2020 is upon us. Time to finish some sets.

Happy New Year to everyone!  I do hope that you had an enjoyable evening celebrating the ringing in of a new decade.

For me, collecting in 2019 was quite enjoyable, and successful.   I completed a few sets, and I also wound up with 154 transactions on the TCDB website (which becomes www.tcdb.com as of today so update your bookmarks), far better than I ever expected to accomplish this past year.

What I want to do this year is pretty simple.   Complete 10 sets.  Easy right?  All 10 sets that I'm going to discuss have want lists of 100 cards or less, 8 of which are under 30.  How I'm going to do it will be a little bit of a challenge, because why would I make it easy on myself?

OK, so here goes.  Here are the 10 sets that I will finish this year, in order of completion. 

1981 Topps

Robin Yount is my first scan of the 20's, and finishing this set is fait accompli.  I mentioned recently that I only needed Mark Wagner to finish this set, and I received a message shortly there after from Bruno in the Great White North (thank you Bruno!) that he was willing to send me the card in a trade, so this is done.  

1982 Topps

As part of that same trade, Bruno is sending me 5 of the remaining 15 cards that I need to finish the '82 Topps set.  That left me with 10, so I hopped on COMC and picked those up.  So, this set is done and is either in transit, or will be in transit in a couple of days.  Which brings us to...

1983 Topps

This was one of 4 cards from the '83 Topps set that I received in a recent trade package (thank you Jason!) that took 3 weeks to travel from Wisconsin to Florida via the USPS.  Dog sled, no doubt.  My '83 build is down to 26 cards, with 2 of them being the Gwynn and Sandberg RCs.  I bought the  Steve Carlton base card on COMC yesterday, so this set is currently in progress.  Once this is complete, next up is..

1979 Topps

Evidence as to why Mario had trouble hitting over 200.  Donuts on the bat make it tougher to hit the ball

This is where a bit of the fun begins.  I have 24 cards left to go to finish this set.  The Ozzie Smith RC will be the one that costs the most, but there's also Nolan Ryan and a host of other star cards to pick up, so I'll be hunting to try and find them as cheap as possible, like usual.  A bit of a hurdle, so after this is done I'll drop down a bit and make things easier for myself again with...

2012-13 O-Pee-Chee

This set will be one that I'll be glad to have out of the way.   I've stalled on it for way too long, and with only 6 SPs left to go, getting this completed will bring a bit of a sigh of relief.   Brandon Manning and his $5 SP (why???) be damned, I'll finish this one in the first half of 2020 finally.  Then I'll move on to...

1976 Topps

This set completion may not be as daunting as I thought.  20 cards remaining including a George Brett 2nd year card, Ellis Valentine and Ron Guidry RCs along with 4 All Star cards and a few other big names will make it a challenge on the wallet, but it's what I signed up for with this set so I'm looking forward to working on this roughly around the start of baseball season in late March.  After this is done, I'll finally finish...

1973 Topps

Yes, I've been down to 2 cards left to go for about 2 years now.  Mike Schmidt RC and the high number series checklist.  The stalling will end this year.   I promise.  Once this is done, we'll move back to hockey and finish...

2013-14 O-Pee-Chee

27 cards left to finish this up, 2 from the base set (Andrei Sekera and Taylor Hall) and 25 SPs.  This situation actually improved while writing this post, as I had the Vladimir Tarasenko RC on my want list, which I was pretty sure I had.  Checked the box and sure enough, there it is, so that dropped the want list by one.  When this is done, I've got two want lists that are a bit bigger, so we'll start with the more recent...

1978 Topps

Still a bit of work to do on this one, with 79 cards to go.  The Molitor/Trammell RC and the Dale Murphy RC are the two big starters on finishing this one, but there's quite a few commons that should help to knock the list down to a more manageable number quickly.  Once those are in hand, several big names such as Rose and Ryan will cost a few bucks.  I also need 11 team checklist and 2 manager cards, which I thought was interesting (Night Owl, do you have a Tommy Lasorda dupe from this set?).  Once this is done, the 10th and final set from this list is...

1974 Topps

92 cards remaining to finish this set.  Let's start with Dave Parker and Dave Winfield RCs.  4 Hank Aaron Special cards at the beginning of the set.  A Ryan/Seaver combo card.  Ryan, Bench, Stargell and Rose cards.  This will take a bit of time to finish up.  But I believe with the other 9 sets above completed and distractions to a minimum (hopefully), I can knock this out in a reasonable amount of time.  

There you have it.  10 sets that I'm going to finish in 2020.  The only other thing that I can promise is that will not rip any 1/1 cards in half.  

Enjoy the hobby!

Robert