Tuesday, December 1, 2020

"Silver" Savings

With the Black Friday madness (or lack there of) behind us, I can get back to reporting about my collection additions big and small.

I know with a collection of over 3,000 unique cards of a single player the obvious reaction is likely one of these scenarios "I didn't know he had that many cards" or "You must have every card made".  

Both above statements are very false assumptions.  Andrew McCutchen has 6,254 unique cards according to TCDB.  If I ever actually spend the time to complete my checklists on their website I would have only roughly half of the produced cards of my main player collection.  To put into perspective, Mike Trout has over 14K cards and Fernando Tatis Jr has over 4K cards already.  

I am very content with my player selection and with each new card I add to my collection that adds roughly a hundredth (yes 0.01%) to the percentage owned.  

Simple math lesson, I need to add 62 new unique cards to the collection to make a 1% increase to the number of cards I own vs the cards produced.  

There are cards though that become available that I get really excited to add to the collection.

This is one of them.
Not only did I purchase it with a winning bid of only 49 cents, it also helps cross off a format of cards that I always covet when making my McCutchen purchases.
Shiny refractor ✔
Dreadlock era Cutch ✔
Pirates uniform ✔
Cards identifying his MVP season ✔

In the football and basketball world, Prizm silvers are the kings of collecting.  They are the equivalent to Topps Chrome Refractors, but with some amazing etching on the cards as well as some shine that really pops.  
Here they are side by side on the scanner, which never captures the refractor quality very well.
And here they are with a phone flash.

I can't take pictures of Refractors very well and my scanner does them ZERO justice.

What tips do you have for showing off the shine of those Refractor and Prizm cards?




3 comments:

  1. People on Twitter always talk about light boxes, so that might be an option if you were interested. I've never tried (or even seen) one personally, so I can't yay or nay them, but for a collection like yours they might be worth looking in to.

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  2. I don't have any advice about what to do. I'm just in awe again of your cards.

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  3. I just collect what I can get my hands on... and enjoy. 62 new cards to increase things by 1% sounds crazy, but I'm sure part of the fun is chasing them down for you. One of the reasons I'm not in any rush to own every single Gwynn card is b/c I know it'll never happen. We might not collect the same way... but you have fun. I have fun. Gotta love that about our hobby.

    As for showing off shine... it's not the best tip... but sometime's I'll rotate a refractor on my scanner and the way the light hits the card adds a little bit more shine. Other than that... photos are the way to go, but my ocd usually won't allow me to use photos unless I'm showing off a bigger item or a bunch of cards in one shot.

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