Shlabotnik Report reader FatCat47 had a request I couldn’t refuse… He wanted to know if I could do some customs of current-day stars in the style of 1982 Donruss.
…And I said “Heck, yeah!” 1982 Donruss is a set I’ve always liked in a “less is more” sort of way… especially since it was so much better than 1981 Donruss, while Fleer (which I loved in 1981) took a step backwards with their 1982 set.
I’m also going to use this as an excuse to kick off “TSRchives”, a new custom set of sorts using the templates I’ve accumulated over several years of making customs, as well as new ones like this.
And just to make it clear, the name is supposed to be “TSRchives” as a play on “The Shlabotnik Report” and “Archives”. It’s not anything to do with chives.
…And if you’re looking at these on a mobile device and the images are too small to see what that light blue thing is in the top right corner, that’s my little cartoon head from my blog’s banner. I figure there’s no need to keep a Donruss logo there, especially if some no-good person decides to print out my images and sell them on eBay.
I included Bryce Harper partly because I wanted to feature a team that wasn’t in the original set (and justify my use of a not-quite-right font instead of just copying the team names from scans of the original cards).
The Mike Trout image is the one out of these five that I don’t feel is 100% “Donrussy” since it’s from a night game. I’m sure you can deal with it.
So there we go… Hope everybody enjoyed this little side trip! I’ve got another set of requested customs in the works, and if you have any requests for customs from a set that’s within my abilities, let me know!
The Shlabotnik Report 
Very nice!
Those are nice looking!
Well done – TSRchives is genius!
Really cool! I like the logo in the top right hand corner!
Boy do I appreciate you granting my request! These look awesome! Can you do the 1984 Donruss? If not, that’s okay. The ’82 style that you did was soooo AWESOME! Thanks, Joe!
No problem at all, I enjoyed doing it.
I’ll have to see about 84D, that one might be trickier than it looks…
I understand. If that is hard to do, can you do a few more in the ’79 Topps style? That is my favorate year of Topps cards.
You *will* see more 1979’s in the future, I can assure you of that.
Thanks, Joe, keep up the awesome work. I truly enjoy this website.
I’ve always been very partial to both the 1981 and 1982 Donruss designs. I don’t know if it’s the design that I’m appealed to or the nostalgia for where I was in life when I was first opening packs of these cards back in the day.
Totally agree with you, Ringo, just wish the ’81 set wasn’t so rife with so many errors. But it was a nice change from Topps.