Contests & Giveaways

Contests & giveaways

SCA Tournament Challenge Winners

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Sports Card Album Tournament Challenge
Sports Card Album Tournament Challenge

March Madness, BABY! It feels like the tournament just began yesterday, but here we are on the precipice of the Championship game between Duke and Wisconsin. This year’s tournament has been chock-full of big-time shots, controversial calls, incredible comebacks, and huge upsets, which is par for the course for what many consider to be the greatest event in American sports.

We wanted to celebrate the biggest tournament of the year with our biggest giveaway of the year, so we enlisted the help of our friends at Upper Deck, BCW, and Blowout Cards. The prizes they donated will make you want to climb a ladder and cut down a net, regardless of how your team did in the tourney.

As we mentioned in our original post, we are giving away four prizes:

  1. Highest Score after Sweet 16
  2. Highest Score after Elite 8
  3. Highest Score after Final Four
  4. Highest Score after Championship Game

There were almost 200 entries into this competition, so the four of you who win should be very proud of how stupid-a** lucky you got on your bracket :-) Just kidding…we know you were probably up for many nights studying metrics and doing analysis on your favorite teams, right? However you got there, the following three winners have already been determined:

Highest Score after Sweet 16 : MiamiTrev2

Sweet 16 Winner

Highest Score after Elite 8 : brandon14234Elite Eight Winner

Highest Score after Final Four : TcolumbusFinal Four Winner

Thanks for making it easy on us by not having any ties. We will know who wins the Championship later tonight, and I will update this post. We have several brackets that are neck-and-neck so we are excited to see how the brackets shape up.

Huge thanks to everyone who participated and a special thanks to our sponsors for donating the amazing prizes. We are packing out the prizes right now and will notify the winners of their prizes as soon as they are ready to go.

Winners: Please email SCAcontests@gmail.com and tell us which part of the tournament you won in the “subject” line. Within the body of your email please include your name and mailing address.

Everyone: Please subscribe to our blog by adding your email address to the field at the top of this blog post, on the right sidebar. Blog subscribers typically have a better chance of winning giveaways since they are the first to know about contests/promotions. Also, if you haven’t looked into our PRO features yet, please do so and sign up!

DickVitale

 

SCA NCAA Tournament Challenge

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Sports Card Album Tournament Challenge
Sports Card Album Tournament Challenge

Welcome to the first ever Sports Card Album Tournament Challenge! We will be giving away a bunch of prizes to our faithful SCA members & fans…all you have to do is fill out your brackets!

Brackets must be filled out before the tournament begins. Each participant may enter up to FIVE (5) brackets! Prizes will be awarded for guessing the best Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final 4, and a grand prize will be awarded to the person who ends the tournament with the most points.

ESPN Screenshot
Click this image to enter the Tournament Challenge

We will also have a few “surprise” giveaways throughout the tournament. All you need to do to enter is to go to our group’s page on ESPN.com. If you’ve already created brackets, you can go into each bracket and simply add that bracket to the Sports Card Album group.

The password to join this group is: Collect

We hope you join us for some clutch shots, huge upsets, and awesome prizes! Big thanks to our sponsors Upper Deck, BCW Supplies, and Blowout Cards who will be providing the prizes!

A photo posted by @sportscardalbum on


 

Small Business Saturday 2014

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I am personally guilty of taking many things in my life for granted. From family, to friends, to the little things that make us happy, it is easy for us to get carried away in our day-to-day lives and forget to show appreciation to those people/places/things that bring joy to our lives.

Thanksgiving is a perfect time for us to reflect on our lives and give thanks for these things.

For those of us who collect cards, we have to appreciate the fact that we are even able to participate in such a cool hobby.

  • We must give thanks for the parents and siblings who taught us about cards.
  • We must give thanks for the friends who traded cardboard with us as kids.
  • We must give thanks for the great collecting-community online, with whom we share our hits.
  • And we must give thanks for the local card shop owners who struggle to make it in this crazy industry just because they love the hobby so much.

I grew up going to local card shops as a kid in California. Many years later, there aren’t many things I enjoy more than spending an afternoon with Charlie and Jeff at my favorite LCS in San Antonio, Sports Cards Plus. We chat about our favorite sports teams, rip on players we don’t like, debate about the latest draft picks, trade cards, bust packs, and shout with joy when a fellow collector pulls a monster. The camaraderie I find there is something special and unique to our hobby. I used to get the same feeling hanging out with Kendall at Orlando Sports Cards.

In an industry with ever evolving methods of distribution and a greater reliance on the internet for price-shopping, fewer collectors are spending their hard-earned money at their local card shops. I realize that some card shops are suffering because their business practices are antiquated or because they have lost their focus on their customers. Or because they just suck. But I make it a goal to stop by a local card shop in every city I visit and I can tell you with confidence that the majority of card shops are run by great people with a passion for our hobby. To me, the local card shop remains the heart and soul of our great hobby.

