At the Trade Deadline 12: Not a Trade

I am going to label this as a trade post, but in reality there was no trade. This envelope just showed up in the mail on Tuesday with a nifty Topps Tribute parallel of R.A. Dickey and a note from Judson over at My Cardboard Habit. It was a nice little surprise for Christmas as I did not have a huge amount of card action for the holiday. I like the blue color of the background and I like that it is numbered, in this case # 24 / 99.

I did get a Mega Box of Topps Update in an Amazon flash sale (nothing really exciting outside of an Update Chrome Gold parallel of James Shields # 115 / 250) for $10. I am still woefully short of completing the Topps Chrome Update series. With two packs of Chrome per Mega Box and four cards per pack with one of those generally being an insert, it can get pretty tedious trying to get a set built from your 6.5 base cards for $15 a whack, especially when you get a pack worth of doubles in your box. I'm not sure when this post transitioned from an expression of gratitude for the nice card from My Cardboard Habit into a rant about building the Update Chrome set, but I suppose I should get back to happier things. I am currently 40% complete with the set, and I will probably try to source the remaining cards I need from the secondary market. I already have everything I want from the regular Update set, so it is hard to justify spending $15 on a Mega Box that might net me a handful of the cards I need when I can get everything on my want list for just over $30. I guess the trade-off is that when I buy singles I don't have the chance of pulling a serially-numbered Puig or something, but the odds on that are minuscule anyway. I am much more likely to pull a not-that-rare James Shields parallel.

Back on topic; thank you for the surprise in the mailbox, Judson. It was a lot of fun to have a nice PC card show up unexpectedly.