SCB Has Relocated...

Due to the spam that has overrun this blog's email I have relocated SCB to the following URL: http://soccercardsblog.blogspot.com/  - Notice the only difference is the "s" after card, should make tyhe transition easy.

Cashing In On Spain's Historic Dominance

Little less than a week ago Spain were crowned 2012 European champions in impressive fashion after defeating Italy with a resounding 4-0 scoreline. After their latest conquest there's now even talk of this Spain team being the greatest national side of all time and at the center of Spain's historic success has been the UEFA Player of the Tournament, 'Don' Andrés Iniesta.

Recently I came accross this auction for an extremely scarce Iniesta Panini autograph. This is one of only two certified autos he has out there, mind you I'm not counting any dubious Futera autos he may have. Apparently the card ended up selling for ¥74,500 (see below) which at the current conversion rate from yen to dollars, comes out to nearly $1,000 USD!

Big PC Mailday!

Just picked up this sweet Rafa Márquez autographed jersey. A few of these cards had popped up on eBay before but I had missed out on them so I pounced at the chance to finally pick this one up. This card's also the last of Marquez's 3 different certified autos I had yet to add to my collection. There is one minor error - The back of the card states: "We hope you enjoy this piece of hockey history" - Fail!

Still an awesome card though.

Beware Of Fake Autographs On eBay

Check out this horrible, 2010 Upper Deck World of Sports fake David Beckham auto I came accross on eBay. There's so many things wrong with this shitty attempt at Beckham's signature that it's not even funny. First of all the signature is nowhere near a genuine Becks sig, see below for the authentic UD Man Utd example.

Second of all notice how the "World of Sports" lettering is red on these un-signed base cards pictured below of Beckham and Thierry Henry. There were autographed parallels of these base cards but those had a guarantee of authenticity on the back and the visible difference of "World of Sports" text in blue, as can be seen further down.

The actual certified parallel autos from this set have the aforementioned blue lettering and the sticker auto such as Pablo Mastroeni and Beckham himself who does have an autographed parallel although it does not feature his signature on the sticker but rather that of former MLSer Luciano Emílio. See this link for more info on that error auto.

Sadly it appears some bidders have fallen for the fast one this seller is trying to pull.

2002 Panini World Cup (Japanese Edition) 5 Box Break

I recently picked up several boxes of this older Panini World Cup collection and as you can see from this side of the box picture (click on image to enlarge) this is the more rare and complete Japanese version of the product which has a deeper checklist than it's counterpart released in Europe and around the rest of the World.

Also of particular interest is that this Japanese set had product exclusive autograph cards of 12 different players with a print run of 100 each, see checklist below.

A1    Ronaldo - Brazil /100
A2    Lilian Thuram - France /100
A3    Igor Tudor - Croatia /100
A4    Gianluigi Buffon - Italy /100
A5    Paolo Maldini - Italy /100
A6    Francesco Totti - Italy /100
A7    Christian Vieri - Italy /100
A8    Nakata Hidetoshi - Japan /100
A9    Ono Shinji - Japan /100
A10   Yanagisawa Atsushi - Japan /100
A11   Rui Costa - Portugal /100
A12   Álvaro Recoba - Uruguay /100

- Check this thread over on FCF (Football Cards Forum) for the complete collection checklist. -

So I busted 5 of these boxes over the last 3 days hopeful of pulling an auto but realizing that with only 1,200 signed cards to be found it was probably going to be quite unlikely. I'm guessing the majority have already been pulled and are now tucked away in collector's private collections. With that in mind I would settle for completing as much of the rest of the master set which includes two other chase card sets to collect, 'Flag Player' foil inserts and 'Japan National Team Players' special cards.

Now on to the results:

Box 1 - From this first box the "hits" I pulled were a F12 Augustine "Jay-Jay" Okocha, F13 José Luis Chilavert and J1, J2, J3 & J23 Japanese player inserts.

Box 2 - This box produced F1 Émile, F19 Álvaro Recoba, F20 Earnie Stewart, J5, J7, J11 and J12.

Box 3 - From this one I got F4 Jon Dahl Tomasson, F5 Oliver Kahn, F6 Zinedine Zidane, J7, J11 and J12. Curiously all of the 'J' inserts in this box were duplicates from the last box, poor collation...

Box 4 - This box was definitely the most productive. To my pleasant surprise it was quite loaded with some packs even contaning 2 hits! Which were F8 Francesco Totti, F9 Nakata Hidetoshi, F10 Hong Myung-Bo, F11 Juan Francisco Palencia, J18, J19, J20, J21 and J22.

Box 5 - Unfortunately in this box all of the hits, save for one 'J' insert, were dupes that I had pulled in earlier boxes. F5 Kahn, F6 Zidane, J7, J9, J11 and J12.

Update - I ended up opening up a sixth box in hopes of getting closer to completing the inserts sets but alas no luck. All of the hits were dupes, in fact this box #6 was almost the same as box #4. As for the hits, F9 Nakata, F10 Hong, F11 Palencia, J20, J21 and J22.

Here are the scans of the hits from the entire bust. Notice at the bottom the Roberto Baggio and Eto'o base cards, these were probably the biggest names to be entirely omitted from the European realese that were indeed included in this Japanese edition.

Hope yous all enjoyed the pics and break, overall I have to say it was very enjoyable for me. Solid product.