So this weekend, after you’ve stuffed your face with Turkey and done some holiday shopping, please remember to do a little something for yourself, and for our hobby. Stop by your local card shop and buy something for yourself (a box?) and something extra for a friend (a couple packs?) You’ll be supporting small businesses in your community while also spreading the love for our hobby. Then tell us all about it below…

A photo posted by @sportscardalbum on


CONTEST: Post a review of your favorite card shop in the comments below. Tell us what you like about the card shop, what they could do better, or what you think card shops (in general) can do to help engage collectors better. Why do you love this card shop? What’s your best pull from the shop? Tell us whatever comes to mind. If you don’t have a local card shop nearby, tell us which card shop you wish you lived nearby. Is there a particular shop you’ve heard about that you would like to frequent? What makes them special? Each person may enter once…you can earn a second entry if you email/tweet/instagram us a picture of you AT YOUR LCS this weekend. Or, for those of you without an LCS nearby, send us some photos of the local card shops you wish you lived nearby (google search.) If you are sending pics via social media, please be sure to tag us with @sportscardalbum or post directly to our wall on facebook.

GIVEAWAYS: Two winners: 1) Hobby box of “2014 Hot Rookies” & 2) Hobby box of “2014 Playbook Football”.

TIMELINE: Wednesday, November 26, through Sunday, November 30th, 2014

BONUS: Don’t forget to participate in the Panini POD promotion while you are at your local card shop! Panini is supplying the prizes for this giveaway, so give them a “thanks” on social media if you have a chance. Also, we will be contacting some of the card shops (that you mention in the comments below) and sharing your feedback with them.

 

Help us spread the word by re-tweeting our tweets and sharing our FB & Instagram posts!

Panini Player of the Day Contest 2014

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Most of you are familiar with the legendary “Player of the Day” contest Panini sponsors through local card shops each year. The last two years, we have participated in the promotion through our “Busting Packs” blog. This year we are a couple of weeks late to the party since we have been working behind the scenes to migrate all of the old data from Busting Packs over to the Sports Card Album blog. Rather than wait until we are finished, though, we are going to get started with this awesome promotion and begin giving away goodies IMMEDIATELY. There will be several stages to this promotion and all of them will happen over the next 3 weeks, so please pay close attention! Subscribe to our blog (see the right side of this screen) and follow our Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram pages for chances to win multiple prizes. We will be doing a different giveaway on each social media platform to give everyone a chance to win! We will also be adding a LOT of sweet prizes to the pot, so get excited.

GIVEAWAY ONE: November 17th, 2014  — We will begin by doing a giveaway here, on the blog. Right now. Just subscribe to the blog and post a comment on this thread. Let us know what you like/dislike about the Panini POD promotion. How it could be better. Do you have an LCS nearby that participates? Whatever…just post a comment and you have a chance to win two (2) POD packs and a prize pack from SCA.

GIVEAWAY TWO: November 17th, 2014 — Giving away an 8″ x 11″ autograph, three (3) POD prize packs, and an SCA prize pack. Rules on our Instagram page HERE.

 

Android App Announcement on Sports Card Radio

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You’ve asked for it, then pleaded for it, then begged on your hands and knees. We finally got our act together and are ecstatic to announce the beta release of the Android App for Sports Card Album. And we are celebrating this news by doing some big giveaways…tune in to Sports Card Live, hosted by Doug & Dan from MojoBreak and Ryan from Sports Card Radio. Click HERE to tune in “live,” or to download the podcast later. Some of the giveaways will not require you to listen “live.”

Hey Sports Card Album fans, Technology Co-Founder John (@smplejohn) checking in here with all the details.

We’ve flipped what we knew of the iOS app upside-down and started from the ground up in developing this. The focus of this app, besides uploading and organizing your sports card photos, is on the actual cards themselves. With a larger viewing area for the card and smaller, flat icons for favoriting, commenting and sharing, this app has turned out more beautiful than our original plans.

You’ll also notice that the profiles for all users have been completely revamped. With a more streamlined approach to displaying user stats all of the information available for users is easily viewed without distracting from their collection. Oh, and the albums. The albums are gorgeously displayed in a thumbnail view with the first card from each album showing proudly as an album cover. Simply click on that icon to view the full album list.

Now, on to some details about the beta.

Here’s how it’s going to work. At the bottom of this post you’ll see a link to the .apk file. “What’s an APK file?”, you ask. It’s the file type that Android uses to install an app on your phone. For the beta we’re not quite ready to throw it on Google Play for the world to see, but for our dedicated users, we’re more than happy to share the progress. And we have to do so by giving you a file to download.

Once the file is downloaded you will make sure your phone allows files from external sources to be installed. If you’re an Android user you are more than likely used to this as we like to tweak our phone’s a lot. If you’re not too familiar with that, follow the instructions listed here.

