I can start buying my retail Heritage now

At least when I am able to get near a Target at least, which is not always easy for me. I am currently working in the Town Without Baseball Cards again, but I had to make a run to a freight terminal today to pick up a load of seedlings.

And I did not pass the red bullseye along the way without stopping for some baseball cards.

My first little cellophane pack inside the blister pack was very, very unique in my baseball card pack ripping experience:

3-for-3 there as you can see. You might have to take off your sunglasses to see the cards in this post, sorry about that. No time to hook up the so-so little mobile scanner I bought, or to re-shoot these cards with the cellphone camera.

I like black border cards. The more people I read crying about how they hate them because they "chip" so easily, the more I like them. Here is a handy tip: a black Sharpie type felt-tip pen can erase those durn little white "chips" right quick. Will this make me eventually be prosecuted as if I trimmed a mega-valuable T206 card and then lied about it? Hahaha.

So I have been looking forward to these cards. They snuck up on me last year, after I had decided to stop purchasing Heritage. This year I have been waiting, which has worked out well enough so far, as I am almost always in towns without baseball cards, when I am even in an actual town.

Except the Target I visited today had only three of these blister packs. I am wondering how often I will be able to find these…

Ugh. Too much black? None more black? Perhaps. This might well be the baseball card with the most black ink surface area of all-time. The crappy photograph I am presenting just makes it look darker, but it's a poorly lit card to start with. Normally I like 'sunset' cards - the ones shot when the sun is going down - but I won't be saving an extra copy of the normal white-border version of this card either.

Thankfully, I also pulled this card:

I love this card; the looking back pose isn't used that much, and I always like seeing the MLB logo on a baseball card. There is a much better scan of it on Night Owl's blog.

Hey, wait … this means I pulled almost the same pack as Night Owl. I can't remember the third card in that pack, but it wasn't Chris Sale; I do know Cole and Ramirez waited for me together on that shelf at Target.

This happened to me last year as well - I picked up 9 of these parallels, and 2 of the 9 were doubles (both Tigers, as it happened). And three blisters were all I could ever find, like today. Uhh-oh.

And those 2 doubles were also from the high number > #425 / 'short-print' section of the Heritage checklist. Indeed, of the 9 cards I picked up tonight, 6 are high-numbers. This makes me think assembling a set of the #1-425 would be quite difficult. You would think collation of a 3 card pack would be a piece of … bubble gum? But of course, this is Topps, In Action. Speaking of Action, it appears that some Topps employee (or a contractor) had to individually tape over the top of each pack with Scotch-tape to get them to fit into the new, single-panel blister pack these appear in this year. Wonderful product planning there.

I won't be trying that. I do hope to assemble a set of 30 of these cards, one from each team. But I won't be real particular about which player makes my exclusive set. Well, that Gerrit Cole won't make the cut, that's for sure. So probably I will be a little picky.

But perhaps not, and that's where you come in. All of the cards pictured above are up for trade, save perhaps the Ramirez, unless you want to trade me the white border version. I also pulled Jay Bruce, Carlos Gomez, Domonic Brown and James Shields (hmm, a nice overcast Cloud Card looks very nice on the black border, I will be keeping that one too). I can definitely let 2 Cards cards go.

So if you pick up some of these parallels, keep me in mind. I'm also particularly on the lookout for the Jeff Samardzija card.

I am enjoying the Heritage cards I've been acquiring. They are so nice to paw through, card-by-card, in a stack. I have found lots of fun ones to share with you, in a little prettier way than bad cellphone pictures, and they are even scanned in already….type at you soon, I hope….