Today brings another Blue Wave Refractor of Titans QB Jake Locker

Today's card is 2013 Topps Chrome Blue Wave Refractor Jake Locker #56. This is my 11th card to the set leaving me with 269 more to go including the autographs. I've set up two collections in my Beckett Organize, one with the cards I've added to the Blue Wave collection and another where I see what cards I have left. This is a handy tool to see what cards have been purchased and to help me make a plan for getting the autographed cards. I've found the best strategy for completing sets is to get the cheapest cards first. While you do run the risk of the expensive cards getting too far out of reach this honestly doesn't happen very often. Usually what you are doing is allow the overhyped players to come back down to earth when they get injured, the team does bad or interest moves on to the newest hottest set. I imagine once some of the licensed 2014 sets come out we're going to see a massive fall off for demand for any 2013 cards with the exception of 1 to 2 players, probably Eddie Lacy and Geno Smith. Everyone else's cards will likely be able to be gotten for much less as time goes on. I've been collecting long enough to see these cycles happen over and over again. 

A Bengals star from yesteryear graces my collection today

Added this 2013 Topps Chrome Blue Wave refractor to my collection today. This is the 10th so far in the regular set of 220. I was looking at purchasing another large lot to help me along with this set from the same seller that seemed to have tons and tons of Topps Chrome but I wasn't willing to pay as much for this lot as the last one because there would be so many doubles to sell or trade off. Looking at the guys lots he must have opened tons and tons of product. He had nearly a complete set of the x-fractors. He was selling lots of 50 or more of these blue waves. He also had a huge lot of pink refractors and blue refractors from 2012 which had tons of demand because of the stars like Russell Wilson and Nick Foles that were in these limited sets. I'm glad he was selling but was wondering what the draw would be to open so much product and then being forced to sell for pennies on the dollar which is essentially what happens with lots on Ebay. 

I did end up getting my first autograph from the 60 Blue Wave Rookie Autograph set yesterday, a Miguel Maysonet that ended up going for less than 10 dollars. My goal is to get at least auto a month, maybe more if I can afford it. At that rate it will take 5 years to complete this set but my patience is unlimited. It took me 7 years to complete the 1999 Spx set and 4 years to complete the 2008 Spx set. I can be very patient when it comes to hunting down the cards I need at a good price to finish off a set.

A strange case of different uniforms on the same player

I am adding the regular version of the 2013 TC Blue Wave, Miguel Maysonet #13. I was wondering if the autographed version was of someone else although I thought it was really unlikely someone had the same name since the last name is so strange. When I checked under Beckett organize it appears that they are both card #13 so they are the same player, it's just the autographed and base versions are using a different photo . I looked him up on NFL.com and it appears that he's actually with neither of these teams, that he's on the Steelers (his 7th team!) I don't think I've heard of anyone going through that many organizations before, especially in such a short period of time. This is one of those autographs that you might expect to pull from Contenders (that is a scrub that will probably never play) but the checklist for the Topps Chrome Autographs is pretty deep. One might wonder why it's needed to have an autograph of nearly every rookie but everyone's hoping for the next big thing. It's also a nice draw for the team collector. Team collectors probably outweigh the individual player collector, I've had several instances where I've invested heavily in an individual player on my favorite team only to see them get traded a year or two later. Brandon Marshall and Jay Cutler are great examples. I never thought they'd get traded but under the Josh McDaniels regime they both got booted in the same season. This might be why I've shifted my focus mainly to sets. There is a sense of satisfaction to completing them and what happens to individual players don't matter as much when you've diversified your spending habits.

Spectacular additions today since I'm a Broncos fan AND doing this Blue Wave Set

No reason to be shy about these beauties today, especially if you're a die-hard Broncos fa like me! These are the Topps Blue Wave Refractors #'s 1 and 97 respectively. The Manning alone was going for over 10.00 or more right before the SuperBowl, it's now leveled off to a more reasonable 6 or 7 bucks on Ebay. I'd guess this would sell for 20-25 at your local card shop, especially here in Denver. I got the Manning from one huge lot of 45 of these cards for a very reasonable price and the Decker in another. Buying lots for set collectors is a dream come true because shipping is reduced per card and any doubles you get you can sell off one by one and really recoup some of your collecting costs. You have to have the patience to do it but in the long run you will do far better for your collection than any other method. Box breaking, group breaking, shows and card shops just can't compete with the vast marketplace that Ebay has become. 

