It was inevitable that I would start collecting again. While I knew I couldn’t live vicariously through Josh’s collection forever, the combination of building Zistle and finding my childhood collection intensified my hunger for starting up again. After some deliberation, I decided to begin by building a football collection. It is by far my favorite sport and since Josh collects baseball, our collections would complement each other.

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.