Rainbows & Cognac - A Saturday Night COMC Blaster

Welcome to the latest edition of the longstanding feature here on Shoebox Legends known as COMC Blasters.  You know the drill by now, $20 spent on COMC instead of on a retail blaster at my local Target.  Let's see what tonight's selections consist of...

Life got a little crazy right after the Red Sox won the World Series, and I never got to really congratulate the team here on the blog.  I'll take this Xander Bogaerts as an opportunity to do so.  2018 was actually Xander's second World Series championship already, as he was a late-season call-up for the 2013 World Series winning team.

This one is a short-print variation of Xander's 2016 flagship card, with a photo from Jackie Robinson Day.  I paid $2.55 for this, which seems like a lot for a base card from 2016, but Bogaerts has been my favorite player for about 5 years running now.  This is  my 111th card and counting of the Boston shortstop.

How about a nice trio of '59 Topps cards towards my slow set build?  Not big names by any means, but I pushed three cards off the want list with Don Cardwell at 81 cents...

...Hobie Landrith at just 55 cents...

...and Mike Baxes in fantastic shape for 70 cents.  I now have 288 different cards from the 1959 Topps set, which means with this trio I have officially crossed the 50% threshold!  That feels pretty great.

You knew I'd sneak a soccer card in here.  I've mentioned numerous times that I've got a very small collection of former Liverpool star Philippe Coutinho, and this 2016-17 Select Multi-Color parallel was just too shiny for me to leave behind at $1.35.  Besides, it pairs nicely with the Ronaldo from this set that I posted over the summer.

Perfect timing to have pulled this Mookie Betts Toys 'R' Us Purple parallel for posting.  Congrats to your 2018 American League MVP!  I was able to get a pretty decent Betts collection going before he became an absolute superstar, but these days I don't pick up too many since prices are so insane.  I'm surprised that I was able to secure this parallel for just 70 cents.

I'm fascinated by dinosaurs.  I'm sure in large part due to the fact that Jurassic Park was released when I was an impressionable 10-year-old.  Anyway, I've shown quite a few Upper Deck 3D Dinosaur inserts on the blog in the past, but here's another dinosaur-themed set that I'm collecting.  These "Monsters of the Mesozoic" minis are from 2010 Allen & Ginter.  There are 25 of them in all.  I was recently able to score Allosaurus...

...and Oviraptor for a combined price of $1.10.  I'm up to 7 of the 25 cards in this set now, getting there slowly but surely.

David Krejci was my favorite player for years after he broke into the league with Boston about a decade ago.  These days I'm not even sure I could name my favorite active player.  Krejci's still at it with the Bruins though, and I couldn't resist this Gold Rainbow parallel (#'d /149) from O-Pee-Chee Platinum when I stumbled across it at just 85 cents.

Here's another Bruin to pair with it.  I really enjoyed that inaugural Prizm set from Panini, and all of its very bright, colored parallels.  At $1.79, this Blue Prizm parallel of Carl Soderberg's rookie is the third most expensive card in tonight's post.  I wouldn't really seek this one out these days, however I picked it up all the way back in November of 2014 when he still had some buzz around him in Boston (yes, it took me that long to scan and add this card to my digital collection).

Running total is at $10.40, just over halfway there.  Let's see what remains...

Topps Chrome Atomic Refractors are some of the most beautiful parallels out there if you're a fan of shiny cards, and the 2011 set was the only time they made them even relatively attainable.  Typically these were numbered insanely low, like to /10, however in 2011 Topps produced 225 copies of each.  I have an insane goal of collecting the entire 220-card set in Atomic Refractor form.  Maybe not that insane, as Jered Weaver here puts me at 182 down, or 82.7% complete.  88 cents well spent.

This was a case of sort all of the 2018 Boston Red Sox cards by lowest price, and pick some low-hanging fruit.  I thought these Tarot card based inserts from Gypsy Queen were sort of interesting, so I snagged Chris Sale at just 40 cents.

Who doesn't love the lenticular cards from Kellogg's from the '70s and '80s?  I'll take any card I don't have from any of the sets, and I'll certainly throw a Red Sox great that I was missing from the '82 set into my cart for the low price of 35 cents!

1993-94 Leaf had some truly excellent inserts in my humble opinion.  I've always loved these Painted Warriors cards, featuring the goalie masks that fans of the '90s all know and love.  I plan to collect all 10 of these at some point, Kirk McLean gets me started for just 47 cents.

Here's your 2018-19 NHL goal leader at this stage of the season, winger David Pastrnak.  This is one of those Gold Rainbow Foil parallels from the 2016-17 Upper Deck release.  I bought this quite a while back at $1.47, and I'm really glad I did because due to his league-leading 17 goals the cheapest one available on the site currently is north of $8.

I shelled out $1.65 for this Opening Day Blue parallel of third baseman Will Middlebrooks from the 2013 set.  I really only picked this one up because I think the photograph on Will's 2013 Topps releases is just fantastic, so I've attempted to pick up as many different parallels of this card as I can find for relatively cheap coin.

Obligatory 2011 Topps Legends variation!  I'm constantly on the prowl for these, and after recently adding Monte Irvin's base card I've now got the Cognac Diamond Anniversary parallel to compliment it.  My cost?  69 cents.  Yes, please.

From the same O-Pee-Chee Platinum set as the David Krejci card above, here's a Rainbow Color Wheel parallel of future HOFer Jarome Iginla.  I really like how colorful these are, and thanks to the e-Pack promotion between Upper Deck and COMC they are dirt cheap.  Iginla cost me just 30 cents in credit.

Almost at the end here, and it's time for the most expensive card in tonight's post.  I aim to acquire the entire 100-card 2014 Topps Finest set in X-Fractor format, as these are right up there with the 2011 Topps Chrome Atomic Refractors as some of my favorite colorful parallels, period.  World Series MVP George Springer's RC is one of the more desirable cards on the checklist, so I was pumped when the seller accepted my best offer of $2.75.  A significant notch in my belt as this project goes, that's 17 down, 83 to go...

I'm also accumulating these 2011 Gypsy Queen "Framed Paper" parallels over time.  There are 100 of them, but there are 999 copies of each so they're not all that tough to come by.  George Sisler cost me 53 cents, which brings me up to a running total of $19.89 on the night.  Since we're just 10 cents short now of the $19.99 retail price of a blaster, that will conclude this evening's COMC Blaster.

Thanks as always for stopping by, hope you saw a card or two at least that you found interesting!