Shiny Cardboard - MVP!

Well, I didn't mean to take a full week off from the blog there, but it's been a little hectic and that's just the way the cookie crumbled these past few days.  I've got a really significant pick-up to show off today though, making up for lost time.

This is actually a card that I picked up months back, but it just so happens to be an opportune time to showcase it.  Behold!

Years back I made the somewhat foolish decision to try to complete the 220-card 2011 Topps Chrome set in Atomic Refractor format.  Atomic Refractors (or "Cracked Ice" in the Panini World) are arguably my favorite shiny cards of all-time.  The Topps Chrome versions have typically been scarce over the years, often numbered to just /10.  In 2011 they were less rare, being numbered to /225, so I figured this would be the year to try to complete a set of them from.

Well, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and it turns out this project is much more difficult than I anticipated.  Even cards with a couple hundred copies each in existence get pretty damn scarce ten years later.  Some of these may have been lost to time, others snatched up by player collectors, or forgotten about in private collections.  I was able to cruise through the first 150 cards or so, but then things sort of ground to a halt.  As I've closed in on 200 of them in recent years, one remaining name towered above the rest, and that was this Freddie Freeman rookie card.

I'd seen a few copies of this one sell for north of $100, which at the time I just wasn't willing to pay since I'm not a Freeman or Braves collector, and just wanted the card to complete my set quest.  After passing on those, I started to feel some regret as I'd go many months or longer between seeing a single copy available for sale.  This spring, the above copy triggered my saved eBay search at $70 Buy-It-Now.  I snatched it up before any other collector could beat me to it, and arguably the biggest remaining missing piece of my set fell into place!

Here's the back, you can see the serial-numbering along the bottom there in the center.  Obviously the attraction here is the brilliant, vibrant, shiny card front, but the 2011 release had a solid back design if I do say so myself.

The chase for this card was frustrating to say the least, but ultimately rewarding.  It definitely taught me that I'm not much of a set collector these days, and certainly not enough so to try anything in parallel format like this again.  I'm just glad I scooped it up when I did, because after his NL MVP win earlier this week this now appears to be closer to a $200 card on the open market.

With Freddie in the collection at last, I'm now up to 199 Atomic Refractors out of the 220 in this set.  I've got another cheap one I picked up on Sportlots on the way in the mail, so I'll be hitting the magic 200 number very soon.  The remaining cards are going to be brutal though.  How brutal?  Well, I placed what I thought was an absolute overkill bid on an Andrew McCutchen ($25) when it popped up a couple months after Freeman here, and lost...

I'm committed to getting there someday.  In the meantime, I'm enjoying the chase the best I can.  Thanks as always for stopping by, and enjoy your Sunday!