Gotta Spend Those Ebay Coupons!

 

It the end, it got me. That little pop-up that just kept tempting me: $10 off! Darn you eBay, you make it so easy to spend money sometimes. The $10 offer (minimum $20 purchase of course) was the incentive to download the eBay app and make my first purchase through it. I eventually decided to take advantage of the offer, and downloaded the app.

Now, how to spend this free money? To maximize my savings, I obviously want to come as close as I can to that $20 minimum. Not a problem, although I found in my searches that I could have gotten the same card in roughly the same condition for less than the $20 but well over the $10 my discount would leave me spending. In the end, I feel for $10 I got a good card at a good price.

 

As for the card itself: I have been pondering my collection lately, more specifically the lack of focus I have with it. I enjoy completing sets, but outside of a few here and there, I haven't really made that my main focal point. I'm a Red Sox collector at heart, yes, but I'm not the type to join group breaks and acquire team sets for each new release that catches my eye. I figured that, at bare minimum, I should focus on collecting all the team cards from each of Topps' base sets. (even more specifically, sets from my birth year of 1975 onward). I should at least have these cards in my collection, even if other brands, inserts, parallels, etc. make their way to my hands. Everything above and beyond this is icing on the cake.

To that end, I decided to focus on one of the more expensive cards that I'm missing from those base sets:

 

 

It was a toss up between the rookie cards of Jim Rice or Wade Boggs. Ironically, when eBay gave away money last year, I ended up with a Jim Rice auto. Maybe the next time eBay wants to lure me to spend, I'll take a cue from Fuji and complete the trifecta!

As for the quest to acquire the Red Sox base set cards, you may have noticed a new page atop my blog. Turns out, when you step away from collecting for over twenty years, you have quite a few cards on the ol' needs list. It'll be a fun challenge getting over 500 cards whittled down to something more manageable!