100th Custom Card (Plus a Giveaway)

If you're a blogger, artist, or any type of creative person, then you'll know about "the itch". 

 

That is, the creative itch. It's the need to tinker. To doodle. To goof around. To create something.

 

You can have so much fun with the process that time keeps going by without much notice. You finish one blog post or one project, and keep moving forward with the next one, and the one after that. If you add in all your other daily tasks and obligations, it's very easy to forget to look back on the catalog of stuff you've created over time.

Well, back in 2019 at Nine Pockets Headquarters, I created my very first custom card. It featured George Costanza on the 1956 Topps design, barreling into Bette Midler at home plate. (Clean play.)

 

Remarkably, it's now six years later. And after all that time I'm still having lots of fun coming up with new ideas for custom cards and seeing them through to fruition—and printing! It's always cool to have something that you've created in a tangible, physical form.

 

So, to mark the six-year milestone, I decided it was time to take a step back and look through all of my designs. The best way to do that? 

Set up a binder, of course.

 

 

 

It contains one copy of each card I've designed, including the commissioned projects I've done for fellow bloggers and trading card enthusiasts. It's fun to flip through the pages and reflect on how the ideas and designs have changed over the years—not to mention all the work that's been put in.

 

Being a collector myself, the next natural step was to count up the cards in the binder. I knew the total would be fairly close to 100, but I wondered just how close it would be.

 

To my surprise, I'd already surpassed it! 

 

If you include checklist cards and the commissioned cards, the number is 144. (Add some digital-only cards, and it's a bit higher.) Even if you remove those from the equation, the total still reaches over 100.

 

Fist pump.

But as exciting as the milestone is, I can't ignore the fact that I missed the chance to celebrate it in real time. So let's fix that.

 

First thing to do: 

Try to figure out which specific card design was the 100th.

For a while, I couldn't decide whether I should go with the 100th card I finished designing, or the 100th card that I actually printed out. Each of those options would produce a different result.

 

Eventually I figured I'd go with the 100th card that was printed. But looking through my order history reminded me that I always try to have a few different cards printed at the same time, to save on costs. I was able to narrow it down to one small batch of cards, but there's no way to know which card in that batch was the exact 100th to be printed and cut. (D'oh!)

 

In any case, here's the small batch:

 

And although there's no way of knowing which of these four cards was the actual 100th to roll off the printing presses, I decided to designate this one with the honor:

Choosing Mr. Costanza is fitting in a "full circle" kind of way. As I mentioned earlier, the very first custom I created also featured Georgie Boy. 

Second thing to do: 

How about holding a giveaway to help celebrate?

The first idea to cross my mind was to give away one copy of each custom card I've ever designed. And as fun as that would be, it's just waaay too big for my britches. I don't have nearly enough of a following to give away that many cards. Not even close. So, let's do this instead: 

 

We'll celebrate six years of designs by giving away one of the Costanza cards shown above to six different participants. 

The duck races that I've held for a couple of previous Nine Pockets giveaways seem to go over pretty well with readers, so I think I'll do that again. But this time, the top six finishers will be the six winners.

To enter the giveaway, just add a comment to this post. That's all you have to do. I'll keep the entry period open through next Sunday, September 21st. Then I'll close it out and get those ducks ready to race.

 

With this milestone now officially in the process of being celebrated, I'll turn it over to all of you creative folks out there:  

 

Have you hit any milestones lately, be it through blogging, creative work, card collecting, or anything else?

 

Share some good ones in the comment section. And here's to more milestones for all of us!

PS: Feel free to share this giveaway with some other trading card bloggers and collectors out there. I want to make sure we have at least six participants.