Bought these online, which are my sons 3 fav players (PSA 10 too): Giannis, Luka, Steph. 🔥🔥🔥

My first post here is to thank Collector Creative and Onmantel for this giveaway. Truly an amazing 1/1 piece (hypnotic variation). Honoring the 2024 National with Cleveland greats LeBron James, Jim Brown and Jim Thome. I can't wait to see more collabs like this piece in the future.

Amidst all the baseball cards and Star Wars tie-ins of Topps’ long history lie rarer, one-off oddities, like the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Fun Pak released in 1988. The set came out in the middle of the children’s show’s five-year run from 1986 to 1990 – the biggest era for the Pee-Wee Herman character and the same year that the franchise peaked in both popularity and merchandising value. 

The cards were just one part of a massive pop culture wave at the time, and today, they remain a curious and colorful addition to any collection.

For fans of Topps’ more retro cards, the Fun Pak set will likely evoke a good deal of nostalgia. In addition to the 33 base cards – each with two background art variants – the set included stickers, checklists, lenticular cards, tattoo sheets, and a variety of punch-out cards. That last category featured “secret disguise” cards that could be worn as masks, “puppet” cards with holes arranged for card play, foldables, and even “door” cards with an openable door smack dab in the middle.



https://ripped.topps.com/1988-topps-pee-wees-playhouse-fun-pak-card-culture/

Popped in a break hosted by KK Sportscards and landed the NY Mets. Nothing crazy but a photo variation is never a bad day.

This is my first post on Mantel, so I had to make it a big one...

Back in 2021, a group of friends and I won the auction for Lionel Messi's membership card from his boyhood club in Rosario, Argentina: Newell's Old Boys

We paid ~ $180,000, which is obviously a lot of money, but it still felt like a steal to us as his rookie card from the 2004-05 Panini Megacracks set (19 of which are PSA 10's) were selling for multiples of that figure at the time, yet this card was and is:

— A 1 of 1, that Messi presumably carried with him for six years during his time at Newell's academy.
— His earliest known autograph.
— Representative of the first chapter in the story of the greatest footballer of all-time.

We kept it quiet for the past couple of years, but given Inter Miami are hosting Newell's tonight in Miami for a friendly (I'll be there!) we decided to post about it.

Here's the thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/brennanjp/status/1758179809383866692