Tuesday, May 12, 2015

A look at a very strange autograph... a Zistle mystery!

I completed my first trade on Zistle the other day!  Someone from England reached out to me and asked if I was willing to send him a bunch of 2011 Allen & Ginter cards.  After visiting the post office and further convincing myself that those that work there have no other purpose in life than to make oneself miserable, I begrudgingly agreed to spend $12 to do so.

In any case, I went through his trade list on Zistle and picked out a few cards that I had interest in...


Here's two missing minis from the 2011 Animals in Peril set.  Very happy to get one step closer to completing these especially since this was probably the only half-way decent mini insert set from 2011.


Here's 5 regular back minis from 2011.  I was missing all of these so these are great additions as well.  You're probably wondering... Bubba... there's 6 cards there.  You said 5.  You're kinda dumb.

I would say yes, I am dumb, but for a different reason.  I had forgotten when I took these pictures that one of the minis was in fact a no number variant (usually a 50 card print run).  I was silly and took a picture of Mr. Billy Butler along with the other base minis.  Mr. Butler is in fact, much more rare than the rest of these cards.  Just trust me.


I also received 3 black bordered mini parallels from 2011 (apparently this guy liked this year's Ginter set...).  I didn't have these before, but these are mostly trade bait.  I'm not anywhere close to putting together a black bordered set from any year except maybe 2012.


This guy did have two code parallel full sized cards which I found interesting.  Zistle also taught me something about Allen & Ginter that I didn't know.  Apparently, these code cards did not span the entire 350 card set.  When I actually looked into my collection, I found that I had approximately half of them.  I've always thought that they were pretty cool, so I think I'll attempt to slowly put this set together... might take a bit, but I got MIGGY! :D


Last, but not least (well... maybe it is least), I saw that this guy had an Evan Gattis auto.  I enjoyed Gattis last year on the Braves and I figured it would be cool to have his autograph now that he's an Astro and there isn't much chance to pull his auto as a Brave anymore... little did I know.

There was no picture of this card on Zistle, and I didn't even bother looking the card up.  I really didn’t care all that much as this was more or less just him throwing the card into the trade. 

The autograph is on-card which is more than I could’ve hoped for, however the photo just makes me incessantly giggle.  I get that he is El Oso Blanco, but this isn’t a baseball card photo… (and it isn’t, one quick Google search shows this was taken for Sports Illustrated.  Topps stealing more photos.  Get your own and make them baseball relevant!)  Anyways, this card is now probably relegated to the status of “bring my useless card into work day” and show everyone how silly baseball cards can be… I know, that’ll draw so many more people into the hobby, but hey, I enjoy it.


Relevant point #2:  As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently joined a group break hosted by Nachos Grande.  I obviously took the Braves and I’m sure I’ll write up a post about my haul when I get the cards, but I just wanted to mention now that one of the cards I’m due to receive is, in fact, a 2015 Gypsy Queen Evan Gattis autograph.  Yes, on the Atlanta Braves.  Huh???  So much for my brilliant thinking.  Here’s a link to the post that Chris wrote about the Gypsy Queen portion of the group break… has a nice big picture of Gattis’ ugly John Hancock.

2 comments:

  1. Hello Matt,
    I've just discovered your blog. It's very informative regarding Allen & Ginter's cards, and I'm sure that I'll regularly revisit.
    I'm the English collector that you completed the above trade with. I was gifted a box of 2011 A & G for my birthday in early April and kept the Mets players and Hometown Heroes inserts and listed the rest as tradebait on Zistle, so all the cards that you received all came from that one box, except the Stadium Club Gattis auto, of course! I know that the trade was expensive to mail from your side, so I hope that you feel that it was worth it. I am certainly happy with the cards that I received from you, as I have now, thanks to yourself and a couple of other Zistle traders, completed the 100-card Hometown Heroes insert set from 2011 - a set that fascinated me as being from the U.K. I was delighted to discover more information about U.S. geography.
    Happy collecting and trading, cheers Paul aka LordPaddington

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  2. That's awesome. I'm glad you got yourself the complete set! I'm glad you're enjoying the blog too as I'm pretty much brand new to it! ...and don't worry, the tone of this post was more negative due to my post office rather than the cards I got. Rest assured I loved what you sent me (otherwise I wouldn't have written about it!).

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