All in all, I was disappointed when I didn't see any dime boxes at the card show I attended a couple weeks ago. A staple at the show I regularly attend, the dealer that usually provides the show's best dime boxes stated that the lack of space at the show that day was the reason why he was unable to bring them with.
This time, the show was back in a larger-sized room and with that came the return of the dime bins. As soon as I walked into the card show today, 3 3200-count boxes chock-full of dime cards came into sight, and I instantly decided that today was going to be a dime box day.
Maybe it's because I haven't gone through dime boxes in months, but these bins seemed better than usual. In fact, I'd go as far as to say these were some of the best dime boxes I've looked through in a while, maybe even ever. Though I can't say the bins specialized in oddballs, I was able to find a decent selection of oddball cards, ranging from Metalic Snowflake parallels to Heritage Minor League.
Above all, these particular dime bins were perfect for finding a large collection of cards from specific sets. Oddly enough, 2008 Upper Deck Spectrum was one of those sets this time around with these 4 player collections benefiting from that. The selection from the set ranged from 2 100-card player collections (Vlad and Chipper) to a smaller player collection that I refuse to give up on, Dice-K.
Similarly, a set that I'm not too familiar with, 2004 Fleer Hot Prospects, dominated a good deal of one of the dime box rows with well over 20 cards, around 15 of which I grabbed for my various PCs. It faintly reminds me of Fleer Patchworks from around the same time, or maybe one or two of the Upper Deck Sweet Spot sets produced over the years.
Even high-end base cards made their way into these dime bins which definitely surprised me as I hadn't seen this number of high-end of products in over a year. It's always a bit of a treat, if nothing else, to find sets like 2017 Topps Museum present in the dime boxes since there's certainly no other way I'd track down cards from this ultra-expensive product.
Even super high-end 2018 cards made their way into these boxes in the form of Topps Tribute base cards, making this my first but hopefully not final look at the product. As you can see, there was a balance between past and present players and even attention put into the photo choice. From the cards that I chose, there were no plain uniforms shown on the cards. All of them had a good deal of color.
In addition to base cards, refractors and parallels were also present in the dime boxes from all sorts of different sets. Opening Day and Chrome are shown above, but Bowman and Gallery were also included in addition to the bronze parallel of Ichiro that was alongside the rest of the 2017 Topps Museum cards.
Curt Flood and Ron Santo seem to be often forgotten players from the 1970's, hence why my Curt Flood collection is relatively small and why my Ron Santo PC is nowhere near the totals of other Cubs greats he played alongside with. Both of them are examples of players I get excited when finding new cards of them, so today must've been my lucky day in the dime boxes.
These 2016 Topps Opening Day Bubble Trouble inserts were pretty hard to pull at 1 per box, and I hadn't seen one of them since pulling a Dominic Brown card out of my box of this 2 years ago. Flashforward over 2 years and I'm finally adding on to cards from this insert set.
But without a doubt, this would have to be the best dime card of the entire day, and that's a pretty bold statement given the selection of cards in the boxes today. Vida Blue is another example of a player who I don't often see cards of at the show, nevermind one with so much color and from such an interesting set. I'm crazy about these 70's Athletics jerseys, and I'm equally as fond of these Sports Illustrated cover cards.
When you put those 2 factors together, you get a card that can't even be beaten by high-end modern cards.
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