Further Adventures in Custom Trading Cards

I'm really having a great time making custom trading cards lately, especially when there's an event that I can piece together to make a fantastic collectible.  We attended the Los Angeles Kings v. New York Islanders tilt on Saturday night having gotten tickets to support the Girl Scouts Family Night at Staples.  This being our second game of the season we were really pumped to see a Kings victory.  When I found out that we'd be getting to see Martin Jones second start in the NHL I got really excited, yes I know a true hockey fan shouldn't get happy over a rookie goaltender, but I really think that Jones, age 23, could be the future of the franchise, not that current starter (since Jonathan Quick got injured) Ben Scrivens is chopped liver.

Martin Jones getting ready for his NHL Debut against the Duckies.

Jones first NHL game came on Tuesday of last week, facing the hated Anaheim Ducks.  His numbers were pretty darn good in the regular session and even better in the overtime.  He stopped 25 of 27 shots in regulation and one in overtime.  The only goals he allowed were a tip in by Ryan Getzlaf where he was screened badly and an early 3rd period power-play goal by Corey Perry The Kings got goals by Jeff Carter to start the scoring and then when they were down 2 - 1 with about 15 minutes left in regulation the Captain Dustin Brown tied it up on a wrister.  After the overtime we go to a shootout these days.  The Kings have the second best shootout record in the NHL currently, with 5 wins to only 2 losses, however both of those losses happened recently, one against Buffalo in the game where Quickie got injured and Scrivens had to come in for the 1:20 remaining in the overtime and face the Sabres one-on-one.  Versus the Ducks neither team had any success in the shootout for the first EIGHT rounds!  Jones made some incredible saves that looked nearly impossible and Dwight King finally put it past Jonas Hiller in the 9th round.  It was a beaut and good enough to give Jones his first NHL victory.

It was Larry Murphy Legends night on Saturday, which meant two things; one we each got a nice Murphy bobblehead and two the Kings wore their throwback Purple and Gold uniforms, which really looked incredible in person contrasted with the old-school white and orange Isles sweaters.  Everything was set up to be a great game, but in the first period with no scoring and lackluster play from the home squad it really wasn't looking that great for our boys.  Until Anze Kopitar received a fantastic pass from Alec Martinez fought off Travis Hamonic and went top shelf against Poulin.  I've never seen a prettier goal in person to be honest.  It starts at about 1:09 of this video.



Dustin Brown scored his second goal in two straight games in the third and ROY candidate Tyler Toffoli added an empty netter for Jones first shut-out.  He wasn't even that busy, he only had to make 16 saves, and only a couple of them were really quality scoring chances.  This kid looks incredible and I'm really happy to have been able to see him play in one of his first games of his hopefully long and storied career.

We actually got three physical tickets for the game, something that is in short supply these days.  With the home printing of tickets and scanners at the game making sure everyone has a bonafide seat there just aren't that many stubs made for each game.  After my success with the Don Rickles Cut Signature Card I really wanted to make more cards.  What better memorabilia to embed than our own ticket stubs?  I used Topps 2009 Ticket to Stardom Baseball set as inspiration and I'm pretty happy with the results.  I'm making two this time, even though we have three tickets, one has to go into my ticket stub scrapbook.

One of these is going to my daughter, I'm keeping the other.  She said she's going to hold onto it forever and give it to her kids.  She's seven.  Now she wants to make her own trading cards, good thing I have some canvas types that she can just draw on, because there's no way I'm giving her an exacto-knife.

Adventures in Custom Card Making

A couple of months ago I found myself wandering around the massive new arts and craft store Michaels with my wife.  Perusing the artists' supplies I found several packets of blank trading cards, both canvas and thick card stock and best of all they were on clearance costing me about 50 cents per pack.  I dutifully bought several dollars worth and promptly forgot about them.

Cut to a couple months later and we bought a brand new Brother all-in-one Scanner/Printer, that has spectacular color printing.  After yet another clearance purchase of some thick card stock I had the brilliant idea of creating my own trading cards.

My first effort is this lovely piece of my family and I meeting Thor on the first day of the Treasures of Asgard experience at Disneyland.

My process was pretty simplistic, I grabbed a couple of pics off the internet because my own pics of the exhibit weren't that great.  I then laid everything out in Word, because I'm not a PaintShop expert.  Printed, glued and trimmed, it's a great effort, but nowhere near perfect.  Still I'm rather proud of my 1/1 card.

 Recently I was gifted with a cut signature of the legendary insult comic Don Rickles.  I won't say how I obtained it, but my first impulse was to make my own cut-signature card featuring "Mr. Warmth" in one of my favorite roles, Crapgame from Kelly's Heroes.  Honestly if I could obtain them, I'd make cut sigs of all the stars of that movie, and there's a TON.  Clint Eastwood and Donald Sutherland are still alive and shouldn't be too hard to obtain.  Telly Savalas has been gone for almost two decades so his sigs are out there but they are getting expensive.  A quick perusal of eBay says I can get one from a certified check for about $90.  That seems a bit too pricey for me to simply cut it up and put it in a trading card that I'm never going to sell anyway.  Still it's a dream and you never know with dreams.

Here's the Don Rickles card:

Now on the Thor card I simply transcribed the narration of the event itself (from my own video I might add).  For the back of the Kelly's Heroes card I wrote my own copy.  I'm especially happy with the pic on the front of the card which is straight from the theatrical poster.  I love the expression on Crapgame's face, and that gun, if you've watched the movie, is a point of contention for the Sarge.  Now I haven't met Mr. Rickles, but I sure would like to, just to say "Hi" and thank him for years of laughter.

