2020 trade package #4: a Penny Sleeve For Your Thoughts

If I decided to make a list of the top 10 best things about card blogging, numbers one through nine would be trade packages.  I've received so many cool items from all over the place since I got into this racket and it's made me a better collector.

My newest trade partner is Jon over at A Penny Sleeve For Your Thoughts.  I'd followed his blog for a while when recently he was nice enough to offer me a couple vintage football cards, one of which I needed.  Then he was able to tack on some cool basketball stuff to boot, which surprised him a bit but not me since that's definitely my smallest Michigan collection.  That was enough for him to be able to send a PWE my way:

The court stuff leads off with Trey Burke, somehow a veteran of five teams in six-plus seasons.  I always loved Donruss' Stat Line parallels when it came to baseball so this '15-'16 card, numbered /43 for his 4.3 assists/game (I guess you can't number a card out of 4.3), is right up my alley.  That's followed up by a shiny Red/White/Blue parallel from the same year's Prizm product, and there's plenty of that brand to enjoy today.

That's all thanks to our next guy, Tim Hardaway Jr., who's only on his third team in his seventh year.  The similar cards you see in a pair were released a year earlier thank Burke's, and they appear to be Blue Wave and Yellow/Red Mosaic Prizms.  These are confusing, but not Topps Tek confusing!  The last card of his trio is from the same 2015-16 set as Trey's card above, and from what I can tell this particular parallel is called a Flash Prizm.  It's definitely all about flash, I'll give it that!

Last up from the basketball group is possibly my favorite of the bunch.  Nik "Sauce Castillo" Stauskas is bursting through your screen in living color on a 2014-15 Donruss Rookies Swirlorama parallel.  I think the combination of a design that succeeds in grabbing me right in the nostalgia plus a funky parallel makes this a win.

And then we close things out with the card that kicked off this deal, a '69 Topps of former Michigan/Chicago Bears DB.  Vintage football is another weak area of my collection but it won't be for long if I have folks like Jon helping me.  This is a great looking card that's especially fun for me since I was primarily a baseball collector for so long and enjoy seeing the different looks Topps used between sports back then.  One feature you can often count on when it comes to old cards: awesome team logos.  Damn nature, you scary!  This is just my second McRae to go with his '64 Philadelphia RC and I appreciate Jon putting in the effort to note that he's a former Wolverine and offer it up to me.

Jon, thanks again for a great first deal!  You have an envelope heading your way as we speak (unless you're reading this after Thursday when it'll likely get delivered) that I hope you'll consider a good answer to this one.

As for me, I appear to be Marching into spring with lots more stuff to show off from a couple TCDBers, another blogger, eBay, and this past weekend's show.