Trading to completion: Part 1

Hello, happy trading card fans! It's been awhile, eh? 

With a cross-country move, a new day job, and the other site taking up a considerable amount of time, there hasn't been much time or energy for writing about baseball cards. It's not unusual for me to go through stretches where cards take a backseat to life. The good news is that the interest usually comes back, especially if I can tie it into a quest.

Will this quest actually come to completion? Hopefully, mainly because I'd like to keep my streak of completing sets going. Most of the time that involves buying at least one hobby box and a ton of blasters or hanger packs and then ending up with hundreds of doubles that I try, but fail, to trade out or sell. 

So, this year, in my attempt to complete the 2024 Topps base set, I'll be trying to finish things off strictly through trades. A few weeks ago, when it was released, I headed out to the local Walmart to pick up a couple of packs and was able to get 88 unique base cards along with 12 duplicates. 

The original plan was to try and pick up all 350 cards through trades, but where is the fun in that? After all, ripping packs is half of the fun. Okay, it's more like 75% of the fun. Unfortunately, another overarching goal is to actually reduce the amount of space that the cards are taking up in the closet, so going down this road again and ending up with a couple of rows of dupes is not what I wanted to do. Also, saving money is pretty nifty. It's a lot cheaper to get 18-20 cards that I need for the price of postage than dropping $10 and ending up with more dupes than needs. 

So, I figured I could knock off a couple of goals at the same time. I could get rid of some duplicates, get cards I need, and save money if I acquired the remaining 262 cards through trades. After dilly-dallying for a few weeks, I finally got around to completing a trade through Trading Card Database and am proud to announce that the want list has been knocked off by two, that's right TWO, cards.

What we have here is Nathaniel Lowe (card #174) and Pete Alonso (card #20).

These two first-basemen combined to hit 63 home runs last year. Lowe might have had fewer bombs than the Polar Bear, but he lifted more championship trophies at the end of the season. The good news is that I was aware of both of these players before I received their cards. That won't be the case for some of the future acquisitions.  

There was a total of 7 cards in the deal, a couple of Orioles base cards and some 1985 Topps needs came along with the two 2024 cards. I sent 9 cards the other way so it was a net deduction of two cards. Woo-hoo!