The Gavining (And Then Some)

DefGav from Baseball Card Breakdown is one of my favorite trading partners. There are a couple of reasons for that. The biggest is that he's my dumping grounds for a lot of my spare cards I just want to move. DefGav is the type of collecting partner I always appreciate where they're a bit of an "everything" collector so chances are they can either use a good chunk of the stuff I send, or find a way to make it useful. It's gotten to a point where I can just send him players at random and he's declared them as PC guys right before they arrive.

He's also creative. A lot of cool ideas have been presented to us through Gavin over the years. Whether it's the custom overlays he creates for cards/autographs, or the custom cards he makes for himself/others, or the glow-in-the-dark cards, or just the dozens of other notable ideas like blogging in your own handwriting or initiating the wallet card. All gold.

I mean just look at this custom I got from him months ago. How many collectors do you know take it upon themselves to bring a card into existence? Extra points for the simple design (reminds me of a borderless version of the '79 Topps design) and the badass Storm logo.

Luis Torrens never got a card as a member of the Lake Elsinore Storm, so Gavin took it upon himself to create a custom one. I've long since left the custom card game, but it's nice to see Gavin continue and get better with time.

It's still probably too early to declare any "card of the year" type of statements, but once again Gavin's custom has a nice lead and is sitting at #1 right now. It will very likely finish in the top three as I don't see too many other cards giving it a lot of competition.

Accompanying the custom was a BoChro auto of Torrens. I've joked about snatching this from Gavin but now that it's finally happened I feel bad. But then I remember that I sent him a clear glass acetate auto of the GOAT once and feel less bad.

This is my 19th LuToBoChro base auto. This put me at one away from reaching my goal of obtaining 20 LuToBoChro autographs. I'm not sure why, but they've all entered gray whale territory for me where the prices appear to be like $2.00 for the card itself, but $3.50 for shipping. Blarg. Also at this point most of the decent deals on COMC are long gone, apparently COMC's sellers think the market for these cards starts at $6 a pop (this isn't including whatever discounted price offers may be going on right now)!

Then at the start of this month, I got my 20th. That's right ya'll, I've reached the 20-auto plateau. I'm at the bonafide prospector's stash level now.

Gavin's also helped me out a few times this year like when I immediately went to him for help with securing some Cameron Maybins (obviously for TTMs). No luck yet, but fingers crossed!

So big thanks to Gavin for the help with various things over the years. Oh, and as for custon pornstar auto overlay project, I'm pulling the plug on it. I'm not motivated enough to put in the time to see it through. Expect something in your mail soon anyway though bud.

As always thanks for stopping by and take care :).