Delivery Time! Community Gum Cards - Part I

I'm nearly through showing off the trade envelopes that have arrived at my house up through the end of August.  In fact, today's envelope arrived right at the end of the month - but it's a doozy of a package that I plan to split up over a couple of days.

First things first, a big thanks to Jon over at Community Gum for the cards since I had definitely forgotten about them!  What happened is that awhile back (in May 2019 if I'm not mistaken), Jon offered up a bunch of random cards as trade bait.  He had a couple of cards that I was interested in and so I made a claim and then promptly forgot about the cards.

Fast forward a few months later and a surprise envelope shows up from Jon which included the cards that I claimed...plus a whole lot more.  Before I get to the surprise stuff, let's go over the cards that I originally claimed starting with a pair of Gypsy Queen cards that I needed for my set.

My 2013 Gypsy Queen set is slowly but surely getting closer and closer to completion.  Of course, being a set from 2013 it isn't always all that easy to acquire the cards so any time I can make a dent in the set I'm happy.  I have to admit that I'm surprised I never ended up with that Dunn card - I have so many cards of Adam Dunn (mostly as a Red though).

The other two cards that I wanted from Jon were both for my mini-PC of Jose Altuve.  

I've mentioned my admiration for Altuve a number of times on my blog so when I saw a couple of nice Diamond King Altuve's available, I jumped on the opportunity to bolster my small collection a bit.  There's a lot of smoke on those cards but I still like them (and the lack of logos isn't nearly as obvious here given the action pose of Altuve in both images).

That was it for the claimed cards, but Jon had more tricks up his sleeve for me.  

First, how about a super thick manu-relic of Barry Larkin?  

Interestingly, the back of the card says that this is a 150th Anniversary Commemorative Patch card but the "relic" on the front is quite rubbery, not exactly what I think of a patch being made out of.  Still, it's a nice looking card of Barry Larkin and one of the few new 2019 Larkin cards that I own.

Finally, sticking with the Barry Larkin theme Jon sent along one more Larkin for me:

That's a sweet looking red parallel numbered 82/99 of Barry.  I love red parallels for Cincinnati Reds baseball cards - and if it's serially numbered that's all the better!  The Optic set is a nice answer to Topps Chrome and if it only had team logos it might even be better (the simple colored borders are sharp looking in person).

Many thanks to Jon for the great batch of cards...and I haven't even shown off the other half (that'll come in a future post)!