3 Very Important Cards In This Week's Mail

Among some other stuff, these showed up this week.








These were the last 3 I needed, and my 2005 Topps Heritage Refractor set is complete. I'm only down to about 10 cards apiece on every other set besides 2010. Very happy to knock this one out since it is by far my favorite year of Heritage.

http://s190.photobucket.com/albums/z142 ... ?start=all

Congrats. You have been very persistent with your Heritage collection. Awesome job.

Congrats. That is my favorite set also. I am hoping to build a chrome set. 55 & even more so 56 is my favorite looking set of all time.

My favorite as well, who doesn't love 56 Topps?

Great stuff Jeff.

The 05 set is my favorite too. How difficult was the refractor set to do?

I've thought about putting the refractor set together but i was thinkng i would wait until a set showed up on ebay.

scotty21690 said:

My favorite as well, who doesn't love 56 Topps?

Click to expand...

Child molesters, that's who

Sweet cards Dabney

well played sir!

Absolutely gorgeous set. Nice job. I love Heritage.

Those 05s are sweet for sure. I did the 01 set and did the short set for 05 since they look so nice. Pretty sure you helped me a ton on the 05.

Thanks for the kind words guys.

Joe-

I wouldn't say the refractor set was too difficult, but I wasn't trying to break the bank with it. You have a window of about 6 months after a Heritage product releases until you stop seeing most refractors on a daily basis, then they get pretty scarce. I generally try to pick up the big names for about $5 apiece after the initial price spike but before they dry up completely. Nowadays you might see 2 or 3 Jeter/Pujols/Ichiro refractors from a specific year of Heritage show up in a year. I don't think I had seen a Wright in over a year when 2 popped up last week, and the first went for around $15 and I think I won mine for around $10 (of course one was listed with a $3 BIN right after I picked mine up.)


I'll go ahead and fully disclose - after purchases, trades, and shipping costs, my set cost $205.65 to build. This includes exact prices from purchases I've made, the cost of refractors pulled from ripping wax, and money that I had sent on cards that I traded away to get refractors for this set. This number is probably on the low side since my accounting practices in 2005 weren't quite what they are today. A lot of the cards I have listed as costing me $1 when I know they had to have cost more than that - probably sort of trying to hide the true cost of the set to myself. This set actually took a lot of work, if not money, by searching for "heritage 556" (the cards are serial numbered to 556) almost every day for 3 or 4 years. If I had aid myself minimum wage for the time I spent building this set, it would probably be ten times what I spent out of pocket. In my opinion, Heritage refractor sets are a bargain when listed for $250 or under, a good buy for $400 and under, and a fair price for the seller at $500 (but nobody will ever pay that.... or will they?)

At roughly 1 per box in the past, and tougher than that now, getting a 100 card set would be like getting every card for a $1 BIN with $3 shipping. I would have gladly paid that for the last 10 cards I needed. The best way I've found is just to buy up big lots whenever I can. I wouldn't call is a "drawback," but a "secondary effect" of doing this is that I end up with the cards I need in my "collection" and thousands (yes, thousands, see my signature) of Heritage extras in my tradebox, even though they are all sitting on my shelf at once. I just love hoarding these cards. I somehow justify it by saying to myself, "Self, surely you will be able to trade these Heritage cards to another Heritage collector for cards you need for your sets." I wish I were able to do that more often, but I'm really getting away from collecting and moving towards hoarding, which to be honest is not a direction that is healthy for me. I am getting better about not adding so much random stuff to the pile of cards in my house, but I need to get rid of things. In fact, I am going to start trimming the fat this weekend. I have way too many cards that aren't "ones that I collect" and I can use the money from their sale to have a much more positive effect on my life that a box of baseball cards does. I can still keep enough to have a fantastic collection, but man I need to get rid of some things.

I think the whole concept of trading isn't really worth it anymore. It would be a lot easier to just buy the cards I want from other traders rather than having a well stocked tradepage and hope that I have something they like. My collection and my life would be a lot less complicated if I did that. At least I can stop running searches for "heritage 556" now. Thanks to pandrews (one of my buddies from back in the day on the PSA boards) for selling me Wright, the last card I needed.

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