Weekend Update

Not this exactly, but this never gets old:

Decided to dive into 2019 Topps Update series with a jumbo box ($139 from Charm City Cards).  Since they are about an hour away, I got it in two days.

Haven't sorted my base cards yet, but I'm hopeful yet not optimistic that I've got a complete base set.  I did get a "hit" in one of the silver pack '84s, which was a nice bonus (even though it's probably going to go to a new home soon.) But I'll get around to all that in a bit.

A couple of keepers in the new World Champion Washington Nationals.  (Man, it's cool to be able to say that!)  The 150th Anniversary parallel of the 150th Anniversary insert Greatest Players Stephen Strasburg, and the 1984 tribute of Victor Robles.

This was on top of the box with the silver pack '84s.  It's earmarked for a new home already, sorry.

Here are the rest of my two silver packs.  Not a bad lineup, with Mays, Yelich, Verlander (sorry dude), and the requisite unknown rookies.  All are trade bait.  

The regular '84s and some of the 150th inserts and a shiny parallel that scans as blue.  These are probably going with Clemente.  I am not collecting either set except for a few of my PC guys that have already been listed on my site.

The remaining '84 regulars and the two (yes, only two) of the annual 60 Years of Cards your Mom Threw Out only to Buyback and Rediscover Berger's Best Future Stars in a Rookie Cup.

New York hot box!  Between Thor's blue parallel and Alonso & deGrom, I can make a Met fan a good deal.  Plus the pair of shiny (not really blue) parallels should go together to a Realmuto or Philly fan.  And nobody probably wants Selig unless they're going for the set.  Again, all trade bait except Cessa, who will likely go with Britton above.

The Golds - always nice to pull Trout, and I have been doing it with a couple of the last products I bought.  Good trade bait - as these all are.

The 150ths besides Stras were all horizontals.  And all in a sequence that will be familiar later.   These too are trade bait.

Dan's nephew is also available.  He's numbered 19/67, which is my birth year, so if I was into that sort of thing, I might keep him.

Here are the inserts I was waiting for - the two sets that I'd like to complete.  With Topps current philosophy of reducing the number of included inserts (instead of reducing the number of produced inserts), this is all I got.  One of each.  Pbbbth.

Here's what most of you have been waiting for.  The sick mojo hits.  Looking for a D'back collector.  I have already notified P-Town Tom about the Cubbies.  At least Kelly has a decent signature.

You'll notice the Wood auto falls outside the referenced "1 autograph and 2 relic cards."  It came from the bonus silver packs of '84s.  So what do they count as the other "relic"?

*Sigh*.  Yes, these appartently still count as "relics".  The only thing that this is a relic of is #1, the machine that produced it, and #2, the original idea that has run it's course.  Now, I won't complain about getting Doc, and it's not a bad looking thing.  Just don't call it a relic.  Philly fans, y'all can work out who wants it and let me know.  It would also go well with the "hat patch" relic of his I think I still have from a few years back.

Now the rest of this is going to look a lot worse than it is.  I started finding runs of the same base cards in the jumbo packs and got worried that there was a whole lot of excessive duplication or really bad collation.  But when you count it out, I should still get real close to a base set in spite of the visual results.

One jumbo box contains roughly 380 base cards.  When I picked up one stack of all the runs you see here, I was left with just under 80 duplicates and triplicates.  Since the base set is 300, I should be good.

Here's how it looks when you're done ripping packs.

One nice perk of all this is these:

 Which means they aren't worth a damn now....