Set Building with COMC

 I showed some of the sets I've been working on with other posts but there were some other sets that the most recent COMC order got me closer to...and even a couple it finished off completely! 

1995 Select is one of my all-time favorite NASCAR sets, I would surely rank it in the top 10 and perhaps even in the top 5 all time. It's a 151 card set...when it was issued Pinnacle didn't have the license for Dale Earnhardt but they got it eventually and issued this card later. I consider it a part of the base set though and it was the last one I needed to complete the set! This is actually the only card from the set to feature photography from 1995. I have not written much about this set on the history of Cardboard History because almost all of my set building of it was done not only before I started this website, but before I even knew what the internet was;, IE, the mid-1990s. 

The next set is one I have been meaning to do a bigger post on for a couple years now but have not set aside the time to write it yet. This is the Rookie Reprints from the 1996-97 Topps Stars (as well as Topps and Stadium Club) sets. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the NBA, this was a major key event for me in learning the history of my new sport, which I started following halfway through the 49th season. As part of the celebration Topps issued a set reprinting the rookie cards of the NBA's 50 Greatest Players. I can't afford some of the original cards, and with how these have gone since the pandemic boom I can't afford the reprints in some cases either. I mostly worked on the basic set...

but I think my favorite addition was this autograph of Tiny Archibald. Only 10 of the 49 living players signed reprints and this is the 8th card from the set I've tracked down. I'm not only a Walt Frazier and a Pearl Monroe away from completing the autograph set. Someday I will, but they are above my self-imposed $20 per card limit...this will be one of the occasions where I break that rule. 

I also worked on the Chrome parallel of the set. These have gotten very expensive in the last two years, but the Refractor versions even more so...enough that I didn't get any in this order. The last time I saw a Jordan refractor for sale the bid was up to $700 something so I don't ever expect to finish that set. The basic version and the Chrome version are possible, and the Autograph set is definitely something I want to complete. At some point both of the missing autographs will go onto my Top 10 Most Wanted list on the right sidebar which is woefully out of date. 

The only hockey set I worked on was the green parallel from 2019-20 MVP. I love this parallel, which was only available via epack. I have been working on this for a while now but stalled out...I couldn't remember which cards I had purchased already and these were all purchased back in 2019 so it wasn't easy to get to them to check, so I didn't buy any more. Since I want as many of these as possible, I just sorted the set by lowest price and picked off a full page.  

While I was at it I also found this Red parallel, which was some sort of epack achievement reward. I have no idea what it was earned by achieving, but I had to  get it. The set looks great in the red border, which is just coincidentally also Blackhawks team colors. It does not appear to be a full parallel, unfortunately. I think now I have all the different color parallels represented in my collection by at least one card, at least minus the other three colors of printing plate.

The 2019-20 MVP set has become one of my favorite NHL sets. I'm actively trying to complete it- just since I began the draft of this post back on April 1st I've added 4 more via trade to the base set. The base set and the Green parallels are metallic ink, which doesn't show up all that well in scans. Hitting the parallels for this set is a well I'll be going back to many times in the future. 

Unfortunately I missed the factory set that year, the only year of the MVP Factory Set I don't have, which is sad because it's my favorite MVP set and I love parallels, and that provides 250 of them in one place. I don't want to buy random cards from it, I want to find a complete factory set at some point, but my hopes of that are dwindling as the hobby remains somewhat crazy. Not giving up hope yet but the last couple of times I checked there were none for sale on Ebay. 

I also nabbed one of the insert parallels, in this obviously numbered, die cut Mika Zibanejad from the Colors and Contours parallel of the Stanley Cup Edition insert. It's a 100 card set, and this is my second, so 98 to go...however, it's another set I don't expect to complete because I don't have any of the big names like McDavid, Matthews, Ovechkin, Crosby, etc.. This card features full holofoil so it looks a lot better in person. 

If you read the post about the printing plates I bought you'll see a base card and a parallel from the 2019-20 MVP set as well. 

The only other sets I worked on were the automotive sets which I've already shown so I won't show them again now. Thanks for reading!