Category: Collecting

500 Postcards!

November 11, 2021

Yesterday I received my 500th Postcrossing card from Anastajia in Russia:

Reminds you of a certain film doesn’t it?

It was six months ago I passed 150 cards so I’ve been receiving them at the rate of about 25 a month. Since the last update I’ve received cards from 7 additional countries, to a total to 49:

There’s still a long way to go though: there’s users from 206 countries on Postcrossing! Looking at the above chart the average travel times have gone up by a few days compared to six months ago, no doubt due to the pandemic. And as usual it takes about a week longer for me to receive cards than for those I sent them to to get them.

The cards are as weird and varied as ever, helped no doubt by me saying in my profile that I like weird cards! Here’s a couple of notables from this last six months:

That’s a card from Belarus and as you can see the sender matched the stamp to the card. This is the third time this has happened and I’m always impressed since it couldn’t be easy!

That’s an old advertising card I received from Germany. The card is clearly very old (it’s heavily yellowed on the reverse) and a quick google search showed the program it advertises screened in the early 1950s. Could this be a 70 year old card?!?

As always I love the stamps, and the majority of users seem to as well since most put effort into using pretty or unusual examples.

I received a card from Guernsey (a small not-country in the English Channel) which is one of the smallest regions in the world to have its own postal service. While the queens portrait gives a hint as to the connection with Royal Mail, I’ve always been intrigued by these small independent island that have their own mail and it was a treat to get this card.

Look at this gigantic Indonesian stamp! I’ve got some massive stamps from Russia but I think this must be the new record for big stamps!

And then there’s this from a sender in Austria. The stamp and surround perfectly fit into the envelope into which he put the postcard. He mentioned he was an avid stamp collector but he is now aging and is giving away his collection. Amazingly he also included a United Nations first day cover in the envelope:

I’ve never sent a card back to a sender (that’s not how Postcrossing works) but I made an exception in this case and sent him one plastered with a variety of retro stamps.

At 500 received (and 502 sent) I’m now well above the average for US users (which is about 100 cards) but well, well below the top ranks, which is over 14,000 cards for a US user and more than an absurd 33,000 cards for any user (in this case, a German). In fact this German guy has sent an average of 7 cards a day since he signed up about 13 years ago. Imagine the time and cost!

So my next target would be 1000 cards, which at this rate should be in about July 2023. I’ll update when it happens and we’ll see how close my prediction was 🙂

Pokeos

November 6, 2021

There’s recently been stories popping up on social media about Pokemon biscuits/cookies selling for thousands. Naturally, it was time to strike it rich.

We bought two bags of them. The Oreos feature 16 different Pokémon designs but are otherwise unremarkable (no different colour or flavours). They look cute though.

There’s sixteen different designs, one of which is ‘super rare’ (according to a press release put out by the manufacturer). In our first pack we got thirteen of the varieties, not including the rare one.

They were tasty though, and we bought a second pack. We got one Pokemon we hadn’t seen in the first, but still no rare version.

The rare one is ‘Mew’, which was a cute choice since Mew was the rarest Pokémon in the original game. About a month ago word spread on social media that Mew Oreos were selling for ‘thousands’ on eBay, and before you knew it there were hundreds of listings, made by people hoping to strike it rich. Still today, you’ll find ~~fools~~ people hoping for a payout:

Of course they aren’t selling for these prices at all, and likely never did. Surprise, surprise, but the stories that initially claimed as much didn’t have a lot of facts to back them up, and (as usual) the internet was happy to spread the story without bothering to verify it. Mews were selling on eBay, but for only a few dollars. And apparently 99% of the listings never sell.

The truth is that the Mew Oreo isn’t that rare at all. I’ve read maybe one in four packs, so for about $15 (the cost of 4 packs) you’d have about a 70% chance of getting your own. Think about that before bidding $1,000,000 on that eBay auction!

Madness aside these are decent Oreos, but don’t hold a candle to the Trolls ones from last year that included pop rocks in the cream! Let’s hope they bring them back at some point 🙂

Hexagons!

October 17, 2021

Back in 2015 Topps released an unusual ‘collectible’ product called Galactic Connexions. Basically they were Star Wars hard plastic tokens with pictures on them:

They were Wal-Mart exclusives, not particularly easy to find in stores, and as far as I thought at the time, a very strange product that seemed like it didn’t have much of a market.

The ‘hexagons’ (which I’ll call them from now on) came in three base rarities (grey, black and clear plastic) with three further rarity levels based on the sticker finish (normal, foil, patterned foil).

In addition there were several levels of chase hexagon available in a variety of colours and foils, including stupendously rare 14k solid gold hexagons available via a redemption.

There’s also an additional rarity in the form of the blue ‘star field’ hexagons that were only available in promo bags given out at a Star Wats event at Walmart in 2015. This was in fact the first hexagons I got, since KLS happened upon a handout of these promo bags one day when she went shopping.

The backs of the hexagons are all the same, only with the ‘1st edition’ removed for later releases. Weirdly I have a single disc with the sticker from the back on each side. Was it some sort of promo? I forget…

So what are these for? We’ll it’s actually a game! Players form ‘decks’ of seven hexagons and score points by placing them adjacent to others a bit like dominoes. Scoring is slightly complicated and depends on the colour of the hexagons, the character shown and the lines at the edges of the image. I’ve never played the game, but I’ve read it gets boring almost instantly.

So they’re basically collectibles. A plastic hexagonal trading card, if you will. Given that almost all of them occur at each rarity then it’s a weird product to try to collect (since there could be up to 17 versions of each hexagon), and they’re not really as attractive as the average trading card. They’re also somewhat heavy in large quantities and trickier to store than cards. As I said, this is a strange product.

As far as I could tell at the time these failed quickly and spectacularly. I only purchased a couple of packets of them when they first came out, but I remember finding them in the clearance section within weeks. When series 2 and 3 came out within the next few months, they seemed to instantly be on clearance and I don’t remember paying full price for more than a very few of the 100 or so I now own. Series 3 was particularly tricky to find, probably because the line had failed by then and most Walmart’s didn’t stock them.

So I bought some, opened them, stuck them in a tin and forgot about them for 6 years. Then – to my amazement – I found three packs of series 3 at a local Walmart just a few weeks ago. And much like 5+ years ago, they were in the clearance bin!

Naturally I bought them, and opened them up. I retrieved the tin, took them all out for a second look (and this blog post) and was amused to see that I didn’t have any of the new hexagons I just opened. Unfortunately I didn’t get the redemption hexagon for the 14k gold one, which was probably for the best since the mailing date expired five years ago!

Now they’re all safely packed back into their tin, where they will probably stay forever 🙂

Robot Claw