Wednesday, October 20, 2010

the great topps chrome experiment


Topps Chrome. We all know what its all about. Refractors, tons of parallels, autographs, etc. etc. Having bought Topps Chrome from earlier years, I knew collecting 2010 would be a hard, wallet draining task. Four cards in a pack and one maybe two is an insert/parallel? Nuts to that. Packs are not the way to go for Chrome. Well, I wanted a set, and decided to try something different that I normally do. I was going to buy a box for the trade fodder, and then I would buy the set and the couple of cards I wanted and see if I could spend less on the set than the box. How'd I do? Lets take a look.

The box I purchased cost $75. Ended up with a refractor auto and a redemption auto. One Blue Jay card. ONE! Out of a full box. This certainly would not do.

Here is the list of what I wanted out of this set and what I paid on eBay (with shipping, because I did pay for shipping so I count it as cost for card):

220 card set - $37.49
Jays team set (5 cards) - 4.00
Mike McCoy auto (non-refractor) - 6.48
Vernon Wells Parallels:
Refractor - 3.98
X-Fractor - 2.99
Orange - 1.99
Purple (599) - 4.24
Blue (199) - 10.00
Gold (50) - 13.51
Red (25) - 14.61
Printer plate (black) - 25.52

Total - $99.29 without plate, $124.81 with the plate.

I would consider the plate an option due to it not really being part of the rainbow but I knew once it popped up, I wanted it. So I didn't spend less on the cards I wanted, but I would have spent a fortune to get all that in packs So I would say it worked out in my favor (kinda). This method may be what I may do in the future to save myself some headache and more importantly, cash. I would totally miss the fun of ripping packs and putting a set together myself, which is why I bought the box. Plus you never know if that box had the Strasburg superfractor auto.......right. Well, it was a hobby box, so it is a possibility. Speaking of hobby boxes, Topps is super conservative on the parallels this year. I seemingly got almost none. Not true of course, but it was very little.

That being said I have many Chromes for grabs if someone is trying to finish a set. BA Benny has laid claim to some Yankees, but other than that they are for trade. If you have a want list, let me know.

3 comments:

  1. I'll take any extra Rangers off your hands. I'll see what I've got for you.

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  2. That's a sweet rainbow of Wells cards. I think that's how I'm going to approach Chrome from now on. I always come up short in the set. I'm still working on 2009 Football, but I'm close.

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  3. I have an Aaron Hill orange refractor and a Mike McCoy RC regular refractor if you have any Chrome Rangers you want to part with.

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