COMC Blaster - Christmas Vacation Edition!

It's been a very trying past few months in both my personal and professional life, but I'm excited that today is the first of a 12-day stretch of time away from work.  I'm hoping to fit in a lot of time with friends and family, plenty of relaxing, and of course...baseball cards!

Since "COMC Blaster" posts are some of my favorite to put together, and I had enough free time this morning to put a couple of hours into one, I figured it was a great way to kick off my vacation.  Let's see what $20 in COMC credit netted me this time around...

Topps releases so many online exclusive/on demand sets these days that I don't even make any attempt to keep up with them all.  Feels more like a chore than a way to enjoy my precious little hobby time.  With that being said, when I stumbled on this beautiful Mookie Betts card from the 2018 Topps On Demand Black & White release I snagged it immediately at $1.25.  An awesome card from Mookie's MVP season.  There's a Hank Aaron in this set that is just great, I'd like to grab that one someday.

Yes, it's another dinosaur card from the 2010 Allen & Ginter Monsters of the Mesozoic insert set.  I'm sure more than a few of you are getting tired of seeing these at this point, but I really went on a streak of picking them up for a while there and seem to keep plucking them from my backlog whenever I put together one of these posts.  This will be the only one featured today though, I promise.  50 cents for this one if you're keeping tally.

I became intrigued by Russian forward Denis Cheryshev during this past summer's World Cup after the striker, playing for the host nation, scored five times in the tournament.  I really wanted a single of his to represent him in my soccer collection, and I settled on this Futera Unique card because I love the simple design and the inset country flag.  If you're a soccer fan and you can find one of these of a player you collect I'd recommend grabbing it, they look great in hand.  Denis cost me an even dollar.

Just one more soccer card here, and then I promise we'll switch back to baseball.  From the 2014 Panini Prizm World Cup set, this is a Red & Blue Wave Prizm parallel of a 'Posters' insert.  I like the idea of these posters being used as an insert set, and this one featuring host city Recife was available at $1.56.  I don't know what the odds are on these, but I think they were a tough pull as they're not all that easy to come by.  A nice, if somewhat odd, addition to my small soccer collection.

Just one card towards my 1959 Topps set this time around, but it's a nice high number (#541) featuring Bob Thurman of the Cincinnati Red(leg)s.  Pretty off-center top to bottom, however at $1.91 I really can't complain.  I couldn't find a copy this nice for that price today if I wanted to.  I've passed the 50% mark on 1959 Topps now, and hope to keep inching closer in 2019...

Here's another type of card that appears frequently on this blog, the 2011 Topps Cognac Diamond Anniversary parallel.  Aside from my graded Trout and Altuve RCs, and the Red Sox, my interest in these lies solely with the retired legends variations.  I've lost track of how many of these I have at this point, but Tom Seaver here joins the rest for a reasonable $1.15.

For these next five cards, I dug into my recently received COMC Black Friday shipment from this year's promotion.  I've been trimming back my hobby spending of late, so I didn't go all that crazy, picking up less than 40 total cards in the end.  I did make a nice dent in my 2014 Topps Finest X-Fractor quest though for relatively cheap coin with Enny Romero at 52 cents...

...Craig Kimbrel at 54 cents...

...Dustin Pedroia at 67 cents.  I think I have a copy of this one and just haven't moved it to my collection on the TCDB yet, but at this cheap a price I grabbed it just in case.

Jimmy Nelson (huh?) at 52 cents...

...and Adam Jones for an even 50 cents.  Five more down for what amounted to just a couple bucks.  I've got 22/100 of these parallels now, enough that I might toss them into a binder during this vacation.  I'll have more from my Black Friday haul to show off soon, now let's finish off this blaster with some older pick-ups that have been waiting for their turn in the sun...

Another Atomic Refractor from 2011 Topps Chrome!  I'm to the point now where I'm having to break my self-imposed "under a dollar unless it's a star" rule in order to try to finish this off.  As an example, I spent $1.25 on this Tom Wilhelmsen, which puts me at 184 out of 220 of these now in hand.  This is going to be a tough one to finish but I'm determined to get it done someday.

Speaking of tough sets to finish, how about the very set that got me back into collecting over a decade ago, 2007 Goudey?  The short prints from this one are brutal, so I gladly forked over $1.75 for this needed Derek Jeter.  I'm down to needing just 4 of the 88 short prints now.  I will finish this in 2019, even if I have to grossly overpay for those final cards.  12 years is long enough to work on a set!

No real reason for this one other than I love the playing cards insert in 2013 Panini Golden Age.  Probably the only chance I'll ever have to add a card of boxing legend Jack Johnson to my collection, and an Ace too!  The 74 cents asking price made this an easy decision to add to my cart.

I'm a sucker for a good colored-border parallel as it is, but make it someone from my favorite team, serial-numbered (to /150 in this case), and under a dollar (75 cents) and you will get me just about every time.  Not a jaw-dropper by any means, but a nice enough card to bump up my Red Sox count by one.

I enjoy cards with a link to my home state of Connecticut, and so I couldn't pass up this Torri Hunter card from the 1998 Multi-Ad Sports New Britain Rock Cats set.  It was very reasonably priced too at just 44 cents.  I prefer Norwich Navigator cards as CT minor league baseball goes, but this is a cool pick-up nonetheless.

Will Clark was one of my absolute favorite guys to collect growing up, alongside Nolan Ryan, Cal Ripken, Ken Griffey Jr. and a few others.  I've probably owned dozens of copies of his 1987 Topps card over time, but the O-Pee-Chee version had escaped me until now.  For 59 cents, I'm not sure why I waited so long actually.

Here's a nice rookie card, from 2014 Heritage High Numbers, of my favorite player for the last 5 years running, Red Sox shortstop Xander Bogaerts.  Nothing flashy, just a plain ol' base card, but it feels great to add it to my ever-growing collection of Xander's cards.  $1.75 for this one, and it keeps me firmly in the lead for largest Bogaerts collection on the TCDB, an even 30 cards ahead of the next closest collector on the list.

After all that baseball, let's close it out with a hockey card.  It is December, after all.  I really enjoyed the inaugural O-Pee-Chee Platinum set that was released back in 2014-15.  It had some of the most eye-popping colorful parallels I'd seen in a long time in a hockey release.  I've picked up quite a few of them over the years, but this is my first of the very rare "Black Ice" parallels.

These are serial-numbered to just 25 copies each, so they get very pricey for star players.  I've been a fan of the under-rated David Krejci since he broke into the league more than ten years ago now, and since he's not that widely collected I was able to snatch this one up for $2.89.  I really just wanted one example of this parallel for my collection, and landing the Krejci was perfect.  The timing for it is perfect as well, as he recorded his 600th career point just last night against the Ducks!

Well, that takes the running total for today to $20.28, so we'll stop there and call it a blaster.  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you saw a card or two that piqued your interest.  I should have regular, everyday posting here for the next couple of weeks, so stop back often over the holiday season!