The Troll's Take on the Million Card Giveaway, In Both Senses of the Phrase...

I have scanned a lot of cards today and I am ready for some serious posting. I also got my car back (early) and it didn’t explode when I turned the key, that is a good thing. It actually looks just as bad as it did-not a bit worse. I also went by the post office today. It was a postal holiday, so I couldn’t get the packages out that I need to ship, but I was able to empty my box. 18 packages, 18 freaking packages!!!! WOW! I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks. I will somehow get to posting all of these. I do really appreciate everything. Sets are getting closer, personal collections are growing and basically I am surrounded by some fine new cardboard and I haven’t even opened half the packages I got. I do want to thank everyone, but I also want to chime in with my two cents on the Million Card Giveaway. I had 6 of these TMC inserts. I put them in my binder with the rest of the set and the inserts. I even made a note of the cards that I was missing. I hadn’t thought much of it really. I didn’t ACTUALLY READ the back of the card-I just tossed them into the random insert pile when I opened the packs. I didn’t think of it until last night when I got home from work and started checking blogs and the Cardboard Junkie mentioned something about it. I tried to go to Topps Million dot com, it didn’t work and I eventually fell asleep. This morning, before and after class, I noticed the address saved in my computer’s address bar and went there. The site was actually “working” at this point-I could see that there were recent redemptions, but I got the white screen treatment when I tried to log-in. I gave up pretty quick as I had other things to do. After getting my car back and hitting the jackpot at the post office I decided to go to Target and buy 10 more packs of 2010 Topps. Now I am REALLY overwhelmed! SO much great stuff to write about and I don’t know where to start! Actually I do. I am starting with the Million Card Giveaway. With my 10 extra packs I received 2 more TMC cards to give me a total of 8. At around 8:00 PM (Eastern) I was able to create a user name and log-in. There were a few set-backs and I AM AT WORK, but the process of unlocking 8 cards while occasionally paying attention to customers took about an hour and a half. I was honestly as excited waiting to see which card I had unlocked as I was ripping the packs. I thank the Cardboard Junkie for the reminder and I also blame him for the system crash. He IS the king of the blog-o-sphere and him bringing it up at midnight surely caused his MILLIONS, make kajillions of readers to immediately attempt to log on to Topps dot com. Damn you dayf! You and your readers! Anyway, it was a REALLY nice bonus from Topps. Remember that you are getting a 1 in 6 chance at pulling a TMC code card inside of a 2 dollar pack of cards that will have 11 other cards in it. That is a really NICE bonus. I actually got excited pulling 2 more of these cards and I got more excited when I was able to redeem them. I don’t think that Topps anticipated dayf mentioning the live date and therefore didn’t have the tech issues figured out in time, BUT it is running fairly smoothly now. Before I was able to redeem anything, I did have a thought pop in my head. It hurt. It happened as I was taking the bus to the body shop to pick up my car. I starting thinking about what I spent shipping out cards on the group break. I still have a few more to ship, but I sent out 25 packages (with extras) and it came to 68 bucks. Granted some went out of the country and I went priority with a few (which was my stupid fault), but it was around 70 bucks worth of shipping. I COULD add in the cost ($3,000) of my car accident on the way to the post office, the missed work and the medical bills, but I will leave it at 70 bucks. Anyway, I started feeling sorry for Topps imagining all of the shipping charges that they would be stuck with when they mailed out these one million cards. I almost didn’t want to redeem my 8 TMC cards because I didn’t want Topps to waste money and destroy the environment so I could receive a 1989 Dwight Smith that I may potentially throw away. With that thought in my mind I decided to check the fine print. In order to actually receive the cards that you UNLOCK, you must have a credit card, share it with Topps and pay $2.92 for the first card and 53 cents for each additional card. THEN, 4 to 6 weeks later, you will receive your 1989 Dwight Smith card. From experience I know that you can ship about 50 cards for $2.92, AT LEAST. I know that Topps has to pay shipping and receiving people, blah, blah, blah, but this promotion is supposed to be geared towards kids right? Kids don’t have credit cards. Hell, I don’t have a credit card. That part of the deal sucks. Anyway, I had to get that out, now here are the 8 cards I unlocked. Oh, the cards scanned in here are some of the “hits” that I got out of the packs. Yes, there is a lot of Tommy Hanson cards shown here, no I am not a Hanson, yes some of them might be tradeable, no I don't know where the black one came from. No morewords on them (that will come later), they are just pics to break up the text before the excitement of the cards that I unlocked, but will never actually get because I don’t have a credit card. Okay, here we go! I will say I was really excited and sweating a bit as I waited for my cards to be unlocked… (note: I unlocked all 8, but this is the first 2 for now...) Here is what I got: 1985 Topps Craig Lefferts 1985 Topps Father and Son Bob Skinner and Joel Skinner

Yes, this rant ran long as usual... I will post the rest little later on. Maybe I got a hit, you will have to stay tuned! Go Rays! troll out.