They come in colors everywhere - Rainbow #1

I made a Rainbow! Sort-of. 

I know these are their own little style of collecting. Although I am always working on a Rainbow set, basically, I am not otherwise that interested in attempting to "rainbow" a single card.

But not completely uninterested. Here is the source material, which to no surprise at all, is from the 2013 Topps Baseball set, card #12 :

Although I haven't (yet) made an Official Top Ten 2013 Topps Baseball cards list yet, this one will surely finish in the top 5. This used to be a pretty common setting for a Baseball Picture Card, but these days they almost don't exist, for brand new cards of current players.

Here is a full write-up on all the many facets of this card.

That page will be triumphantly updated sometime this winter, when a big batch of new (to me) Sea Turtle cards arrive and (I think) I can officially declare cards #1-100 completely selected for the all-parallel project. And then every page can have a freshening up, one-by-one. It seems The Commissioner ruled that using the Opening Day Blue Foil cards was a little on the cheese side, and thus only Baseball Cards showing an authentic Opening Day photo can still use those otherwise fine parallels for the project. Historical revisionism is after all always a perpetual task, si?

That project explains why this Rainbow was created however - always assembling big (& little) piles of 2013 parallels left me with a whole bunch of different ones for this wonderful Baseball Card, and it seemed a shame to just lock bonus versions of such a beautiful Baseball Card away in a little cardboard box casket, just in case I met another 2013 collector in desperate need of them.

Since I had over-easily assembled the easier versions of this card, I decided to put them on that sadly incomplete binder page and start watching for a few helpers to scroll by in my never-ending feed of "new" 2013 cards, as in, newly offered for sale. This has now borne enough couple-three dollars fruit to get all the way to the magic favorite number of the Beatles, which is of course, Nine, 9, nine, number NINE.

That, however is not an official "Rainbow" as a few more parallels of this card exist but are not included here. The toughest part of a Rainbow is of course the 1/1 cards. And there, a massive majority of such Rainbow efforts begin the line-drawing around the concept right away. Obviously with the Topps Baseball set the premiere parallel to obtain is the Platinum. But what about the printing plates? There are four of those, too, each 1/1. And then there is the 1/1 Topps Vault Blank Back. A half-parallel?

So almost every Rainbow is going to have to accept being just partial, in the down-at-the-courthouse sense. I'm not sure I want to visit the Courthouse of Baseball Cards.

I prefer making my own rules, with Baseball Cards. The next problem with most Rainbows is - how do you display them? Yeah, sure, they're tucked safely away down at the Safe Deposit box at your local bank, full of incredibly valuable Baseball Cards, and your inner Heart-of-Darkness is quite pleased to know you own a whole Rainbow (kinda, an inconvenient fact which will permanently irritate old Colonel Kurtz). But how do you enjoy them from inside the safe?

That's of course where the nifty binder page comes in. And that's where I'm drawing my line on "Rainbows." 9 cards. No more, no less.

The missing cards here would be those six 1/1s I mentioned, the /25 Sapphire, which with the foil printing effect takes away much of the charm of the majestic background, and also the /99 "Desert Camo," which obliterates the White Sox' very own, one team only, grey-white Sea Turtle graphic, a whole lot. The Desert Camos are also largely banned from the All Parallel project too, by the way. They just don't "pop." And there is a chance I forgot a parallel somewhere. 

Given that leaves 8 cards off this result and I could put a base card on a page too, that means I could have done a 2 page Rainbow. But that's just not going to happen. And that doesn't bother me, unlike that infernal list of Super Short Printed 2013 Topps Baseball cards.

Now if this were a 2023 Topps Baseball Rainbow attempt, I think those could go to 3 pages, easily, maybe even 4. No one has enough fingers and toes to count all the parallels that exist of a 2020s Baseball Card any more, with all the special stamped versions evilly chuckling 'dance, junkie, dance.' I think the Chrome parallels of always the same image but technically from different "products" might get a single Baseball Picture Card all the way to a three digit quantity of "different" versions, particularly in the year 2022. Possibly, maybe, perhaps. I just won't ever be calculating that number though you can for extra credit, after class.

So, yeah, yeah, tl;dr, let's get goin' here

The Result

Neat.