20 in 20....in 2021

 So, back in about September, I bought a big lot of cards which honestly, I haven't touched, other than getting the smoke smell out of three binders which were obviously out in such an area, while the rest of the cards were from a different collection (the guy I bought from bought collections and sold everything that didn't fit his collecting goals).

The good news on the smell front - the cards generally don't smell at all...well, maybe a bit of a lingering Febreeze smell, but I'd take that over smoke. Some of the cards have a bit of visible damage in those, but we will get to that another day.

Anyway, here is what the collection (which was for $60 Canadian) looked like...

The binders and all the pages were thrown while emptying and taking care of the smell on those cards, everything else was simple cleaned up into a neat pile in the corner, waiting for the start of this year.

The plan for 2021, to go through this who thing day by day, and see if I can do it well enough to finish it at the end of this year.

On pure guess, I am thinking there are 20k cards here, so how much I get through on a give day with vary, but roughly 50 cards a day I would guess.

Like I did with the Santa Lot, I'll keep a good tally of what has come out of the lot, and a nice breakdown as well - should be fun on it's own and in comparison to that lot from a few years ago.

It isn't just sports - definitely some non-sports stuff in there, which although I don't collect per se, will be interesting to dive into, and although I am sure some sports and players will be missing (if I were to guess, say Gretzky from hockey, Jeter from baseball, for example), I don't think there is a ton of skimming, and at a glance, there are still Jays and Leafs from what I saw, so I won't be shut out on what I end up keeping.

So only really one goal for 2021 - have a blast going through this bunch of cards - and I guess - seeing what I can keep, but also, I have some people in mind and what they collect, so should be able to send some decent stuff off to others this year as well.

Without further ado, let's take the first item for today...

We start with not one, but two of these little binders which are 4 cards per page.

What we have in each, is a complete base set of 1996 Score WLAF - World League of American Football - exactly as the little binders detail.

Each binder had an insert card too...

So apparently the factory set of base cards also came with one of six team insert cards. That's a bit annoying since that means the only cards you would be missing from the full release, if you bought a team set, would be the five other insert cards.

So obviously here we have two factory sets in perfectly fine condition.

I do remember the league being around in the 90s, but never really watched or followed it. In short, the WLAF was initially an attempt by the NFL to have football in the offseason (there were North American teams originally when it started in the early 90s). It then changed to a European only league when they felt it was cannibalizing the NFL fan base instead of complimenting it. It then turned into NFL Europe and more of a feeding system to the NFL.

Now, the league is a memory, but it did pave the way for fandom in Europe and without the league, there probably wouldn't be near as much love for American Football from European fans.