Thursday, June 24, 2021

It would have taken me nearly 3.6 million trips to Target...

As I continue to live with the in laws for the forseeable future, I have been forced to look at my binders of Cutch cards more often and pay less attention to the big sick mojo hits of autographs, patches, etc that are in toploaders and one touches in storage.  

It's actually been calming to look back on the base cards and revisit the card backs and fronts instead of just concerning myself with all those wacky parallels that Topps and Panini are doing.

Similarly I have really slowed down in terms of adding new Cutch cards to the collection.  This is for two reasons. 1)We are continuing to look for the perfect home in a difficult market and 2)The parallels in current products don't scream to me the way they once did.  

One parallel I haven't seen hit yet is the 2021 Topps Series 2 pink parallel for Andrew McCutchen.  If one of those does pop up, you can be sure I will be adding it for the October event.  

Anyway, as I was flipping through my binder I came across a page with 2015 Bowman cards.
As you can see from this page there are quite a number of parallels on this page.  The Orange parallel pops, but I want to talk about a pair of cards in today's post.

I want to focus on the cards on the right side of the 2nd and 3rd rows.

I took them out of the pages and used the camera scanner app on my phone.
They both look pretty similar, right?

The only differences I could see on the front was that the unique "ice" technology pattern continued all the way to the edge of the card on right, but the card on left had that technology stop at the borders of the card's design.  I have bought missing foil stamp cards and as you will see in a future post (maybe even tomorrow) I have bought severely miscut or error cards.  

I thought this was something similar.

I didn't remember much about the 2015 Bowman release so after flipping the cards over I discovered that I had something special.
Yeah, the card on the left is a pretty unique card indeed.  The card where the pattern stops at the borders is called a White Ice parallel and was printed as a 1/1.  

I can't find any details for hobby pack insertion rates, but the purple ice (pictured on top right corner of page) were limited to 50 copies and found 1:239 packs.  At a similar rate, the white ice parallels would land 1:11,950 retail packs.  Expand that to a 300 player checklist and you would need to open nearly 3.6 million packs (3,585,000 to be exact) to ensure getting the McCutchen.  

With the current hobby market, that would have been a lot of 6am Friday visits to Target!!!

I honestly had forgotten all about this parallel and might not have even realized how rare it was, as proven by it just being in an Ultra Pro Platinum 9 pocket page.  

What kind of rare cards have you found recently that you forgot you owned?

Have you seen any cards at retail return yet?  

3 comments:

  1. Haha just a 1/1 casually sitting in a binder!

    I randomly found some Bowman at Five Below when I was picking up Big League Chew for my little league team, but haven't looked anywhere else.

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  2. Still real spotty in regards to seeing cards in the wild but I get lucky about once a month which still stinks. These are good looking cards and that 1/1 is a great surprise. Don't think I've ever had something that rare surprise me before. Probably a few old rookies of stars but nothing like this. Great post.

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  3. Wow. Love the math behind this post. Now calculate the miles involved... and how many trips around the planet that would be equivalent to. I can't think of any finds as rare as this... but I do have a mid-July post involving a pair of low pop graded inserts I found sitting in a box that I turned around and sold for a nice profit. As for cards at my local retail... haven't seen them in a long, long time.

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