I’ve Been A-Costa’d!

I have very few card collections given my limited resources and space, but I did decide some time ago to begin collecting on-card Royals autographs. It’s been a blast so far trying to track these things down and this is the latest addition to my collection. To view the cards currently in the collection, take a look at the Gallery or the other posts in this series. I’m working on getting a legit want list together on my trade page but, in the meantime, if you have any on-card Royals autos that it looks like I don’t have, don’t hesitate to drop me a line!

Shane is back in black.

There’s a perfectly good reason I haven’t posted in over a month. Well, there are several. You can read all about 5 of those reasons in the form of our 2012 Topps 5 case breakdown and review. It was a harrowing experience that ate up so much time that it’s embarrassing to even think about it. The good news is that sorting 5 cases of cards affords some time to catch up on some movie watching and removie some of the 270 movies (give me a break, I have a degree in movie watching!) in my Netflix queue that are expiring at the end of the month. To recap: Arthur is an unfunny mess of a movie and Driving Miss Daisy isn’t quite as cloying and saccharine as I remembered it. Also, dude who made the animatronics for Showbiz Pizza has kind of a sad story.

Now to the goods. Or, rather, the recap of stuff I’ve picked up for my Royals On-Card Autograph Collection over the past year that I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet. Oh look, a 2005 Topps Chrome Shane Costa black refractor parallel #/200 or something. I showed off the standard old refractor version way back at the beginning of my collection, but just for the sake of completism, here it is again. Plus, I’ve actually shown the black refractor version already, too, but I had already written the captions to the scans by the time I realized it so I don’t want anyone writing me any letters.

Shane is back from a previous post!

I have nothing new to add about this card but I really hate having two pictures stacked on top of each other. Makes me feel like I failed at blogging.

Shane is back and hand-numbered!

The card above is the beginning of a slew of very similar scans of Shane Costa cards from 2005 Topps Finest. If you don’t like this one, you won’t like the rest because this one is hand-numbered for absolutely no good reason and the rest are stamped on the back like some sort of peasants. Speaking of peasants, how much do you think the person who hand-numbered all the HIGHEST NUMBERED autos from 2005 Topps Finest was getting paid? Not enough, I assure you.

Shane is back. In blueish Xfractor... ack.

There are a couple of Royals in 2005 Topps Finest. The one people other than me might care about is, of course, Mr. Billy “Country Breakfast” Butler himself. And, even though I’ve seen dozens of the cards from thisset in my searches, I stil have no idea what’s what. Is this a blue Xfractor?

Shane is... nah, just another xfractor with a different number.

And is this a red Xfractor? And should I capitalize the X? And should I hyphenate it? Or should I, as Night Owl does, refer to them as xrefractors? So many questions.

Shane gold, Ponyboy.

I know what this one is, though. It’s a gold refractor. Who doesn’t like a good gold refractor? Especially one you can get for a few bucks shipped right to your door. Shane is in an indy league right now, so I’m guessing this isn’t the best investment in my portfolio (incidentally, I think it’s utterly hilarious when people describe their baseball card collections as “portfolios” as if it makes it sound more adult or meaningful) but, being #/50, this is the hardest of the Shanes to track down in my collection. Someone keeps posting the black version #/10 on eBay and as awesome as it would be to go full rainbow on this bad boy, I’ve got to stick to my collecting guns else it gets out of control. As if 7 Shane Costa RC autographs isn’t already out of control.

4 comments to I’ve Been A-Costa’d!

  • Jon

    That Showbiz Pizza guy was a bitter, bitter man. There needs to be a Celebration Station documentary now.

    You think the guy hand-numbering has it bad, what about the dude that has to double check his work and make sure the 1s don’t look like 7s and that he didn’t write something twice. Across the entire print run. That seems worse to me.

  • jon

    hi i was wondering if you will be doing any box/case breaks in the near future i am addicted to them ad need my fix

    • Great question! Nothing currently, but we’ll put out some feelers soon and see what people are interested in. Thanks for reading and, in the meantime, get your fix by joining Gint-A-Cuffs!

  • In regards to your question I always capitalize the X and the F and use a hyphen with regards to X-Fractor. I think it looks better, but I think that is a case of to each his own.

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