CheckoutMyCards.com has been making a run at it as well as other minor players like Amazon (in the sports cards market anyway, in other products like books they are obviously industry giants). I'm not really too impressed with COMC.com because the niche that they claim to cater to (the small time buyer who just needs a common or two to finish their set) can just as easily be filled by Ebay. COMC.com also claims to have an edge up on Ebay because of their "low low" shipping prices capped out at 3.00 per card. If you look on Ebay, very rarely will you see unreasonable shipping costs because sellers are now rated for it. It has become more and more expensive to ship cards and you always want to be careful of those sellers offering free or very reduced shipping costs because guess what... it will come to you in a plain white envelope with high risk for damage and maybe a toploader if you're lucky. I even had one card shop sell me 4 hall of famer autographs. No top loader, plain white envelope and they were all sandwiched between a piece of cardboard. Why in the hell would you ship even commons that way much less 4 very rare cards with AUTOGRAPHS? The common sense of some of these sellers really eludes me sometimes. I will gladly pay 2 or 3 dollars for shipping to get an undamaged card. 

Nice Blue Wave of 6th overall pick Barkevious Mingo

Today's card is one of the first horizontal card layouts I've seen and with the blue wave refractor technology it looks stunning as you can see. Mingo did well for a rookie last year, in looking up his stats looks like his first ever career sack came from getting Tom Brady, not a bad way to start off. 

A minor difference between the autographed and non autographed versions of these cards besides the lightened area where the auto goes is that the team logo gets moved out of the middle so the player has more room to sign. This is my sixth card in the series and I've got enough buildup now to showcase one a day of these cards for quite some time what with the awesome lots I picked up on Ebay.

On other product notes it looks like Fleer Retro is live for Upper Deck (weird right?) and now we're seeing all the throwback insert sets but very few on-card autos. As with all UD products they are going to be college uniforms, a big problem with collectors like me that enjoy NFL based products. I stopped collecting the SPX brand for this very reason, just can't get into the college theme that much because I don't tend to follow college. Focusing on the singles I need for this set seems to be a far better project that shooting in the dark for big hits out of the late NFL releases like this and National Treasures.

Today's addition, by far my best Polamalu card to date

Today's card that I'm adding to the stash is a 2013 Topps Chrome Blue Wave Refractor #123 Troy Polamalu. Because most of the complete sets I've worked on so far have been extremely rookie oriented (like the 1999 Spx, 2000 Spx and 2008 Spx sets that I've completed) I don't have many star cards other than if they happened to be rookies and made it that year or if they were in the base set. Since this is a rare refractorit's a bit better than the common base cards that he usually shows up in although he does seem to show up in most sets. He's obviously the most popular Steeler outside Roethlisberger and the Steelers have a huge fan and collector base all over the country. I've pretty much ignored this team in my collecting habits since I'm mainly a set collector first and a Bronco collector second. His 2003 Spx RC might be one that I get if I ever get around to completing that set. That one's famous for having the Romo and the Sp Authentic is even better with Romo's card being autographed.

Checking in my collections I have the base 2013 Finest, the base 2008 Spx and a card from a 2009 Steelers Superbowl commemorative set out of Donruss. This is my fifth Blue Wave card, just 275 more to go! This could take a while but with money and patience I'm determined to put it together.

More Topps Chrome additions, and another Blue Wave Refractor

Today's additions consisted of a base card, a rookie and a Blue Wave Refractor rookie from 2013 Topps Chrome. I was looking around yesterday at the completed auctions for 2012 Blue waves since I'm sort of enamored with this set idea right now. If you guys have seen the "Chuck Strong" version of the Andrew Luck RC refractor that is going for HUGE bucks right now and it's not even autographed. This is the version where he's got his helmet off and his head is shaved to support when head coach Chuck Pagano had cancer in Luck's rookie year. My guess is that it's really really rare and combine that with the fact that it's just a cool card to own and the sky is the limit on this one. An ungraded version of this sold for around 75 bucks which is big money for a non-autographed non-serial numbered card.

Last year's version even included an autographed version of Alfred Morris. This had a shabby looking sticker autograph which ruined the look of the card. This years 60 rookie autos have solved this problem by using a lighter shade above the team logo and eliminating the sticker entirely, a very smooth move by Topps.

If you wanted to purchase a full set of the 2012's the buyer was asking about 2 grand for it. I haven't done any market research on this but my guess is this is well over twice what the market will bear. Full sets don't really do that well on Ebay unless they happen to be rare vintage sets, and even then I'd say the seller will get gouged much more often than if they would break it up.