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A TCDB Surprise Card from mpdillard25!

Giving Up? What's Your Limit for Card Collecting Patience?

I often wonder just how long I should hold out hope that I might acquire a card in a trade.  As you probably know, my want list spans many different sets and years (actually it spans well over a century if you count my original Allen & Ginter set that I'm slowly working on)!  Sometimes I add a set to my want list and then receive a flurry of trade offers and quickly complete that said (1990 Topps comes to mind) while other times I add a set to my want list and I don't receive a single trade offer (2009 American Heroes of Spaceflight inserts for instance).

The million dollar question:  When do you give up on hoping for a trade to help complete a set?

Sometimes, I give up and then go to eBay, Listia, or Check Out My Cards to try and finish a set.  Other times, I give up on a set and simply delete it from my want list and remove it from my binders.  Most of the time I do neither of those - and then things languish on my list for days, weeks, months, and years.

Why do I try to maintain that level of patience?  Well, for one every now and then I get a PWE in the mail with a surprise.  The other day, I received this in the mail:

Yep, that's a 2011 Diamond Anniversary parallel - a set that I tried to put together immediately upon pulling my first few diamond parallels.  Although now I'm sick of the sparkly parallels (Topps killed it with the gold, green, red, etc. in subsequent years), I still would like to finish off the 2011 set (especially because I am now only 22 cards away from having all 660 parallels in the set!

The only bad thing about the PWE that contained the card of Votto and two other shmucks is that there was no return address or note - so I don't actually know who set it my way!  If it was you, let me know please!!

As for everyone else, do you have any 2011 Topps diamond sparkly cards lying around?  Maybe you have one of the few that I still need?  If so, or if you have anything else on my want list, please make me an offer!

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:08 PM

    This is a constant struggle - it's a tough balance. When I get close, I usually start going to sportlots or COMC. Even doing that - the number of sets on my wantlists seems to grow larger not smaller!

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  2. I will be sending a few A&Gs from your want list next week

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  3. I feel yer pain Chris!
    Mine is 2008 Upper Deck Documentary...
    I am only collecting the Rays, so its less than 200 cards, but it was pretty much the worst product to rip ever!
    Most folks bought one discounted blaster and most of them sent me their Rays, I had 50 within months, but they stopped coming. I have added one card to the binder in 2 years. The problem is - the set is AWESOME to me because it documents game by game the year my favorite team went to the World Series... Blurgh...

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