TCDB Monday: A Massive Mail Day to Start the New Year Off on a Great Foot!

All good things must come to an end, and for those of us in education, that means that for most of us, we return to work this week!  For me, my classes don't start until next week, but I have plenty of on-campus meetings this week (not to mention a brand new course prep that I need to work on for the upcoming semester)!  

That being said, I made great use of my holiday time off (at least in terms of baseball card collecting, less so in terms of lesson planning)!  Case in point, I've got a huge TCDB mail day to get through from all of the envelopes that arrived last week.  Let's get right to it!

We'll begin with a trade with TCDB user ldtaft:

You probably ought to prepare yourself for a lot of 2025 A&G minis in this post!  I've been hammering out as many trades as I can in an effort to complete the various mini sets from this year's Allen & Ginter.  This particular trade inched me a bit closer on three of the mini sets.  I think the Fish set is my favorite, and that Hammerhead Shark card is definitely a cool one to get!  

Next up, from user TCDB (and blog commenter) kcjays comes a single A&G mini card:

That's the Mockingbird (state bird of Tennessee).  My sister lives in Tennessee, so maybe I ought to ask her if she knows what her state bird is! 

Continuing with more A&G trading, next up is a swap with user Grillmycheez (a user name that I love, of course)!  

The Light the Night minis are quite cool, though I think Topps missed a golden opportunity to use a little glow-in-the-dark ink on the lighthouse at the bottom of every card!  Even so, with the vibrant colors, the Light the Night set is going to look great in the binder once it's finally complete!  I should also note that while this trade with Grillmycheez was in the mail, he and I agreed to a second trade!  Hopefully, next week at this time, I'll have the contents of that trade to show off!

Next up, a rather rare minis-for-minis trade with user Eggbert60:

I was able to swap six of my duplicate minis for six needed minis, which made for a quick and easy trade for both of us!  This type of trade is why I don't mind buying the occasional eBay lot that contains a few minis that are duplicates for me.  By far, the easiest way to acquire minis on TCDB is to directly swap them for other minis from the same year (at least, that's been my experience when trading on the site).

Next, from user moowaukee comes (you guessed it) more A&G minis!

Sometimes, when I propose trades on TCDB, I'll send out several offers at once.  Oftentimes, those offers might contain the same card(s) coming in return for me.  This particular trade is one such example - the Beachin' It card of Elafonissi Beach is a card that I also acquired in a trade with Grillmycheez (see earlier in this post).  As I said before, that's not a huge problem right now because it's generally quite easy to swap duplicate minis for other needed minis.  I guess it's a bit of a waste of postage, but what's done now is done!

Finally, from user oktoberrust comes more 2025 A&G minis:

The Lighthouse mini ended up being a duplicate (see the trade with Grillmycheeze from above), but at least I still needed the Seadragon card!  I must say, seadragons are weird-looking creatures, aren't they?!  According to the card back, they are actually cousins of the seahorse (the more you know).

That was a massive week of mailings!  It's a shame that I have to go back to work this week. I could use another week (or more) to do even more baseball card trading.  That said, I have a ton of envelopes that should be arriving over the next few days, so hopefully next week's TCDB wrap-up is just as full as this week's edition.  Have a happy Monday, everyone.