TCDB Weekly Recap: The Shiny and the Syrup.

Here we are, a full week plus into December.  It's hard to believe that the end of the year is rapidly approaching and soon I'll have to remember to write "2025" on all my papers.  No need to worry about my crappy memory quite yet though seeing how we still need to finish out 2024.  Speaking of finishing out the year, I've been on a roll lately in terms of making lots of trades - so many, in fact, that my trade total for the year is now up over 100 unique trades!  

Let's get into what I received last week from TCDB swaps starting with a trade with user howe9909:

As you can see, I was able to land four needed minis from this year's A&G set including two more US States cards.  I spent much of my summer vacation as a kid in the state of Vermont (my grandparents lived there) so I'm super happy to acquire that particular card!  I like the fact that Topps used maple syrup to represent Vermont.  My family only ever used the "real stuff" since my mom grew up in Vermont and now I've converted my wife into only using authentic maple syrup as well.  You're welcome, syrup harvesters!

Next up, from bdhrbob comes more 2024 A&G goodies:

I decided to go a bit crazy on this year's Allen & Ginter set and with that, I'm now trying to build the Chrome mini set and the Chrome Refractor base card set.  Each set contains 100 cards so I thought they'd be doable but I didn't take into account the fact that both Chrome minis and Chrome Refractors typically fall about one-per-box on the hobby side of things.  Needless to say, it's been tough sledding so getting a couple of Refractors in the same trade is quite the treat for me!  

Continuing with the A&G theme, my next trade was with Wisconsin Digger:

That's four more Chrome minis plus another Swamp Creature mini.  The Swamp Creature set has 30 cards in it and I've been slowly picking away at that one as well.  What's been interesting on my end is that even with ripping a case of A&G for myself AND doing all of these trades, I've yet to actually finish any of the mini insert sets!  I'm close to some of them, but they still need to be completed!  I guess I need to keep working the trade circuit for additional help.

Next up, one of the larger trades that I've made on TCDB in a while happened to be with user ryegram:

This was a giant trade in which I acquired a whole bunch of this year's mini inserts plus a Chrome Refractor and some mini Chrome cards.  I still haven't finished off any of the various mini insert sets but I definitely made some progress on all of them with this swap!  

I'm not quite done with last's week massive mailbag!  Next, we have a simple swap with user Miabert1:

That's another Swamp Creatures mini, this time of one of the most annoying insects in all the world:  the Mosquito.  According to the card back, mosquitos have killed more people than all of the wars combined.  What a terrible, horrible, little bug.

Another small trade is next, this one being from user thirdcoastsportscard:

Another Swamp Creature card plus the United States Flags of the World card.  Both cards are #1 in their respective sets which was kind of neat (though admittedly, a useless nugget of information).

My next trade is another mini-centric deal, this time with user swainzag:

Another Chrome mini for my set build plus a Batoids Beneath and another US State card (Rhode Island).  Of the 50 states, Rhode Island is one of the last states that I've yet to visit.  Rhode Island also happens to be the closest such state to me that I haven't been to, so perhaps someday I'll do a random road trip for no reason other than to knock that state off my "never visited" list.

Finally, the last trade of the week was with user cashdoug:

As you probably expect by now, this trade also featured 2024 Allen & Ginter goodies but I was also able to nab a new-to-me Barry Larkin pink parallel as well!  

That does it for the past week in TCDB trading.  It was certainly another good week of mailing baseball cards around the country and I'm hopeful that the next couple of weeks will be equally good so that I can (maybe?) finish off the majority of my A&G set before the calendar flips to 2025.  I do know that once the year changes, people move on to the new stuff and then trading for older stuff becomes much more difficult!  As always, if you have any cards that I need, please let me know and maybe we can work out a trade!