Striking (Steel) Gold on eBay!

One of the benefits to sitting out most 2022 baseball set releases is that I've freed up some funds to try and track down older cards that I need instead!  Lately, I've been browsing eBay and grabbing affordable Barry Larkin cards that I need - and that's what I've got to show off today:

The above card is a 1996 Leaf Preferred "Steel Gold" card of Barry Larkin.  As you can see, it has that annoying "protective film" on it but I can't quite bring myself to remove it!  This is the rarer parallel of the steel cards from the '96 set (the regular Steel cards were seeded 1 per pack while the Steel Gold were 1:24 packs)!  Nice to get a Barry Larkin box hit.

With the Steel Gold tucked away in my Larkin binder, I now own 119 of the 188 different Barry Larkin cards that I'm aware of from the year 1996 (I only count cards with a print run of at least 25 copies).  119/188 cards is good for a 63.3% completing rate for the year.  It just so happens that 1996 is the first year earliest in Larkin's career where my completion percentage 79%.  Not surprisingly, the year 1996 also has nearly twice as many Larkin cards as any year prior to '96.  In fact, there are 510 Barry Larkin cards from 1986 through 1995...and then in 1996 there were another 188 cards to track down!  

Don't even get me started on later years like 2004 which has nearly 300 different Barry Larkin cards for me to try and find.