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!

Traders without Borders

Quintessential Robby Alomar.

In the never-ending competition we bloggers have, I am stooping to a new low with this title. So if you've come here to see my convoluted mentioning of a one Pat Borders, you'll have to wait.

But, I guess, it makes some sense. I received a package today from Jeroen, the man behind the Ace and Yankee-centric Dutch Card Guy blog.

This is our second cross-Atlantic trade, the first netting me a forking JP Arencibia 1-of-1 Printing Plate (no big deal). While JP wasn't involved in this particular trade, I did receive some soon-to-be well-loved Blue Jays, along with some 2012 Allen and Ginter's help:

I know you guys have Allen and Ginter base cards laying around. Check out my want list, and I will make it worth your while. I'd love to get this set banged out by the release of Gypsy Queen and forgotten on my shelf of completed set binders.

The Dutchman also contributed to my Blue Jays rainbow attempts for 2013:

 

The Hutchison is just a common, but at this point I had only pulled his red parallel. I believe le Dimwit may have contributed the Drew to my base set, and now this one will go on the rainbow page - hopefully to be replaced before 2014 by the Silver Slate parallel.

There was also a Jos-eh Reyes sighting:

The emerald is from Jeroen, but the black is from ebay. Coincidentally, the pink and black parallels of Jose both came from sellers based in New York, one being in the town that I still play baseball in during the summer.

If you send me a Bowman Blue Jay in a trade package, there is a strong chance that I will mention it. Daniel Norris loves him some crosses, as does Jose Reyes. Damn, the Blue Jays are a handsome bunch.

Well, except Colby Rasmus.

And now, what you've all been waiting for, a full-bleed, fully-geared, chaw-choked Blue Jays fan favourite and all-around ruggedly handsome gentleman - NAY, Legend, Pat Borders:

Oh sweet hell yes.