The Ultimate Ginter Mini Set Bracket: Seeding Vote #11 (2017)

Before we get to today's vote, let's congratulate the Ferocious Felines - winner of the top seed for the 2016 vote!  Interestingly enough, we now have a cat focused set and a dog focused set as two of our top seeds as we make our into the final week of seeding voting!  Speaking of that, let's get to it!

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Welcome to the eleventh of my Ultimate Ginter Mini Set Bracket posts!

For the first part of the bracket creation, we need to seed the various mini insert sets.  I thought it'd be fun to first have a vote for the best mini set within each year and use each vote winner as a top seed.  From there, I'll fill in the rest of the bracket with some of the non-winning mini sets and then the entire bracket will be set and we can have our giant vote-off!

I also hope that each of these Seeding Vote posts give you a bit of information about each of the mini sets for a specific year.  That should help with your voting as we move forward into the heart of the Ultimate Ginter Mini Set Bracket.  I laid out the rest of the ground rules in my introductory post so feel free to check that post out as well.  Now, we move on to the good stuff (and remember to vote at the bottom of the post)!

The Ultimate Ginter Mini Set Bracket:  Seeding Vote #11 (2017)

The 2017 Topps Allen & Ginter set featured six more "regular" mini insert sets plus an unannounced stealth set that I actually didn't know anything about until I started to do some research for this post!  I'll blame my lack of knowledge about those cards on the fact that in the summer of 2017 my wife and I welcomed our baby boy to the world...clearly my mind was not on baseball cards at the time.  

With that out of the way, let's update our running tally of mini sets and the total number of mini cards in each year's edition of Allen & Ginter:

• 2006:  0 sets, 0 total cards
• 2007:  3 sets, 65 total cards
• 2008:  6 sets, 107 total cards
• 2009:  5 sets, 90 total cards
• 2010:  9 sets, 181 total cards
• 2011:  8 sets, 95 total cards
• 2012:  8 sets, 116 total cards
• 2013:  8 sets, 116 total cards
• 2014:  8 sets, 123 total cards
• 2015:  8 sets, 116 total cards
• 2016:  6 sets, 103 total cards
• 2017:  7 sets, 129 total cards

Now, let's take a look at the mini sets for 2017!

Bust-a-Move

The Bust-a-Move set celebrates dancing of all kinds.  Each card has an image of the dance on the front of the card (as much as one can have a picture of a specific dance I guess) but the real value is the card back:  a move-by-move rundown of how to complete the featured dance.

Checklist:

BAM-1 Ballet Dance

BAM-2 Bavarian Polka Dance

BAM-3 Belly Dance

BAM-4 Break Dance

BAM-5 Charleston Dance

BAM-6 Cossak Dance

BAM-7 Flamenco Dance

BAM-8 Hula Dance

BAM-9 Irish Dance

BAM-10 Jitterbug Dance

BAM-11 Salsa Dance

BAM-12 Tango Dance

BAM-13 Twist Dance

BAM-14 Waltz Dance

BAM-15 Whirling Dervish Dance

Constellations

If you like glow-in-the-dark cards, then this is the set for you.  The card front my look blank from my scan but it's actually got a glow-in-the-dark printed constellation.  The backside of each card gives you a bit of information about the given star formation.

Checklist:

C-1 Orion

C-2 Ursa Major

C-3 Ursa Minor

C-4 Scorpius

C-5 Cygnus

C-6 Leo

C-7 Perseus

C-8 Hercules

C-9 Aquarius

C-10 Libra

Horse in the Race

The Horse in the Race set was a retail only set and at 25 cards in size it required buying a lot of retail packs to complete it!  Luckily for me, I was able to complete this set almost entirely by trading (and the occasional eBay or COMC purchase).  

Checklist:

HR-1 Friesian Horse

HR-2 Exmoor Pony

HR-3 Shetland Pony

HR-4 American Quarter Horse

HR-5 Camargue Horse

HR-6 American Miniature Horse

HR-7 Grayson Highland Pony

HR-8 Palomino Horse

HR-9 Belgian Horse

HR-10 Bavarian Warmblood Horse

HR-11 East Bulgarian Horse

HR-12 Clydesdale Horse

HR-13 Arabian Horse

HR-14 Shire Horse

HR-15 Andalusian Horse

HR-16 Barb Horse

HR-17 Marwari Horse

HR-18 Scandinavian Coldblood Trotter

HR-19 Arabian Berber Horse

HR-20 Bosnian Pony

HR-21 Percheron Horse

HR-22 Ardennais Horse

HR-23 Mustang Horse

HR-24 Pinto Horse

HR-25 Norwegian Fjord Horse

Magicians and Illusionists

The Allen & Ginter set has had a fascination with the unknown, magic, and similar mysterious ideas for quite some time so it's only fitting that they eventually had a set dedicated solely to magicians and illusionists.  

