All Things 2012 Heritage

I bought myself a blaster of 2012 Heritage… Probably doesn’t seem like a big deal to most of you, but my budget has been jammed up at nothing for a while now, getting a blaster was pretty exciting… I have been so lucky getting so many cards towards this set without buying any wax myself… Before I ripped my first pack I had 312 out of 500 cards in the set.  

The box promised 72 cards and after ripping the 8 packs inside I was in fact left with 72 new Heritage cards. The problem was that of the 188 cards that I need to complete the set I only pulled 6 cards I needed, the rest were dupes and inserts. Now I didn’t think I was going to scratch 72 cards off my list, but I had really thought I might do better than 6 cards.

I pulled 2 short prints out of the box. At this point I had 5 short prints in my binder, now I have 6 as one of them was a dupe. What are the odds? The SP I pulled that I did need was pretty sweet though, card #495 of Big Game James Shields – Ace of the Tampa Bay Rays staff and owner of a perfect 5-0 record.

Beyond that SP there wasn’t much to be excited about. I bought the box at Wal Mart and I pulled 1 blue parallel (Yadier Molina), I landed 1 chrome card, 2 News Flashbacks, 2 Stick Ons, 1 Baseball Flashback, 1 New Age Performer and 56 base card duplicates including multiple copies of cards #73 Fredi Gonzalez, 160 Mark Buerhle and 187 Shelly Duncan. Not cool Topps!

Anyway, I still had fun ripping a little bit of wax even if the results weren’t ideal. I am still in love with this set and love flipping through the binder and reading the card backs. I despise Topps collation and hate how difficult it is to pull short prints… I mean based on my results with 2 SPS in 8 packs, I would have to open 200 packs to pull 50 short prints. At $3.29 a pack that is $658 to pull 50 SPs and the chances of them being unique are very slim… Basically unless you have a card blog, trading partners in good standing, a lot of money, a lot of luck and a lot of patience, you are screwed if you want to complete this set to 500.

That said, I am not giving up, I want to finish this set and I intend on it. This afternoon I got a bubble mailer at the PO Box from Ryan of the Ryan’s Pitch blog. He had posted that he had 3 SP dupes on his blog and I jumped on them. He sent those 3 along with some Rays cards and a few other base cards from my needs list.

The 3 short prints included card #449 Geraddo Parra, 458 Adron Chambers and card #468 of Nelson Cruz and his 8 postseason homers in 2011.

He also sent a trio of sluggers from the LA Angels. These 3 combine for 12 All Star appearances, a slew of Silver Sluggers and a bunch of Gold Gloves. The card in the center celebrates Albert Pujols blasting 3 homers in 1 game for the Cards in the 2011 postseason. I had a little bit of time on my hands and combined 2012 stats for these 3 Angels. They are batting a cumulative .207 (61  for 294) with 4 homers (all by Wells), 19 RBI and 2 steals. Sad really.

Thanks to all for reading! Please check out my freshly revamped 2012 Topps Heritage page. Aside from the 180 or so cards I need, this page now shows ALL of my dupes, plus all of my inserts and parallels for trade. A huge thank you to Ryan from Ryan’s Pitch for all the Heritage help, he is another blogger on the short list of Troll-endorsed traders. Aside from chasing the standard modern sets, Ryan has taken on the task of chasing 1960 Topps. Wow. Go check him out and check out the Rays tonight, Jeremy Hellickson will be on the hill and they can’t lose at the Trop, so if that holds true he will be 4-0 at the end of the night.

Oh, as an endnote I did get a 90 on my Statistics final exam and got a B as my final grade. Due to schedule change at work I missed 2 weeks of school, so pulling off a B is pretty huge. My GPA dropped to 3.37, but I ain’t worried. Once again, PLEASE check out my well organized haves and haves not 2012 Heritage page...

My next ventures will be posting up the rest of the 2012 Gypsy Queens from the JABO break and I have a blaster of 2012 Opening Day to rip... I wanna chase the base now, but all the inserts will be up for trade, so stay tuned in if you need any...

Go Rays! Troll out.