Lots of Mail To Catch Up On!!!!

Ok, so going home for Memorial Day weekend created a HUGE backlog in mail... so I'll start out with some good, old fashioned COMC/eBay purchases!

The last 6 full sized relics I needed!!!! SWEEEET!!! The full sized relic set is DONE! Stan The Man is the 3rd-from-last card I needed... only Munson and Ruth left... and I think I have a firm deal in place for the Munson... :-D... I LOVED the Bagwel/Thomas card! Two guys born on the same day, with equal success, playing the same position (pretty much) and who burst onto the scene about the same time?!?!? How awesome of a dual relic? And got it for like $2.00... I'll take that any day!

Trumbo finishes up my Future Stars insert set, the two 1978 cards brings me down to just 3 CARDS needed for that set!!!! So close! My first "vintage" set (I define vintage as anything older than me, so pre-1980). A few GQ short prints and a couple of Queens from last year!

Finally, my COMC purchase would not be complete without mini's!

Next up are contest winnings from Brian over at the Pirates Treasure Room... he's running a great contest throughout the year, where all you have to do is root for the Pirates to win a series, and he gives away cards if they do. You get bonus entries for rooting against "your team". Thus I won the Astros prize shown above. An awesome "oddball" relic of a Glen Barker batting glove. Then I rooted against the Rockies and got the SWEEEET Drew Pomeranz triple jersey Team USA relic. Brian threw in a few extra cards as well! Thanks Brian for the contest and the blog! Great to finally have an active and avid Pirates fan/collector out there!

Here's a small (b/c they are mini's of course) trade with Larry over at My 2008 Topps Set Blog... he needed mini's, I needed mini's... we swapped... thanks Larry!

Finally, the results of a group break...

Them's the breaks... it was only $6.00 and I was taking a stab at getting an auto from 2 boxes of 2012 Archives over at JABO's. Kyle had a big stack o' Astros to send my way as well as part of his collection down sizing, so I ended up with a bunch more cards.

Kyle was a bit discouraged (I hope he doesn't mind me sharing) that some people buy into his breaks, then only end up with stacks like mine: 2 cards for $6-$10. I told Kyle not to worry, thats the breaks. Heck, even when we bust a whole hobby box on our own or even a blaster, there's not guarantee we'll even end up with one card we want (for instance, the craptastic blaster of Archives I opened this past weekend, talk about your all-time waste of $20). Kyle, I've wasted worse money chasing worse odds... keep up the great work on the group breaks. I am fairly certain we all know the odds are typically not in our favor, so when we hit something nice in a break we know there are probably 2-3 breaks down the road where we subsidize a few other participants' awesome cards. Get ready to see an example of this later this week... let's just say I joined a case break for the price of a blaster, and ended up with what will probably go down as one of the best cards in my collection... just sayin'... it's going to be epic!

Speaking of group breaks... it's almost time for The Dimwit's June Group Break announcement... I honestly have NO CLUE what boxes to bust this month... I thought about doing a break of a BUNCH of blasters but I couldn't guarantee which ones ahead of time but mostly would consist of current products and whatever other craziness I could find... I think I prefer hobby boxes because of the guaranteed hits, but let me know what you'd be interested in... I'm guessing if we did something like 10 blasters, it'd be about $18 per two-team slot... let me know what interests you, what products you'd like to see in a break...