4 Kimbrel Cards From Sportlots

In terms of what cards I buy online, roughly half come from COMC while the other half is courtesy of Sportlots. I usually tend to place larger orders on COMC due to the flat-rate shipping. But, if I'm only buying a few cards, Sportlots is the best option for me.

This recent purchase was one of those smaller purchases with the store credit I had from the sales I made last month. The Kimbrel cards all arrived in the mail today while I expect the 2 vintage cards I ordered separately to arrive a couple of days from now.

As you can see, I purchased 4 Craig Kimbrel cards with the first of them being the 2018 Topps Heritage card shown at the top of the post. Somehow, after opening 2 boxes I still was unable to pull a single Craig Kimbrel base card. Thankfully, Sportlots has nearly every base card from the set, so I picked up one for the Kimbrel collection...

along with one for my Topps Heritage master set. Since I was missing one for the PC and one for the set, I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and pick up 2 base cards for a grand total of 36 cents. This brought the Kimbrel Collection total up 1 card and brought my number of missing base cards from 2018 Heritage down to roughly 90 cards.

Moving on from Heritage, I picked up another base card from a recent set release, this one being 2018 Topps Opening Day. I have absolutely zero intentions of buying any Opening Day even though the new logo near the team nameplate looks intriguing and more modern. I'm not the biggest Flagship fan, and since Opening Day is on more flimsy cardstock, I think I'm going to pass on buying any of it. With that being said, I love Kimbrel's Topps base card, especially the photo choice. So, any chance to get that on a different card to add to the collection is one I will take advantage of.

Now, I've been super-collecting Kimbrel since the very beginning of the year and have built the player collection up to over 100 cards and counting. Among all these cards, there is surprisingly not a single relic card.

Until now.

It's not as glamorous as some relic cards, but the 2018 Topps Major League Material relic cards look pretty sharp with their design that includes slashes representative of the team colors. The red, blue, and grey were placed in good spots all throughout the card in order to create a relic that goes with the modern direction that Series 1 goes in. The jersey may be a plain white jersey, but I can't say that I mind that. Sure, red or blue would be cool, but in a way, the white works well with the card by looking nice with the silver background on that section of the card. 

Now that I've acquired my first Kimbrel relic, I am excited to be able to add more relic cards of him in the future from all 3 teams he's played for, especially the Red Sox. The Kimbrel Collection currently stands at 105 different cards with (hopefully) many more to come in 2018 releases as well as in general.