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.

Completion! - 1993 Topps Gold

While there are likely several larger parallel sets out there, this is probably the biggest one I'll ever build.  Many of the cards therein are the same ones I pulled from packs as a young man making the transition from junior high to high school.  It was a build 30 years in the making, one resumed in earnest just a few years ago, and now it's over.

The final card?

#444 David Nied

Why is he performing his wind-up with a dark expanse ("Blacker than midnight on a moonless night.") lurking behind him?  How did the Rockies know to track Nied to his Enclave of Obscurity in order to make him their first pick in the 1992 Expansion Draft?  What sort of dark arts did he practice, and why did he fail to use them to enhance his pitching prowess?  So many unanswered questions here.

As the final card to go into the binder, Nied has some auspicious company on the completed page.  With Murphy, Caminiti, and Strawberry, Nied struggles to make it into the top half of players on his page, much less earning the honor of the page's captain.

It's a pair of binders that looks really good on the shelf.  I will show this off to any head of state whose car happens to break down in front of my house and asks to use the phone.  

 *Special thanks to Chris Harris, who generously provided a few hundred cards for this endeavor.

Completion! - 2019 Topps Opening Day

It's been a while since I've finished up a set.  In the past week I've picked up some cards, one of which changed that.  Here's the last one I needed.

 

Mascots #M-21 Phillie Phanatic

I started collecting this set after buying a couple of cheap boxes at the 2019 National, just for something to rip.  It's been a looooooong time since I collected the flagship Topps set, but the Opening Day set once a decade or so can scratch that previous itch.  For some reason, the Phanatic card commanded a premium much higher than the rest of the mascot inserts.  However, I waited it out and finally found one for a decent price.

Here is the sum total of this complete (by my standards) set:

*Base Set - 200 cards

*150 Years of Fun Insert - 25 cards

*Mascot Inserts - 25 cards

*Opening Day Inserts - 15 cards
*Team Traditions & Celebrations Inserts - 10 cards

All in all, a fun set that looks good in a 1-inch binder.

Completion! - 2020 Topps Update Series

A card arrived in the mail this week from Puerto Rico, kind of a long way away for a card to travel.  When it completes a set, though, it could come from Nepal or Napoli or Naples, Florida, for all I care.  Let's see what we got.

2020 Topps Update Series #U-251 Nico Hoerner Rookie Debut

Nico had one hell of a first MLB game, going 3-for-5 with a triple, two runs scored, and 4 RBI.  In the next two seasons, Hoerner averaged 46 appearances a season, but this year he is the Cubs' everyday shortstop.  As I write this, I am probably sitting no more than five miles away from Nico, with his team in town to face the Brewers, a far cry from the Caribbean island from where this card traveled.  And with that, my 2020 Topps Update set is complete.