And So On And So Forth.....

I totally blame Meijer for this. I really do.

Since I've all but finished putting together a Topps Series 2 set, I went back to see what else I could maybe work on. (Despite my claims that I would never again buy a pack of Topps cards. Yes, I am a liar and a hypocrite.)

The natural continuation would be to go ahead and build the 2008 Updates & Highlights set, since one, Meijer has plenty of blasters of these, and two, Topps didn't bother to offer this one as a factory set that I could pick up after spending over $100 trying to complete it (see Topps, 2007...)

So a building I a went!

It didn't help matters any that Meijer has these heavily discounted too. Well, actually it did help matters. These blasters were $19.99 marked down to $11.99. On top of that Meijer is currently discounting all cards 25%, so these are only $8.99. That's not horrible for a box that has 80+ cards and one jersey or bat card per box.

I picked up four blasters of the Updates & Highlights and one of the combo Heritage Update with Updates & Highlights blasters too. The collation of these is even worse than Series 2. Out of the five blasters, I got a total of 305 base cards. Out of that, I got 173 different cards in addition to 132 doubles. Damn near half the cards were doubles, and I'm still only about halfway to completing the set.

Enough bagging on Topps for now though. I think I've complained enough so that I'm starting to sound like a broken record. The funny thing is that there are some great things going on with this series.

I collect a set each year almost as a scrapbook or sorts of that season. Therefore, I dig the subsets a lot, and there are no shortage of them in this series. I really like the All-Star and Highlights cards. I could live without the Home Run Derby cards, as I'm not a fan of the contest itself, but all in all I think this is the best series of the three. And as much as I hate insert cards, I love the WBC insert cards. I like the Year In Review Cards, but would have preferred that they be base cards. What better time to release a 180 card subset than in the final series of the year? The Ring Of Honor cards are ok even if the player selection is not. (Jesse Orosco? Dave Justice? David Cone? Mike Lowell? Thank god I got a Bruce Sutter...)


The political cards are even worse this time around, as there is a First Couples card showing a pic of each President and the First Lady. I would really rail on these, but then I pulled a Tricky Dick card and his smiling face made me laugh so hard that it was impossible to be too upset about these.

It's time for me to go back to blogging about old Tigers team sets for awhile. Which is infinitely more fun than ragging on Topps.