Well, it's finally over. The box has been busted, the cards have been sorted, and my want list has been updated. I ended up with around 280 cards, so another 40-something are required. Any help you can provide is lovely.

After pulling star after star that I didn't want, I finally got a Diamond Star card that is of interest to me. The checklist isn't great (for my purposes) as there's only three cards on there that I want, and this is one of them. Votto and Felix are the other two.


The checklist on the Topps 60 and the Kimballs, on the other hand, have been fantastic this time around and I've added many more to my want list. Here's an example - Johnny Bench in all the Reds double-knit glory.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but growing up in Cincinnati, I always got the sense that a person was either a Johnny Bench fan or a Pete Rose fan, but you really couldn't be both. You might appreciate the other for what they accomplished, but you really only warmed to one or the other. I was a Pete Rose fan growing up. That's not to say I mind it when I get a Bench card - it's always welcome. And given how Pete is now persona non grata in ToppsTown (and all of baseball), I guess I won't be pulling any new Roses in the forseeable future.

The category they chose for this Topps 60 card is very lame, however.


Finally, the last gold parallel of the box, and I'm certainly please by this. Rarely do I get gold parallels of players I give a shit about. They're usually Pirates, and that trend held firm again with this box. Prior to this Roberts, the only gold parallel I pulled - ever - that I was happy to see was a Felix Hernandez league leaders card that he had to share with two other pictures. So this one is pretty good. Then you flip it over and check out the serial number:


ZOMG!!!!@~``111!!@!!! IT'S A 1-OF-1!!!!!!!! I COULD GO ONTO EBAY AND SELL THIS FOR $$$$$$$$

No it's not. It's a 1 of 2011. Says so right on the card.

Well, the corpse of my 2009 Topps box wasn't even cold before I cracked open the 2010 box. Heartless bastard, I know. I opened four packs, and am going to keep opening them four at a time until they're all gone.

The first pack was uneventful, but the second one contained a nice surprise - a Million Card Giveaway redemption card. And having *just* read this post from Play at the Plate about how the Transmogrifier was unstuck, I decided to head on over to the Topps site immediately. Sure enough, on the "recently unlocked cards" graphic there were 8 cards from the 60s and 70s, as well as one from the 90s and one from 2005. Pretty good odds, I figured. So I entered the code and...

Sunovabitch.

But I pressed on, undeterred. And in my next pack, wouldn't you know it, another MCG redemption card was staring at me. "Surely, this couldn't happen two times in a row," I said. Having looked at the updated recent cards chart, my Carter card was the only none 60s or 70s card. So I rolled the dice, typed in the nine-digit code with all the question marks and ampersands, and it spat out...


That's more like it. Former Bird Curt Blefary, albeit as a Yankee. A horizontal card in all its early 70s day-glo and lower-case fontted glory. Finally, a card worth having. But I wasn't done, oh no. Because in the next pack...well, it wasn't another redemption card. But midway through the pack, I saw this:


A Johnny Bench '73 Topps Yo Mamma card replica! Cautiously, I turn the card over to look at the back. Do I dare dream?


OH HELL YEAH!