2017 Topps Heritage came out today, which is a pretty big event in the baseball card collecting world. I like Topps Heritage, and went out of my way to collect the full set in 2014 and 2015. In 2016 I meant to collect it, but the price tag on the short-prints scared me off and I never got around to it. This year there are 25 more short-printed cards in the set (100 instead of the usual 75), and I just can't see myself paying what it would take to get a complete set, either through pack-busting or purchasing from a case breaker.
I am thinking that my next big baseball card project will be completing the # / 2017 parallel set from 2017 Topps Opening Day. I've built the parallel set from Opening Day for a couple of years in a row now, and it's an attainable project that I enjoy. I typically set some kind of target, like trying to acquire the full set for less than a dollar per card. It's pretty easy to get a few lots at much less than that mark, but it can get pretty complex as I try to fill out the last few cards, which are invariably superstars and rookies.
I recently picked up this Cyan printing plate of Jon Singleton from 2015 Topps Chrome for my player collection. He hasn't had much going on in trading cards the last couple of years, so I am mostly limited to base and parallels from Topps' standard annual products. I think this plate looks pretty nice, and it didn't cost a whole lot. Singleton has had a couple of Spring Training at-bats. He's in the competition for 1B reps, but there are at least three other players (A.J. Reed, Yulieski Gurriel, and Tyler White) in the mix, and the Astros are arguably higher on all of them than they are on Singleton, who has already been given his chance to break out. I guess I'll keep collecting his cards until no more are being made, though, because I already have those searches saved in my eBay profile.
Congratulations on picking up the Singleton plate for your collection. 100 sp's in this year's Heritage? For the set building people's sake... I hope they're not too hard to pull.
ReplyDeleteBased on the breaks I've seen so far, they are still seeded at 1:3 packs or 8 per Hobby box. Adding 25 more to the set just increases the number of boxes you need to bust to complete the SP set from about 10 boxes in prior years to about 13 this year.
DeleteI've never owned a printing plate card. Are they pretty thick? Is it blue because of the ink...I'm assuming so.
ReplyDeleteThey actually aren't very thick. It's a very thin sheet of metal. They round off and smooth the corners out before putting them in packs. I have a couple of printing plates that weren't smoothed out, and I have to be very careful not to get cut on the corners. I assume the ink used in printing gives them their coloration. There is one in each set for each color of the printing process (Black, Yellow, Cyan, Magenta). Some have blotches or smears on them. This one is pretty clean, though.
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