What kind of Christmas is it going to be?

I'm not going crazy, but I'm starting to prepare for the upcoming baseball cards extravanza known as Christmas!
It's been in the last couple years the excuse to order very big loads of boxed cards from DACARDWORLD, ensuring a 25th of December spent busting packs...

I know it's not intended in such way, but when you grow up you leave the magic behind and start focusing more on the material aspects, and after a certain age, it can be used as an excuse to buy very nice stuff to yourself... please let me know if I'm a bad person!

This year, it seems that the average price of boxes on the above mentioned website are slightly higher than last year...
I compared today prices to those I paid last year when I bought my Christmas presents, and please consider this as a rough estimate, since a couple products are no longer available, but I'm pretty sure that the exact same lot of boxes would cost about 50 to 100 dollars more...

So I'm still deciding what to do for this year...

But, just for the sake of completeness (this is what the blog is about), let's list what I got last year with a vote to the quality of cards I got..

- 1 box of Topps Tribute WBC, as usual a great product (and very expensive as well). I got a cool Cespedes auto and also a double card (Jason Grilli auto if the memory works still)...
- 12 Jumbo Packs of 2014 Topps, this had a double purpose. On one hand it is always fun to bust a huge amount of packs, and also it was very useful to find some subsets and parallel cards for my sets.. Amoung others, I found a camo Jeter card and an acetate Jorge De la Rosa numbered to 10.
-1 Box of 2014 Topps, same as above... (the purpose, not the hits!)
-1 Box of 2012 Heritage, I remember this costed less than 10 bucks, and considering it is a very cool product, I couldn't pass this up...
-1 Box of 2011 Donruss Elite Extra Edition, a product not particularly appealing, since the absence of licenses (and the limited checklist as well), but I pulled a cool Jurickson Profar auto so it's fine...
-1 Box of 2009 Upper Deck signature series, this was he second most expensive box of the order.. but was filled with cool cards. For example a triple auto with Dustin Pedroia, JD Drew and Jonathan Papelbon, a US set auto jersey of Sonny Gray, and 3/4 more autos and jerseys so definitely a great product!
-1 Box of 2007 Upper Deck series 2, this was more for checklist completion than other reasons...
-1 Box of 2012 Bowman, I don't remember pulling anything cool from this box, exept some cards useful for the completion of the set
-1 Box of 2005 Donruss studio, because I really like the brand, and I also found a couple Portraits cards (those numbered depending on the coloring of the border on the front of the card), so overall a cool box
-1 Box of 2006 Upper Deck future stars: the box guaranteed 5 autos on a acetate colored card, and I got 5 autos to be honest...but the players were more than unknown, so pretty disappointed with it...

Five more boxes bought only for completion purposes, since were from sets I had very few cards, are the following:
- 2009 Topps T206 (nothing very cool to report);
- 1994 Upper Deck series 2 (nothing very cool to report);
- 1996 Upper Deck series 2 (nothing very cool to report);
- 1995 Topps (sticky cards, which resulted in several cards scratched or chipped/tear when the packs were opened) (second worst box of the lot);
- Upper Deck the american epic, an 80 card set (if I remember correctly), with the greatest that ever plaied the game in the past. The set is connected to a very cool set of documentaries by Ken Burns.


Maybe this Christmas will be focused on Justcommons pickups, maybe I'll blindly buy some appealing lots on ebay....

Speaking of which, on July, due to my birthday (again, excuses),  I picked up 5 lots on ebay, purely basing the decision on the acution picture and the quantity price ratio of each lot... I almnost finished my checks and soon I will post a detailed statistic on the content of such lots...

Merry Christmas and Keep Collecting!!

CIAO