Time Traveling through the decades

 Like last year, my first cards from this year's set have come to me via the Diamond Jesters Time Travel Trade. He buys a pack of the current year's cards and begins the process of working backwards through time by trading each card for something older.

Everyone's been ragging on this set, but now that I have them in hand, other than the small print I like it well enough. A lot of people have been calling it the Donruss set. The diagonal design does bring '86 Donruss to mind. I didn't realize it also mimicked the '87 design's stripe of baseballs on the middle edge until seeing them in person. I like those designs though, so those callbacks are OK by me. And you can do some fun things with the way the diagonal slashes are aligned:

Time-hopping a bit, I picked up some pretty big names from the '80s. '85 Football is one of my favorite designs, so it was nice to get a big star from that set. Kind of ironic seeing OJ Anderson, future Giants Super Bowl hero, running over a few Giants, including George Martin and Beasley Reece, on his '83 Topps sticker.

The best part of the time travel trades, of course, is the vintage baseball. Sadly, Ed Armbrister passed away while his rookie card was on it's way to me. Still, a Hall-of-Fame All-Star and a couple of early '60s cards will always put a smile on my face.