One Last Etopps Delivery

I've been meaning to take one last delivery of eTopps cards from my portfolio- at least some select cards- before I'm done here.  Delivery is damn expensive ($12 first card, $1.75 each additional), but I'm getting worried that soon Topps is just going to pull the plug on the site (they stopped making new cards back in 2011, and recently took down the message boards) and my cards will be lost forever.  So I figured I'd bite the bullet and get the cards I really wanted and hope for the best on the rest.  I have a couple of complete sets that would be painful to ship, but I'm hopeful that someday there will be a special offer to clear out one's portfolio.

Anyway, my cards arrived the other day:

Four bubble wrapped blocks of shiny eTopps cards.  Aren't you excited to see them all?

Here they are out of the bubble wrap:

Sorry, I know that's a strange angle.  All the cards come in their own little zip-loc baggie.  So we'll take the next step and look at them all lined up out of the wrap and out of the baggies:

These are the T-206 cards.  They are every bit as beautiful as you think they are.  I still need about 8 cards to finish the set, but they are getting really hard to trade for on the site.

I didn't take an individual shot of the Matt Weiters card in the bottom left of the photo above.  But I managed to trade for one and took it in hand.  Why?  It's Weiter's only Topps card.  I learned that from a comment by a guy named Stubby on a previous eTopps post I wrote.  Thanks for the tip Stubby!

So the challenge of taking pictures of eTopps cards is that not only are they in hard plastic cases, the cards are shiny too.  So my picture styles aren't consistent.  Because I just kept snapping away until I got images that didn't have ridiculous glare.

As much as it ticked me off to pay that much for shipping, I absolutely love these cards.  Especially the T206s.  Here are a few up close for ye:

At some point, I plan to have this Willie Keeler card in it's original T206 form too.  For now, this will work.

I took a bunch of standard eTopps cards too:

 It's neat to have a couple of cards of Christian Colon, who has been mentioned on my blog many times before.

 I got this Mauer just because I thought it would be a nice looking card in hand.  I was right!

 See what I mean by shiny?  Isn't that Maddux gorgeous? 

I took all my Derek Jeters for delivery.  No way I'm leaving those at risk with the website.

These two are from the 2004 set.  As far as eTopps sets go, 2004 is considered one of weaker offerings, and the cards are very cheap to obtain up front before delivery.  But I have to say they are very striking in hand, and a great value in comparison to the other sets.  If I decide to take more cards in the future, I'm loading up on stars from the 2004 set.

I could probably get 2 or 3 more posts out of this haul, but you get the idea.  I will say that I'm not especially interested in trading these just because I wouldn't know what would be fair for them.  On the one hand, the degree of difficulty getting these in a portfolio, coupled with expense of shipping means I'd want something good for them, but on the other hand the initial "cost" per card doesn't warrant getting something good for them.  Mostly, I don't want to go to the effort to replace anything I trade out.