One More Pack

Optic Project: The Beginning and the Brady Holo

I’ve always been a bit of a collector.  I like to complete the base sets because what is the point of spending all that money for one or two big “hits” and throwing away all of the other cards.  While being stuck and home and trying to catalog my entire card collection, I became very aware that I had some strong collections of base sets for Optic Football.

Donruss Optic is my favorite set of the season.  I can get hobby boxes on the internet and retail cards at Target and Walmart so it’s easily available. The Optic technology makes for a great looking card.  It has a set size of 200 which makes collecting the base set something that’s doable.  100 base veterans, 50 base rookies, and 50 base Rated Rookies.  Along with the base cards there are many parallels, each more difficult to find.  Pink, Purple, Red & Yellow, Bronze, Aqua, Red, Blue, Purple, Green Gold.  Some are numbered from 299 all the way down to Gold Vinyl 1 of 1.  Some of them are ridiculous like White Sparkle, Green Velocity, and Black Pandora.  Any given card can have about 10-15 parallels.

So here is the deal.  My first attempt was 2016, I had already collected the base set, so where should I go from there.  All the rookies have parallels from retail boxes with Pink and Purple.   I had about 20 each of those.  Not too bad.  But I really like the HOLO versions of the cards and they have versions of all 200 cards in the Holo parallel.  I also had a bunch of those, 30 to be specific.  So that’s where I started.   It’s not easy to see the difference in the Holo (left) in a scan but in person the difference is obvious.

For set collectors, I recommend SportsLots (Use the banner to the right, I’ll get a little something for sending people that way.)  I went to SportsLots and checked out what the cost would be to pick up the 2016 HOLO cards. To my surprise most of them were between 18 cents and 30 cents.  Sure the big rookies were more and the some stars a bit more.  I had about 30 holo cards so I only needed to get 170.  After spending an hour or so searching between COMC.com and SportsLots.com I was able to purchase about 160 of them leaving me to hunt down the rest from eBay.

This is where it got interesting.  I got most of them, Ezekiel Elliot, Jared Goff, Michael Thomas, Tyreek Hill for under 10 bucks shipped.  I was still missing two cards Tom Brady and Carson Wentz.  I figured Brady wouldn’t be bad as it’s a veteran base and there would be plenty out there.  Maybe I’d spend $10-15 on this card.  But then something happened.  I’m sure it’s some kind of market manipulation by people with lots of money in the game.  The price of the Brady Card jumped.  From $9.95 at the end of February to $199.00 or more where it sits today.  Now there is no way I’m buying a card with Tom Brady on it for 200 bucks.  Just not going to happen.

I’d love to find out what really happened here but I’m sure I never will.  I’m also hoping that the price comes way back down and I can complete the 2016 Donruss Optic Holo set.  I guess 199 out of 200 isn’t too bad.

I was also looking at the pink, purple, and Red/Yellow parallels at the same time.  I found that some of these could be had on COMC.com and some on SportsLots.com, but the best place was to find them on eBay when someone wanted to get rid of 20 or 30 of them for cheap.

Another post is in the works for the 2016 retail parallels.

Now go open One More Pack, and as always Let’s Go Buffalo.