Being a low-budget set collector, I’ve never been one to pay much attention to Topps’ higher-end product or online offerings. But thanks to a cool contest from Rod of Padrographs fame, I am now the proud owner of two such items. Best of all, they didn’t cost me a dime. From an extensive list of possible prizes the Rod offered I chose these two magnificent Project 2020 cards:
I chose the Ryan card because it’s great reminder to me that the 1969 Topps Nolan Ryan #533 is one of just four cards I need to finish my 1969 set. And of course I had to choose the Jackie Robinson card because he grew up not far from where I live. In fact, I always drove past his old high school when I drove to work (before the pandemic). And when I arrive in the parking lot , there stands a statue of Jackie in his football uniform. But that was before the pandemic.
The artist of both cards is Joshua Vides who happens to be based here in my neck of the woods (SoCal). I think what I like most about these cards is that the player’s image is pretty much the same as on the original cards but other elements of the cards (borders, nameplate, background, etc.) show more artistic license. In my opinion, Mr. Vides created great artistic versions of Nolan’s ’69 Topps card and Jackie’s ’52 Topps card. These are definitely keepers.
A sincere Stadium Fantasium standing ovation goes out to Rod for his generosity. As of this writing, Rod is running Phase 2 of his blog contest. Like Phase 1, all you have to do is visit his Padrographs blog and leave a comment helping him choose what cards will go into his Padres Phrankenset binder. Thanks Rod!
My apologies to anyone who may have noticed and gotten confused by recent Stadium Fantasium “posts”. In my determined effort use RSS to make my blogroll look more like the ones found in Blogger/Blogspot blogs, I accidentally turned my blog into a RSS feed aggregator. This caused my blog to find some of the latest articles by fellow hobby bloggers and automatically post them as my own. I deleted those erroneous posts but my Twitter account still shows tweets announcing those posts. D’oh! I removed those RSS widgets and deactivated the RSS plugins so hopefully the problem has been solved.
Stay tuned…


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I came around on the Project 2020 cards enough to buy one and I had a couple more sent my way. They look nice on display.
Great old-school video! 1987 ruled.