to deal stuff back and forth!

To begin, he always tends to use Sage Hit extras as filler.  He must've busted every box of this that ever existed, because every package always has a ton of these!  Today's package included Jimmy Claussen, Seyi Ajirotutu, and Dan Levefour, with both inserts and parallels:

In terms of the football PC stuff, the biggest gets in this package, IMHO, were for my Corey Alston and Shyrone Stith PCs.  Seneca Wallace will always be my main collecting focus, but I always tie my Alston and Stith collections to him since they were my main skill players at WR and RB on those Wallace Madden '04 teams.  So I'm trying to collect Alston and Stith with a similar fervor, which makes all the gets in this package really great!

There was only one Alston in the package, but as he has only 15 cards to his name each card is a big get.  I'm now at 11/15, and this might be my 2nd favorite card of his to the 1/1 I picked up a while ago.  This is the Bowman Chrome Xfractor - and man does it ever sparkle!

Not all Xfractors work for me, but the above every much does.

Dennis also sent SEVEN new Stiths, which is a big deal not just in adding a lot of cards, but also in that all were truly new to me.  See, even with my own knowledge, I've had a few occasions were I bought or traded for a Stith I already owned because a few of his cards are hard to tell apart.  Maybe it's a turn of the century thing - I feel like my Seneca Wallace collection, which is heavily 2003 based, is easy to differentiate.  But Stith's cards, which primarily come from 2000, have a lot of sets that are badly identified online or that have crazy subtle differences.  So it's impressive that Dennis went seven for seven in new cards.

The first one is very different - it's the Skybox Dominion EXTRA parallel.  It scans horribly, but is pretty awesome:

Then there's a Fleer Tradition Glossy - online these are sometimes hard to tell apart, but in person the texture is so different:

Sage cards are weird - it's easy to find autos online, and relics exist, but finding base cards outside of the Beckett Marketplace or Sportlots seems to be impossible.  Luckily Dennis found a Sage base (1 of 4,500) on Sportlots:

AND a Sage Hit base:

AND a Sage Hit NRG parallel (hence the big embossed NRG):

I would maybe never have found these on Ebay/COMC.  People just don't post these on those sites, so I'm glad Dennis was able to find 'em!

This next one is a similar hard to find base, but it makes more sense to me.  It's Stith's 2001 Pacific card - which is a random set and a non-rookie card of a scrub.  So these kind of cards never get listed.  I'm so happy to have it though!

And then the final card is one of those bizarro parallels.  Stith's PressPass base is silver, and there's a gold version too.  This is the "Torquers" version, which has blue foil for...some reason.  It looks great though:

So those are all the Alston and Stith cards - but Dennis sent a few other PC goodies as well.  First two nice Deion Branch cards - I especially love the Chrominess of the Branch on the left:

Then he sent me two PC cards from 2002 Pacific.  One is Rod Smart (I have most of the parallels of this card so it's cool to get the base finally) and the other is Ben Gay, whose small collection is finally gaining some speed:

Dennis sent two others Gays too.  One is his Score base (I have the Scorecard parallel) and his Fleer Showcase card.  I LOVE the border on the Showcase.  And I wonder if these were Sportlots buys or card show buys as it's hard to find Ben Gay cards sometimes!

Wrapping up this post and this trade, we have the two most valuable cards of this post - two Gold Zone /50 autographs from 2009 Score.  One is of Mohamed Massaquoi, who may soon need his own binder since I already have so many of his cards!  The other is DeMeco Ryans, who I still don't have many cards of but whose collection is turning out nicely given the autos and relics I've picked up so far:

Thanks for all the PC help Dennis!  If COMC can get their ISH together I am sure we will trade again soon!