Mail Day - The Joys of Combined Shipping

I really like to take advantage of combined shipping on eBay. It is tough for me to pay $3 to ship one card but when you can get a decent stack for $3-5 it makes it much more palatable.  I ran across a single card I really wanted from a seller recently and did some searching in his inventory and picked up a pretty nice stack of cards.

 First up is this nice card featuring two HOF Giants, Johnny Mize and Mel Ott, although Mize is in a Yankee uniform.  This is from the Rival Factions insert set and is numbered 0309/1000.  This is kind of an interesting choice of players as Mize and Ott were teammates during the last couple years of Ott's career and Mize didn't play on the Yankees until after Ott was retired.  Regardless, I like the card and the Ott picture is pretty cool featuring the Giants across his chest.

 A couple of cards from my favorite Giants 3B of all time, Matt Williams.  Although the bottom card doesn't look it, these are both gold. I love the photography in the Collector's Choice set, for a low end set, Upper Deck sure did it right.  Williams is stretching out to snag a grounder and in the Flair insert he is honored for his Hot Glove.

Speaking of Collector's Choice and great photography, I was able to pick up 7 Gold Signature parallels from the 1996 set.  I was surprised to find these all with one seller as I thought the Gold Sigs were pretty tough pulls.  The photography on these is great, particularly the 4 horizontal cards. One day I am going to have to pull a bunch of Kirt Manwarings cards for a post, the man has some great looking cards - gotta love catchers.

 I also scored 3 Barry Bonds cards.  I am tempted to peel the Finest insert but the coating has been in place for 14 years so I am not sure I can actually pull the trigger. I am sure it would look much Finer in a peeled state.  The UD Ionix insert looks great in person and actually scanned better than I suspected. The final card is an SPx Radiance parallel from 1998.  I really like these cards but there are somewhat hard to come by.  This one is serial numbered to 1000. I knew these cards held high book values from my days of trading on the forums so I looked this one up - $50!  That is crazy for a card /1000.  I am happy to add it to my collection.

The final card is the only non-Giant and the card that started it all. I don't know if I had even seen this card but I needed it for my Rickey Henderson collection.  When marking it off my checklist I noticed that I only need 3 more cards of his that were released in 1993.  The only years I have all his cards are 1979 and 1980 where he had only 1 card in each year and 1983 - with 40 cards.  Adding those final 3 cards might be a fun side goal, there are a total of 51 of his cards in 1993.

I was pretty happy with this package, thank goodness for combined shipping to allow me to put together packages like this.