Checklist:

MI-1 Papus

MI-2 Pamela Colman Smith

MI-3 Arthur Edward Waite

MI-4 Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin

MI-5 P.T. Selbit

MI-6 William Ellsworth Robinson

MI-7 Thomas Nelson Downs

MI-8 Horace Goldin

MI-9 Alexander Herrmann

MI-10 John Nevil Maskelyne

MI-11 John Henry Anderson

MI-12 Howard Thurston

MI-13 Harry Kellar

MI-14 Robert Heller

MI-15 Georges Melies

Required Reading

An insert set all about books?  Sure, in the land of Allen & Ginter, why not?  The neat thing about this set is while every card front looks the same at first glance, you actually get the first couple of lines of each of the featured books if you read it carefully.  Unfortunately, despite the name "required reading" I've done woefully poorly at actually reading most of these texts.  Out of the 15 cards on the checklist, I've only actually read two of these...and one (The Canterbury Tales) was when I was in middle school so I know I didn't actually get much out of it.

Checklist:

RR-1 Walden

RR-2 On the Origin of Species

RR-3 Jane Eyre

RR-4 A Tale of Two Cities

RR-5 War and Peace

RR-6 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

RR-7 Heart of Darkness

RR-8 Moby Dick

RR-9 Wuthering Heights

RR-10 The Canterbury Tales

RR-11 The Illiad

RR-12 The Prince

RR-13 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

RR-14 The Count of Monte Cristo

RR-15 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Super Stealth Minis:

Note:  No images since I don't own any of these.

Overall, I did really well with the 2017 mini insert sets (I've completed all of them except for the four super stealth minis which I've lumped into a single set since the cards are numbered sequentially).  What's interesting (to me at least) is that I didn't even know that any of these four cards existed until I started to put together this blog post!  Even someone like me who loves Allen & Ginter can still be surprised by something in a set many years later - that's part of the charm of Ginter!

Checklist:

AG1 Mike Jasperson

AG2 The Backcountry Kid

AG3 The Pool Player

AG4 Coletrane "Choo Choo" Bisquick

World's Dudes

The largest of the mini insert sets in 2017, the World's Dudes set is basically a set of guys doing random things.  Some of them are fairly common (pilot, tennis, or artist) while others are definitely not so common (chimney sweep, Chilean sailor, or secretary to the Sultan).  

Checklist:

WD-1 Surgeon Dude

WD-2 Conductor Dude

WD-3 Pilot Dude

WD-4 Polo Dude

WD-5 Traffic Cop Dude

WD-6 Hunting Guide Dude

WD-7 Deep Sea Dude

WD-8 Scholar Dude

WD-9 Japanese Sumo Dude

WD-10 Algerian Lawyer Dude

WD-11 Tennis Dude

WD-12 Ferreter Dude

WD-13 Tunisian Editor Dude

WD-14 Packer Dude

WD-15 Barber Dude

WD-16 Chef Dude

WD-17 Newsboy Dude

WD-18 Egyptian Sultan Dude

WD-19 German Snow Patrol Dude

WD-20 English Chimney Sweep Dude

WD-21 Chilean Sailor Dude

WD-22 University Track Dude

WD-23 Lumberjack Dude

WD-24 Violin Dude

WD-25 American Football Dude

WD-26 Farmhand Dude

WD-27 Steel Worker Dude

WD-28 Irish Golfer Dude

WD-29 Boxing Dude

WD-30 Machinist Dude

WD-31 German Cyclist Dude

WD-32 Concession Dude

WD-33 Zookeeper Dude

WD-34 Ornithology Dude

WD-35 Camping Dude

WD-36 Circus Clown Dude

WD-37 Artist Dude

WD-38 Polish Prince Dude

WD-39 Scottish Dude

WD-40 Park Avenue Dude

WD-41 Russian Peddler Dude

WD-42 Scout Dude

WD-43 Fisherman Dude

WD-44 Gardener Dude

WD-45 Secretary to the Sultan Dude

Now it's your turn!  Be sure to cast your vote for your favorite mini set from 2017 in the comment section below!