trade with andrews baseball cards

Lately I have been complaining about the abundance of inserts in the past few years Topps sets. For the most part I like the inserts, I just don't like how there are so many of them in each set. If you're trying to at least get the base set it's going to take buying that much more of the product to finish off the set and you're still left with partially completed inserts and base sets. It's one of the reasons why I got a little bored with A&G last year. Buying some random retail packs didn't do much to chip away at the set and actually completing the set or feeling like I was getting closer makes me want to buy more of it. It feels a little futile to buy up a bunch of packs and not really feel like you're doing much in the way of completing anything. Pulling the cards are fun, grabbing a few inserts or some cool minis is nice too, but ultimately I want to feel like I'm getting closer to the goal of finishing something.

Whew, that was a long winded rant. Sorry. Enough whining, now for the stuff that I do like:


In the past few years of Topps flagship baseball they included at least one insert set if not more that I really liked. The retro themed inserts like Turkey Red and Kimball Champions were really nice looking to me.

I was mainly collecting series one. Occasionally I would buy a series two rack pack or individual packs for fun. I wasn't really that concerned with collecting the series two, but as long as I was buying it I might as well put them in the binder. It's a very lazy way of collecting, but that's how I felt about flagship last year.


I didn't buy much in the way of Updates, mainly one value pack and a loose pack to see what kind of stuff I could pull.

Since I wasn't buying much product it stands to reason I wouldn't get close to finishing up the base set much less my favorite insert set: Kimball Champions.



By not going the Ebay or COMC route, buying packs is pretty much the only way I'll finished

That only leaves one other option which is the trade route. I did pick some singles online, but I was pretty much laying off this set in favor of vintage. I don't know about you guys, but I seem to have a little ADD with my collecting habits. For a few months it's all retro stuff, then it'll be vintage, then it might be football or player collections. Just whatever random stuff I happen to be into at the moment.

Gettting back to the trade topic. Andrew's baseball cards blog offered up a big chunk of Kimballs for trade. I jumped on the offer and he sent over about 29 minis from series one, two and updates.

Here's some visual evidence of the trade.

In series one I only needed one card of Roy Halladay to finish up the first 50.

You can see that their is a missing Halladay at the bottom of the sheet.

Here is the after pic.


I bought a bunch of 20 card pages in addition to the 15 card pages just to see how I like them. It's nice to have a bunch of mini cards on one page. 20 per page looks better, but the top of the card sticks out of the top of the sleeve, so the card isn't completely protected. It bothers me a little, but I'll get over it. 15 card pages protect the card more, but there is a lot of space in between the cards.

While I'm at it, here's the third page. The first ten were already in my collection. the lower five including the Koufax was from Andrew. Pretty nice.


I only bought a couple of packs of Updates last year and I only pulled one Kimball; the one of Ozzie.



As you can see after the trade I have a lot more in the binder.
Ozzie's not so lonely now. I wish I would have remembered to put the blank page on top of the cards when scanning, but at least you get the idea.

Since I needed some photos to break up the monotony of my writing and because I wanted to show off the minis in the binder rather than alone on a scan I just randomly inserted scans of the pages. Hope you all liked it.

Thanks for the cards Andrew and thanks for the cards.