I have not kept up with this thread at all lately! I've been slowing down on purchases of my usual mid range cards lately, in part to focus on some other financial goals, and in part because there have continued to be a bunch of higher range cards that have popped up for me this year. And I'm still just not feeling too incentivized to collect the 2025 releases very hard with the continued explosion of parallels and print runs (and the Twins awful season certainly hasn't helped either). With that said, I've still been having a lot of fun. Here's what I've been up to lately!
The one 2025 project I decided to take on (at least, until Ginter releases soon!) is working on Harrison Bader's 2025 Topps Chrome products mega-rainbow. Bader was one of the lone bright spots on the Twins this year and I love his playstyle - fantastic defense, speedy, can get it done with the bat, and just exuding style in every way. I've been focusing on picking up as many lower numbered parallels as I can for now, figuring the more common ones should be easy to grab in the future whenever I want. Here's what I've accumulated so far:
Gold Geometric /50, Orange /25, Orange Geometric /25
Orange Wave /25, Orange Logofractor /25, Black Geometric /10
Black RayWave /10, Black Logofractor /10, Red /5
I mentioned Ginter above, I can't wait for the 2025 release in a few weeks! I will be chasing all of the Twins as usual and really looking forward to adding some new cards for the ultimate Twins mini rainbow chase of all mini versions from all years of A&G. But before we get to the 2025 release, I have a few accomplishments from A&G of years past to share.
First, I was able to track down a 2006 No Number Mini of Harmon Killebrew, which completes my Twins NNO Mini run from the inaugural Ginter release! Those scarce early year minis are *tough*, so it's super exciting to be down to just hard to find one left. Here's the Killebrew alone, and with all its friends from the 2006 mini rainbow
Beyond that, I had been down to just a handful of base minis and A&G Back minis until I had all of the Twins that have been produced to date, so I finally bit the bullet and hit a few BINs that were higher than I wanted to go, so I can say I had this completed before the 2025 set releases. Each of these runs has 181 cards in total, across 19 years of Allen & Ginter, and so much fun to look at side by side!
I still have a little work to do to complete the Black Mini run, without looking it up I think I am roughly 75% of the way there, which is very doable and will just take some more time. And then from there it'll be a continued lifetime project to try to knock out all of the No Numbers and Bazooka/Brooklyn Backs /25. But this is always one of my favorite things to work on and it's a blast to see them really start to come together!
Next up is just a mishmash of some things I pasted together. These types of cards are really what I build my collection around the most, with Topps Black rookies, printing plates, some more A&G fun, and cards that I just gravitate towards
Same with a couple of autographs, fun mix lately of a few Molitors as well as a Trevor Plouffe rookie, who I have really enjoyed listening to in his post playing days on the Baseball Today podcast:
Ok, pause.
All of this has been a blast, but the last bit of this are some big ones for me. It is funny how things seem to come in waves, with nothing really catching my eye for the longest time, and then all of a sudden, a bunch of cards near the top of my all-time want list all pop up around the same time. It's a whirlwind, but so much fun!
First, here is one of my bucket list Twins cards, and the single best rookie card of my all-time favorite player. A 2001 Bowman Chrome Gold Refractor of Justin Morneau /99
There have been a handful of these that have popped up that I have debated grabbing over the years, but I've learned this card is notoriously off center, and I had been holding out for a copy that hits my eye a little better than copies in the past. This one is not perfect, but it finally was one that was good enough for me, and it is just awesome to be able to finally add one of these to the collection! This also completes the Morneau rookie rainbow for me, but I will hold off on sharing a rainbow pic for now as I need to go back take a better scan of the X-Fractor
Next, if you have followed my collecting at all over the last few years, you know I have been lucky to add a bunch of huge Brian Dozier rookie cards. Doze is one of my top 5 favorite Twins, and it has been just incredible to build out so much of his rookie rainbows. Well, that project has continued on lately with some more great ones popping up!
First up, these trio fill a few huge holes in my rookie rainbows: 2012 Bowman Draft Chrome Red Refractor /5, 2012 Bowman Platinum Prospects Atomic Refractor /10, and a 2012 Topps Chrome Atomic Refractor /10. All of these are basically just impossible to find, so when they pop up, you have to go for them!
Adding these three bring me down to just 8 non-1/1s until I have a copy of every single Brian Dozier rookie card ever produced, some of which are more low numbered cards that will be tough to find, but a handful of them are more common and I just haven't grabbed yet. To be able to be this close still blows my mind!
But that's not all! In the past few weeks, a bunch of Dozier rookie printing plates popped up as well! I found these within 15ish minutes of them being listed, but sadly even that was not fast enough to nab them all. Someone else beat me to 4 of them, but I was able to pick up 4 for myself as well! If you or someone you know happened to be the buyer of any of the other plates, I would love to see if we can work out a deal to bring them into the massive rookie collection. But for now, I am ecstatic to be able to add these 4 to my PC! This gives me at least one printing plate from 5 of the 7 sets that Dozier has rookie plates in.
I am going to hold off on posting updated Dozier rookie rainbow pictures in this thread for now since this post is already pretty long, but I will get an update posted in my
Dozier-specific thread sometime soon
And that's what I have for now! Thanks for following along!