Completion! - A Familiar Face

This is a post that's a long time coming.  Shortly after completing my 1959 Topps set, I received the final card needed to finish the modern set using the same design, the 2008 Topps Heritage High Number set.  The card that completed the set was #686 Gavin Floyd of the Chicago White Sox, a card that was short printed.

Let's take a tour of some of the highlights of this set.

Unlike it's 1959 design-sake, the Rookie Stars subset checklist was amazingly robust, featuring rookie cards of Max Scherzer...

Evan Longoria...

...and Clayton Kershaw.

(Editor's Note: Death Stare Cards normally eschew graded and slabbed cards, but when the time came to acquire this Kershaw, this BCCG version was actually selling for less than any raw versions we could find.)

My Milwaukee Brewers are looking good in this team photo.  Good job by the photographer to keep everyone especially well lit while the sun was rising behind them.

Onto the inserts.  There are more Then & Now cards, continuing from the original series.

Some more Then & Now cards, and the first half of the Rookie Performers inserts.  Again, a distinctly strong checklist with these rookies.  That Kershaw is very nice.

More Rookie Performers.

The last two rookies and some of the 2008 Flashbacks.  Griffey, Pujols, Ichiro, all legends.

And to finish things off, I also completed the partial parallel of black backs.  These are actually very easy to find, and key cards usually cost less as a black back than the regular green ink back.  I think I finished these off before I was a parent, and I'm slated to have a teenager in the house later this summer.  So it goes.

The Kershaw black back parallel.  This one actually came out of one of my boxes 15+ years ago, didn't have to hunt it down.

Is this the end of the story?  Maybe not.  I do have a pretty tall stack of chrome parallels from this set and the regular Heritage set.  That impossible-to-find Jerry Hairston is throwing me off the scent, though.  (Look it up, it's a dark corner of Topps Heritage history.)

As for now, I'm happy with this set in its binder with the requisite box cover header.  One of my most enjoyable periods of collecting is, for the most part, done.