Cheap Card Collector, But Not a Cheap Trader!

I have been out of town for a few days if anyone has noticed a lack of posts for a few days.  One of my favorite things about coming back from a trip, besides of course seeing the lovely wife and kids, is ripping open any packages that have come my way, even though I know what is in them already.  One of the packages that came in this weekend had more than I expected though, and it made my day!

Cheap Card Collecting is the kind of blog I aspire to run.  It has a point of view (how to collect on a budget) and looks great too!  Anthony from CCC contacted me about a couple of Bowman Platinums I pulled, and we worked out what I thought was a 2 for 2 trade.  This is what I knew I was getting:

2 Bowman Platinum Christian Colon (Base and Purple Parallel).  Colon is a top prospect for the Royals and plays for the Northwest Arkansas Naturals who are nearby the Doon household.  My hope is to get one or both of these autographed. 

But not only did I get the cards I wanted, Anthony also added some very cool Felix Jones cards:

The Certified card on the left is numbered to 250!    And the Topps Magic card is very, very slick. My eyes may or may not have welled up when I saw these.

And to top it off, he added a card of my man D-Mac, and a Topps Diamond Duos card of Josh Hamilton.  Bullseyes all around!

I assume if you are a serious card collector, you are aware of Cheap Card Collecting.  If not, do yourself a favor and check it out! 

Wax Wednesday- Bowman Platinum

I suppose my attempt to score some points with the lovely wife Tuesday night by magnanimously announcing I was refraining from attending the weekly auction at Cleve's would have been more credible had I not had 3 rack packs worth of cards in my hands at the time.  But they were rack packs of Bowman Platinum, and I had my reasons.

I've been able to mostly pass on A&G so far, but the other day at Walmart, I just happened to be walking by the card section when I saw the stocker putting out some brand spanking new Bowman Platinum.  Actually, I couldn't give you a good reason why I felt the need to grab these.  I wasn't overly impressed with Platinum last year.  Perhaps I wanted to be one of the first to post pack break results from this offering.  So far, I haven't seen much on this set in the blogosphere.  Probably,  I was still coming down from the high from Brycemas and hoped lightning would strike twice.   Yeah, actually I know that's it.  I'll save the suspense and tell you I didn't hit anything big.  But I do like these cards. 

Here is a base card.  This is actually a case where the scanner OVER does justice to the card.   The base cards are nice, but it's not as shiny as the scanner makes it out to be.    The prospects set cards are nice too:

These look and feel more like chrome cards than the base, and in fact curl a little bit (but not as bad as Topps 2010 chrome).
Rack packs come with 3 purple parallel cards. Here was what I got:

And of course, there are all sorts of other parallels:

The Cox (Yea! a Razorback!) and Ackley are refractors, but not numbered.  The Crawford is more true red than the scan shows.

Looking at the checklist, I'll probably decline to build this set (not enough Rangers) but will probably put together some "rainbows" of a few players.  Anyone else have any initial luck with Platinum?