4-Color Magic

It's become somewhat of a tradition here on Cardboard Greats. A quick trip to my LCS for supplies leads me to search through the various bins set up around the shop and before I even know it, I have new cards to go with the top-loaders that I bought. Then, the cycle repeats itself all over again a few weeks later.

If nothing else, the unplanned purchases provide content for the blog, and it's not like I'm choosing cards just for the heck of it. I think very closely about what I believe is reasonable when buying singles at my LCS, and I always try to walk away without breaking the bank.

Today, for instance, I needed some 130-pt and 180-pt top-loaders to store my abundance of new Red Sox autographs. I knew full well that this store has the best prices for supplies aside from the weekly card show, so I picked up what I needed and, while I was there, searched through the 50-cent box.

The card at the top of this post will let you know what direction I went in from there. Indeed, there was a handful of 2019 Panini Prizm parallels in that box, a no-brainer for me to scoop up to make progress with this mission of mine.

I've had much more luck with Prizm parallels over the past few weeks than I had during the 2 months prior. I wasn't able to find any while walking the floor of The National, but a casual trip to the card show as well as my LCS landed me some singles for the project.

The red and blue parallels are common to both retail and hobby boxes, so I've accumulated more of these 2 refractors than most others in the set. Still, the checklist consists of 300 cards, so completing any complete set rainbow will prove challenging, nevermind 27 of them.

Still, I envision having this project for many, many years as something that I can always add to or work on. It'll take me as far as it takes me, and I know I'm going to have fun doing it.

Plus, the missing logos and team names make the cards a bit more affordable, hence why each card in this post was found in the 50-cent bin.

Today was actually a pretty big day for the 2019 Panini Prizm project in that I picked up my very first purple parallels, cards that I believe to be blaster box exclusives.

It seems that each medium of Prizm retail has its own exclusive parallel, including different colors depending on what store you buy it from. For example, Target's mega box exclusive is pink, but I've seen other stores with cosmic haze Prizms instead.

I don't know if this will positively or negatively affect the price point of the cards, but it is going to make tracking them down a bit more challenging, hence why I hadn't come across a purple parallel until today.

The parallels themselves, nonetheless, are stunning, some of my favorites from the set thus far. Although they aren't serial numbered, you rarely see this shade of purple make it onto a sports card (Topps' shade of purple is much darker; this is more of a magenta).

The unconventional parallels, from this distinct shade of purple to the zebra stripe and snakeskin cards, are what inspired me to begin this project in the first place.

Panini makes up for not having the MLB license through their creative cards, and I hope that, even if they come to an agreement with MLB, they never lose this uniqueness.

The last of the 4 Prizm parallels that I found today is pink from the previously mentioned Target mega boxes. Unless I'm forgetting something, I only had the 8 from the box that I opened going into today, so any addition to that list would surely help.

The various tiers in this set (I-III) still feel extremely unnecessary. Though it doesn't affect the print-run of each card, it makes some base cards more expensive than others, and it could be impacting the price of parallels for all I know.

Still, I don't exactly know where this Panini Prizm project is going to take me or how close I'm going to get to complete the whole thing. It's projects like this, however, that make Baseball card collecting such an enjoyable thing for me.

I truly love finding new parallels from this set and watching them accumulate as I sort the piles by player. Granted, I may never complete all 300 of the rainbows (I'm excluding cards with print runs <25), but I'm going to do everything I can to make it happen.