Normally I'll open a few blasters and sometimes a hobby box in an effort to build the base set, while accumulated as many affordable Fan Favorites autographs off of eBay. This year I was really excited about two things:
#1: Seeing the updated card stock people have written about on the 1960 and 1982 cards.
#2: This year's Fan Favorites autograph checklist is loaded with guys I'd love to pull.
This morning I drove down to my local wholesaler in hopes of picking up two boxes and was told that they're completely sold out. They could order it from their other locations, but that it'd be around $105 to $110 per box.
$105 for a partial set, a handful of inserts, and two autographs? Uh... no thanks. I've slowly been picking up the autographs I want off of eBay and I'll eventually try to grab a hand collated set if one becomes available for a reasonable price.
I was also hoping to pull the last card in the Derek Jeter Retrospective set, which features one of my favorite cards from the 2010's:
2015 Topps Chrome Refractor #1
I don't actually own the regular 2015 Topps base card that's part of the Retrospective set, but that's okay. I'm more than happy to have this Chrome refractor sitting in its place.
The card front captures Jeter celebrating after his walk off single in his final plate appearance at Yankee Stadium on September 25th, 2014. You honestly couldn't write a better ending to a hall of fame career. The decision by Topps to keep his entire body intact truly makes this card one for the ages.
Although the front is the main reason I chose this card for my Day 15 entry for Tony's 30 Day Baseball Card Challenge, the back is pretty sweet too. It contains complete regular season statistics for Jeter's entire 20 year MLB career.
Getting back to Archives though... the odds of me actually pulling the Retrospective Jeter card would have been against me, since Topps made it a short print. But just like the base set and autographs... I don't need to bust any blaster boxes or hobby boxes of this stuff. I'm perfectly content with cherry picking these cards off of eBay and COMC.
Happy Monday and sayonara!
Speaking as someone who's never even attempted to complete a set and only buys, at most, a blaster of any given product, cherry-picking is the way to collect. I love to sample a little bit of everything - variety is the spice of life!
ReplyDeleteI busted 3 $20 blasters from walmart and got excellent correlation and two autos. check out tonights post.
ReplyDeleteI was standing in Wal-Mart today, contemplating a rack pack of Archives. Then I reminded myself that for a little more than the cost of a rack pack, I could get a Wally Moon autograph from eBay.
ReplyDeleteWait....don't buy the Archives Jeter card. I got one I'll be happy to send you.
ReplyDeleteThe Pirates have Tony Pena and John Smiley this year so I was happy. I've been watching auctions for a while now and will probably pull the trigger in the coming week or so.
ReplyDelete