April Card Show Purchases

When I got Whitey Herzog's autograph, I had some time to shop while waiting for my number to get called into line. Here's what I found that I felt was worth buying:

1987 Topps #243 Whitey Herzog
1990 Topps #590 Ozzie Smith
2013 Gypsy Queen #144 Red Schoendienst
2016 Heritage #14 Jhonny Peralta

4 base cards? Of course not, that'd be quite the waste of space for the sellers paying for table space. I bought 4 complete sets, but I decided to just post a representative card from each here. The 1987 and 1990 Topps came from a seller who said he just bought a large collection of hand-collated sets. In fact, he had so many junk era sets, he didn't have time to go through each one and verify they were complete, so he instead put them on his 2 for $5 table with a sign disclosing they may or may not be complete. He told me he trusted the guy personally, but he didn't want to upset anyone if they had missing cards. I flipped through them pretty fast, but mine did appear to be complete.

From the same seller, I also bought the 2013 Gypsy Queen base set, after looking up in Zistle and seeing not only was I nowhere close to completing it, I only owned one card from the set. I was kind of surprised by that, but that's just one of the sets that I never got around to buying in 2013. I'm really glad I have Zistle as a resource to look up my collection in cases like that; I would have guessed I already had most of the base set.

Finally, I purchased the 2016 Heritage base set (without short prints), saving myself the cost and time that go with opening retail blasters, which is how I usually buy Heritage. I think I did OK on the price of $35, based on what they're going for on eBay. I certainly saved myself $5 off the cost of the first two blasters I would have bought, and I probably would have bought a few more. I won't get any insert cards, but I rarely chase those anyway. They're just nice bonuses that come with my set building.

I've started to feel like buying full sets is the better way for me to go. I'm not making some huge change to my collecting, except I'll probably purchase full sets a little more often, and slightly fewer packs. I'll still buy packs and boxes for some sets, like the relatively cheap Opening Day, or ones where I really like the inserts.