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28 March 2013

Completeness: 304

Topps Series 1 of 2013 was released sometime in the middle of January. After a week or so of it being out, it was obvious that the base set was greatly improved from recent efforts (cough, 2010, puke, 2011) and the inserts were the same-old retreads of minis, rookies and dead guys.

The set did, however, offer the player collector a massive amount of parallels. Ten of them, to be exact...or reasonably close. The retails gigantes of SprawlMart, Target and Toys 'R Us produced blue, red and purple borders, respectively; while inserted within all packs were Topps go-to gold borders (/2013) jungle fever or mouth wash of fresh field greens salad mega-foilboard, the eunexpectedly awesome pink and just plain "meh" camo borders. Inserted within hobby packs were the black borders numbered to only 62, which I have always been a fan of.

On top of those - Topps offered a redemption plan to those with deep pockets for a five-card pack of "silver slate" parallels - but good luck if you wanted a slate one, as they're limited to 10 and most packs were filled with the much better looking blue slate parallels, limited to what some have guessed to be about fifty - let's call those the...Deep Blue Matrix parallels. Eh?

I decided to drive myself crazy over the time between series 1 and 2 with a hot pursuit of all of these parallels - aside from the silver slates...I am not made of money. A blue, red, purple, green, gold, holoblue, camo, black and pink of my favorite Blue Jays and other players, which in this set consists of Brett Lawrie, Colby Rasmus, Adeiny Hechavarria, Ricky Romero, Drew Hutchison, Kyle Drabek, Edwin Encarnacion, Rajai Davis, Jose Reyes, Carlos Santana and (gasp) Starling Marte.

Today, in the mail, I received a major milestone in my search:
Deep Blue Something
   ...which lead to this:
Click to embiggen!
YUSSSSSSSSS

I knew that one I completed my first page, all would be right with the world. What magnificence!

6 comments:

  1. Wow, that's an achievement, hope to get there one day with one of my guys !

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  2. I've got no patience for that, but niiiiiiiice work.

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  3. Very nice, looks sweet. I haven't picked up a pink or camo or black yet this year of any Giant and with the number of Giants cards in Series 1 I don't see ever getting close to the entire team set for anything outside of the gold, red, blue and green. I may go after the sparkly blue as they look cool. Congrats!

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