In this beta you can expect to…

  • UPLOAD CARDS!
  • View the Sports Card Albums cards feed including all sports, recent uploads and user-specific cards and albums
  • Search all cards, user-specific cards or users
  • Edit cards
  • Message users
  • Comment on cards
  • Favorite cards
  • View backs of cards
  • Share cards on Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere Android allows
  • Follow users
  • COPY IMG CODES!!!
  • Add new albums
  • View all albums / sub-albums

What we’re working on…

  • The back button: We want you to be able to go back to the last feed you were looking at because that’s what I would want to do.
  • Editing profile information
  • Deleting a card
  • Notifications of comments, likes, follows and messages
  • Back of card uploading
  • Rotate cards

Reporting Bugs

This is a BETA and I can’t be any more clear about that. Although we have thoroughly tested it on our array of Android devices (Moto X, Nexus 7 and Samsung Galaxy Nexus) there are a ton of Android devices out there. It is a possibility you’ll run into a bug that we haven’t seen. If you do, please comment below this post with your phone model and the specific problem you’re encountering.

After the Beta

Once the beta is completed, we will be blasting from the mountaintops that the app is available on the Android store (which won’t be long.) When that happens, simply delete your app and install it from Google Play to continue receiving updates for your favorite card collecting app. No data will be lost in this switch.

Enough talking, here’s the link…

downloadAppAndroid

If the button above does not work for you, try this alternative link: ANDROID APP DOWNLOAD

We are now on Instagram! Follow for another chance to win!

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Apparently there’s this thing called “Instagram,” and it’s kinda a big deal. Forgive us for being late to the party, but we’ve kinda been swamped with the whole “invent-a-photo-management-site-for-collectors” thing. We are now on board, and to celebrate, we are giving away some beautiful cards from 2014 Panini Rookies & Stars Football and 2014 Panini Elite Football.

 

All you have to do is follow us on Instagram and post a comment on our first photo (shown below) to enter. That means we have THREE giveaways going on today…we will do a video and post it to the blog tomorrow with the winners of all three giveaways. Link to our Instagram: CLICK HERE

New “Bulk” IMG-Code Feature and Giveaway!

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Good afternoon, fellow collectors!

I am excited to share an incredible new feature that is guaranteed to make your life as a collector easier! Whether you are sharing your personal collection on the Beckett forums or trying to sell some cards on the Blowout forums, anyone who collects online understands how cumbersome it can be to copy and paste dozens of “IMG-Codes” into your thread. Our super-simple new tool allows collectors to grab countless “IMG-Codes” all at once.

Bulk IMG-Code Animation
Bulk IMG-Code Animation

To celebrate this new feature, we are going to giveaway up to $150 in gift cards to your favorite retailer (online or LCS.) Here are the rules:

Post a thread in any forum using the new bulk-img tool to embed the images. Email us, tweet us, or FB us the link to your forum thread. One person, chosen at random, will win a $50 gift card to their online retailer or card shop of choice (assuming that company sells gift cards.) If we get more than 50 entries we will give away two extra $50 gift cards (three $50 gift cards total.)

NOT SO FINE PRINT: You can only post one thread per forum category, but each person is allowed to submit a maximum of three (3) entries. For example, you could submit two entries if you used the bulk-IMG-code tool to embed images in the Football forum as well as the Baseball forum. Or the Football B/S/T forum as well as the Football “box breaks” forum. If you’re not sure what this means, ask. Threads must include at least ten images to count towards this giveaway. Contest ends Monday, August 18th, after the Cleveland v. Washington NFL Preseason game.

Watch a video demonstration of this new tool below:

Without a doubt, it is the community that makes Sports Card Album what it is and we thank you for all of your support.

Welcome to the Sports Card Album Blog!

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We finally have a blog!!! This may not sound like a big deal to you, but I have been wanting a Sports Card Album blog for a really long time, mainly so we can share all the new features and updates we are doing on the website (and apps.) We have been mentioning our progress via traditional social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, but relying solely on those to get the word out is pretty dumb for a couple of reasons:

  1. Not everyone is on Twitter & Facebook
  2. The people that are on Twitter & Facebook aren’t online 24 hrs a day
  3. It is virtually impossible for people to search through all our old tweets to see if/when we announced something (hard to see archives)

This blog is the solution to all of these dilemmas and a whole lot more. This blog will provide us with a better platform for our giveaways, it will allow us to bring you special (unique) content, and will allow us to share our thoughts (and progress) with you in a way that is easy to navigate and search.

We encourage you to sign up for our mailing list (in the right sidebar) so you are notified when we launch our updates. We look forward to sharing a lot more with you in the days to come and thanks for all of your support!

In the meantime, let’s kickoff the blog with a giveaway…simply comment below and you’ll be entered to win one of two SCA prize packs!

Sports Card Album Prize Packs