COMC Blaster - Thanksgiving Edition

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

With COMC's big Black Friday sale looming on the horizon, it seemed like an appropriate time to post a "virtual blaster" that I built on the site. I acquired these cards at different times, but none of them have seen the light of day on the blog until now.  Let's see what my $20 in credit brought home...

Starting off with a couple of Bogaerts minis from 2015 Gypsy Queen that I picked up right around Opening Day this past season.

Honestly, I wouldn't buy these today, but I was on a baseball kick coinciding with the start of the season and at $1.15 for the pair at least the damage to my wallet (or in this case store credit balance) was minimal.

I've been making some slow but steady progress of late on what will become my oldest hand-collated set if I ever complete it, 1971-72 Topps hockey.  I have a trio of them in today's post, beginning with Rosaire Paiement.  '71-72 was Paiement's final season in the NHL, he moved to the WHA the following year where he'd finish out his career later in the decade.  My cost for this one?  57 cents.

Next up, defenseman Jim Roberts of the Blues.  Jim was actually named team captain for St. Louis at the outset of the 1971-72 season, but was traded to the Canadiens shortly thereafter.

Rounding out the trio is winger Ernie Hicke of the Golden Seals.  I love, love, love getting any new vintage Golden Seals cards.  These were pretty dirt cheap additions to my set build here, as the trio set me back a grand total of $1.68.

Here's another that I'll file under "wouldn't buy it anymore".  Back in August of 2015 I picked it up, primarily because it was cheap (43 cents) and shiny.  Today I think I'd hang onto the 43 cents and keep browsing...

Speaking of shiny, here's a "camo prism" parallel of Olivier Giroud from the 2015-16 Select.  These are limited to /249 and can be had for cheap coin (I paid 60 cents), so I try to pick up some players I'm familiar with from the Premier League from time to time.

I grabbed this Joonas Kemppainen Young Guns card because he's a somewhat obscure name in the history of the Boston Bruins.  He played in 44 games with the team during the 2015-16 season, and it appears at this point as though that will be the entirety of his NHL career as he's been playing in the KHL over in Russia since.  65 cents for this one, though you can grab a copy for less than 50 cents these days.

I've gone on record numerous times stating that I'm a total sucker for Topps Chrome colored refractors.  As such, this pink Mookie Betts was simply irresistible to me at a buck twenty-five.

This '94-95 Finest Rod Brind-Amour refractor is definitely one of my favorites from today's post.  I'll grab any and all refractors from the two mid-'90s Finest hockey releases if the price is right, which it certainly was here at just 87 cents.  For whatever reason I've ended up with many more of the '95-96 versions, but this is still my sixth from the '94-95 set so far.

One of the more creative insert sets in recent years in my opinion were these "Tip Top Bread" die-cuts from Panini Golden Age.  Aside from the design, which I love, the selection of subjects is very broad for just a 10-card set.  Basketball legend Curly Neal set me back 94 cents...

...while I had to put up $1.25 for Kelly Leak from the Bad News Bears.

Rounding out today's trio is Man o' War, which cost me $1.74.  I told you the subject selection was random!  What's really great is that these were the final three cards I needed to complete this insert set, sweet!

Here's one towards my 1959 Topps baseball set.  It's a little beat up, no doubt about it, but I'm really just trying to complete a set in any condition at this point.  Besides, this is from the dreaded high-numbers portion of the set, and I only had to shell out 59 cents for it which is pretty unheard of.  I'll be pumped if I can grab a few more high numbers for that price over the weekend here.

I've shown off a couple of these lenticular 3-D Dinosaurs inserts from Upper Deck in previous posts, and today I've got my third.  I typically try to keep these to under a dollar, but in this case I paid $2.37 as this is one of the short-printed aquatic dinosaurs towards the end of the 42-card checklist.  Someday I'd love to track down the 39 I'm still missing and get them all in a binder...

I've been a fan of the "Traxx" parallels in OPC Platinum since I first encountered them a few years back.  Thanks to Upper Deck's ePack promotion the recent ones can be had for pocket change for the most part.  As an example, David Pastrnak here joined my collection for 55 cents.

Why would I shell out 67 cents for this Jarome Iginla card?  Well, I love the photograph and he's a lock for the HOF.  This is also from the high series portion of the set that you could only pull in boxes of Rookie Anthology in 2013-14.

Here's the second shiny Mookie Betts of the post, and the final baseball card.  I know Mookie dropped off a touch from his unbelievable 2016 season, but he still put up very solid numbers in 2017.  In fact, with three complete seasons now under his belt, here's his "162-game average" season stats....292/25/99 with an .839 OPS and 194 hits.

I got a steal on this Bowman's Best Green Refractor, #'d /99, when the seller accepted my offer of $2.75.  Cheapest copy on the site these days is north of $10.

We'll close it out here with a couple of hockey cards.  If you've read my blog at all over the past couple of years then you know I love buybacks.  That love isn't limited to the Topps baseball buybacks, I like the Upper Deck hockey ones as well.

I was excited to land this Eric Weinrich Star Rookie buyback from Upper Deck's inaugural hockey set for just $1.75.  These seem to fetch decent prices on the secondary market, in fact the cheapest one of any player currently on COMC is listed at $2.50.  Weinrich played an impressive 17 seasons as a defenseman in the NHL, including through the entire period of my childhood fandom so I'm really pleased with this one.

Here's the final card for today, which I spent 61 cents on simply because I enjoy the old-school subsets that chronicled the previous year's NHL playoffs, and because I have precious few OPC cards from the '70s.

Well, that brings the total for the cards in today's post up to $19.85, so we'll stop there.  I hope you all enjoy a nice holiday break with family and friends, and happy hunting to those of you who'll be shopping COMC's Black Friday sale tomorrow and over the weekend!