I have no idea what my next card will be, I'd like to try a memorabilia card with a swatch of Jersey or fabric embedded.  I own a Los Angeles Kings practice worn jersey from the Gretzky era, but I have no idea who actually wore the jersey.  So while it would be fairly simple to cut a small swatch off the jersey without ruining it completely, I'd like to picture someone on the card that I knew wore the jersey.  However at this point it's impossible to prove the provenance of the piece, even when I purchased it from the Kings themselves (though the Art of the Game store at Staples Center) they didn't know who wore it either.

I also own a piece of fabric that came from the same bolt that was used for uniforms in Star Trek Nemesis but I'm not sure exactly where that fabric happens to reside at the moment.  I'm also thinking that a ticket stub card would be cool, though these days you don't always get physical tickets when you go to a sporting event.  Though oddly enough we have tickets for tonight's Kings v. Islanders tilt at Staples and we do have physical tickets, and since it's Girls Scouts night, and Larry Murphy Bobblehead night a card featuring one of our stubs from tonight's game would be really neat, especially with a cool pic from the game.  Hmm...

Custom Cards are IN!

Way back in October I told you that I ordered some custom cards to be made of my daughter from Topps through a promotion with Nestlé Drumsticks Ice Cream. They arrived last week and I couldn't be happier with them. OK that's not ENTIRELY true, I would have preferred that the name be done in foil just like the standard issue cards, but that's not a deal-breaker here.

Check them out:

A person could take one of these cards, mix it in with other '08 Topps baseball cards, and you probably wouldn't notice the difference. In fact, that's what I wanted to do to tease my mother on Thanksgiving, but the only place that was open where I could buy a pack of cards didn't have any '08 base, I had to buy a pack of Co-Signers, which SUCKED. Still it was a Topps Pack, so I mixed in the card and handed the pack to my Mom and said "Hey Mom, check out this pack of cards I got, it's really interesting." She looked through a couple and said "Yeah, that's nice." She didn't get it at first. I had to tell her to keep looking. Of course, I had pre-ruined the surprise by telling her that I had ordered them. BUT you could easily fool a loved one with these cards, they're that close to the real deal.

My plan is to actually take older pics of my baby and have a 2006 and 2007 version made up, and then have one card made up for every year of her life. Of course, that might get expensive, but she's my baby, she's worth it.

Custom Cards on a Budget

Readers, have you ever want to make your own custom trading cards? Well, you can on the web in a number of places. Both Topps and Upper Deck have programs on their sites that let you upload your own images and create your own text. Problem is that they tend to be not on the cheap side. Upper Deck's program "My Own Trading Cards" program is currently being updated, which is good because the previous iteration of the program had only a few uninspiring designs, none of which were actually based on real Upper Deck cards.

Topps actually offers quite a few designs, including classic set designs like '59, '72, '74, '75, '76, '77, '87, '07 and '08, as well as a couple of nifty insert types AND Wacky Packages templates. Not only do they have nicer templates, but they also offer a number of different color selections within each template so you can really customize your cards. You also get to include as much information as you can fit on the back of a card, if you have a little-leaguer you can put his or her actual stats, or you can make up your own. The pricing is not great though, the most expensive package is the 5 cards for $10 deal, and the cheapest is 1000 cards for $420, so it ranges from 42 cents to $2 per card depending on your quantity. The cards are supposed to be printed on the same presses as their retail cards. At some point I'd love to order cards of my daughter once a year so that I have a complete set!

There are, of course, many many other companies that will do pretty much the same thing, and most of them have really nice templates, though you can only get official designs from Topps and UD. The nice thing about third-party presses is that the pricing won't be quite as steep, you're looking at between 25 cents and $1.00 per card depending on quantity.

BUT this is the BUDGET Sports Card Collector, I wouldn't be doing my job very well if I didn't have a deal to tell you about. Nestle's Drumstick Ice Cream has been running a promotion all Summer, and it's still going on now that gets you 16 Custom Topps cards for the bargain price of $4.19 in shipping plus two product codes from Drumstick packages. Here's the real secret, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY THE ICE CREAM - simply copy down the codes off of two packages in the store, and go to this site to start off your cards.



You don't get the same selection of cards, only the last three years' worth of designs, which actually has one design that's not available on their mainstream site (the 2006 design). The text options on the back isn't quite as good either, and you don't get to put on a card number like you do with the paid versions, but hey, they're a lot cheaper. I just ordered a set of cards of my daughter today, and here's the pics:





Personally I love custom trading cards, and I already have two of them of myself. One I made in 1992 at the All-Star Fantasy-Fest when the Baseball All-Star game was held at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. They had a booth set up where you took a picture in front of a backdrop in your favorite team's uniform and they printed it on a trading card. These aren't the same stock as normal cards, and the photo isn't near the quality of a retail card, but they're still nice, and they were free. I got a second one done at the Hockey fan-fest when the Hockey All-Star game was held at Staples Center, and that's pictured below. I also got to touch and take a picture with the Stanley Cup that day, so it was all good. My biggest complaint is the back of the card, the stats are nowhere NEAR realistic, but again, it was free.



I love the fact that I played in 76 out of 80 games, but that 3.2 Goals Against has GOT to come down if my team is going anywhere...

So has anyone else ever had custom cards done? Got pics?