Zistle’s football library just grew substantially thanks to Mike from Nearmint’s Vintage Football Cards. Mike graciously shared the beautiful scans featured on his reference site the Vintage Football Card Gallery with Zistle and we are extremely excited. I mean you can just see from the image of his site above that these scans are beautiful. If you haven’t checked out the gallery, it is a well-designed site that contains various football sets from 1948-1975 with great images and more information than most sites.

Mike got back into the hobby after a friend got him hooked on 1989 ProSet. After a short time, he started collecting cards from his childhood and in 1999 started selling cards on Ebay.  When Ebay raised thier prices in 2001, Mike launched his own sales site Nearmint Vintage Football Cards and never looked back. TheVintage Football Card Gallery grew from the sales site and 98-99% of the cards in the gallery were at one time in Mike’s own personal collection or sold through his site–meaning that he has spent quite a bit of time with his scanner.

Mike is a true Zistle hero. Not only does he run a fabulous site selling vintage football cards but he has created an amazing resource for vintage football card collectors. We are truly honored that his gallery is now a part of the Zistle library.

So for Christmas, we adventured to our local hobby store and I decided on a box of 2007 Upper Deck Artifacts hoping that I might get lucky and score an Adrian Peterson rookie card. I wasn’t quite that lucky but I was extremely pleased with my pulls from my first box break. I scored four  relic cards including a Michael Vick, which supposedly Upper Deck removed from all of their 2007 releases. TO was another great one for me.

I pulled six rookies as well including a gold parallel of Trent Edwards numbered to 99. I also nabbed a red parallel of Philip Rivers numbered to 99.

I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get an autograph but the shop owner made it up to me by giving me a Jay Cutler rookie (since we share the same last name). A nice touch I wouldn’t get with an online retailer.

My first box break was awesome but using Zistle to add the cards to my collection and using the Box Breaks feature was by far more exciting. For the first time, I could enter my box breaks and build my collection using the site that we had been laboring over the last few months. Pretty cool.