Today's addtion, 2013 Topps Chrome # 7 Gavin Escobar

Today's card, another rookie from 2013 Topps Chrome, this one is # 7 in the set. Tight ends don't typically get much hobby love but this didn't stop Topps from making 52 different variants of this rookie card. 52! If you think about this for a second, that's why team collecting and even player collecting for any given year is impossible. Collectors have to resign themselves to getting the best cards they can and either give up on the rest or add them whenever possible later on through the years. You'd be surprised what players people will still be going after years later. Personally  the only player collection I've gathered more than 100 cards of is of Clinton Portis. Honestly, player collecting can't hold my attention very much over time, especially because Portis has been retired for some time now. 

Some people on Beckett.com go after various players like Mark Brunell (There's a big time guy named Jade Rock who's managed to amass over 90% of his cards including multiple copies of his cards numbered to 5 or less). To do that you really have to have dedication. I have dedication as well but for me, sets have been the only thing I could concentrate on to any degree. There's a beginning and an end. You focus on a set and it takes as long as it takes. It took me over 7 years to build my 1999 Spx set which included autographed rookies of Donovan McNabb, Tim Couch and Ricky Williams. The reason it took  me so long is I waited for values to go down to acceptable levels. The last card in my collection was the 1999 SPx Tim Couch which I paid 30 dollars for; that's even high by today's standards I think, but you'd be really hard pressed to find one for sale, or at least that was my assumption. When I bought it he was trying to get on with Green Bay, shortly after he got released. A quick Ebay search turned up no less than 3 copies for sale right now including a BIN for a BGS 9 version for 20 dollars. There's one with an extremely blurry picture right now that's going for .99  cents with 4 days left. That makes sense right now. There's not many Browns collectors that want this card and surely not many set collectors that have not already put this one together. Even with my patience I had to vastly overpay for some players that never made it like Cade McNown. These cards are still offered for sale at times but it's very sporadic. High end sets like these where the cards are priced at a fraction of what they used to be are not worth it for collectors to sell any more. The only good news is that like all old cards, the prices have bottomed out and there's nowhere for prices to go but up. It might take 20-30 years for that to happen but eventually I think people might see how undervalued this set is. All rookies are hard signed and there are a few possible HOF cards in it like the Champ Bailey AU RC and possibly the Donovan McNabb AU RC.