For 3/17/23
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Another busy week here at the Rebel Base Card. Started off the week by publishing my conversation with Ian Taylor of the Marvel Card Collector's Podcast. Always good to have Ian back on the program talking cards. It has been a stretch of time, as Ian was last on way back in December of 2020 on episode #79. This is his third appearance, with the first, being in the first year of the show on episode #32.
Now doing the show solo with guest hosts, after the departure of longtime co-host Norrid Radd, Ian and the MCCP still has a great gauge on new releases, sketch artists and Marvel card collectors. His recent series on the stages of collecting at the end of last year was perfect to expand upon. You do tend to evolve in your hobby and what you started off collecting and coveting may change over time as you refine and gravitate more towards certain aspects of your collection. I was forturnate to have been on his show recently, episode #162.
This week also marked the 8th Anniversary of Star Wars Card Trader, which debuted in 2015. I dove back into the archives and did a nice post of some of the physical promo cards done a few years back by Topps for the app. These were either given out at cons or put into trading card packs for various releases. Looking back at the cards you can see how some early base series cards were designed and it's always fun to look at the image used for the mobile device and how old it looks now.
I had jumped in early in the app history, but was off for a number of months before I picked it back up. On the first promo card show on my Instagram post, you can see the elusive 'Vintage Han' which still is a white whale of a card for hard core collectors. One reason is, although this was an early insert series with a population of 1500, many users dumped out of the app completely, taking this card with them, making the population much lower. I would see this card on secondary markets like eBay for a long time fetching quite a pretty penny.
On Tuesday, Topps Online refreshed the Living set with two new cards from Carlos Cabaleiro and Kris Penix. The featured charachters this week were Todo-360 from the Bad Batch and General Pong Krell from the Clone Wars. Both cards are up for a 7 day period and the set is $11.99. You can also buy these individually for $7.99 each.
On Wednesday, Topps Online also released the second chapter set from the new third season of The Mandalorian. Like the other Topps online sets, these are up for a week only. This 5 card set with pictures from the show sell for $19.99. Numbered colored variants are possible and come as an additional card in your order if you are lucky to pull one.
Thursday also saw 3 new Throwback Thursday cards released, featuring Kylo Ren, Saw Gererra and Emperor Palpatine. The Kylo Ren card also has a variant short print card that could be included in your order if you 'pull' one. This 3 card set goes for $14.99. Cards 19-21 are a part of the second wave of this set and are desinged to mimic the 1984 Topps MLB one. Cards 1-12 looked like the 1952 MLB set.
While we are on Thursday, that saw the release of the latest 'Breakfast Pack' insert podcast episode, #51. Greg Cass from eyeoncanon.com and I traded questions on Bad Batch episode 13, Pabu and Mandalorian Chapter 19, The Convert, which premiered on Wednesday March 15th. I won't spoil the Pringles can ratings for these two episodes, but I will say they did not disappoint.
In our 'Greg's List' segment where we highlight other shows and media we took in over the previous week after the last show, we talked about a number of amazing content creators.
The list includes:
Greg Cass:
Blast Points
Skytalkers Podcast
Podcast Stardust
Riververse
Coffee with Kenobi
The Long Take Substack from Jen Sopchockchai
Greg McLaughlin:
Making Tracks from Fantha Tracks
Rebel Force Radio
Star Wars Reactions
What the Force Podcast
Fantha Tracks reviews - Feat. Ross Hollebon, Daniel Lo, Jen Sopchockchai
The Long Take Substack.
Honorable mentiones to Kara Dj from the Into a Larger World Fanzine
Congrats to Dan Z from CWk for his Celebration Europe announcement
There are only 3 more episodes of the Bad Batch left, with the season finale being a 2 parter on Wednesday March 29th. There's certainly going to be a lot of TV happening that night with Mando moving into high gear.
The Chicago Sports Spectacular is back at Rosemont this weekend, which for me kicks off some of the upcoming Con season. The next two weekends will be busy with GaryCon in Lake Geneva Wisconsin next weekend and C2E2 the following one. I sent the last card of the Swag Pack series off to the printer this week and expect to see it by mid week of next. I have been making tweaks to the wrapper and should have them ready for handing out at C2. These Swag packs have become a great set of memories for things that have happened over the course of the previous year and it's fun to create trading cards that have the look if not the complete feel of the vintage run. In these packs you will find 9 cards, a sticker and 3 classic Return of the Jedi cards from 1983, as it is getting closer to the 40th anniversary of the last of the original trilogy films. As we get into May I will be putting together a couple of shows that will celebrate not only ROTJ, but the 40th anniversary of the cards released for the film.
Also soon celebrating 30 years is the first set of Topps Star Wars Galaxy cards which debuted in April of 1993. The 140 card set highlighted the amazing artwork that helped paint the picture of what the universe might look like, by Ralph McQuarrie, but also feature art by great comic illustrators and artists and how that contributed to the popularity of the franchise. The release, which was originally set to coincide with the original film's 15 year anniversary, came 10 years after the last set of Star Wars Cards have been released. The Galaxy sets are wonderful ones to chase and there have been 7 more regular sets of Galaxy, along with 2 subsequent Chrome editions, the last just released a few months back.
I hope you all have a great holiday and weekend and we will talk again soon!
Greg