Set Collectors Still Live! (at least I do) PT 2 of 2

As I spoke about at the end of in yesterday's post about set collecting, today's part is telling you about my biggest and most favorite set I put together ALL-TIME! I hope this kind of post will influence some of you who may not set collect to give it a try. It's honestly quite the rush and relief when you accomplish something like this. This is as much of a high as getting a big hit or busting a box.

My ALL-TIME favorite set that was both challenging, yet tons of fun to put together was the 1997 Upper Deck baseball. The set was in two series and an overall 520 whopping cards not including the update cards which I didn't do.

There were some fun inclusions in both series including this tribute cards to Jackie Robinson to open up the first 9 cards of the set:

Then some great photographs for the base set including this unique one:

The base cards were border free and each were "game dated". The base set also included these subsets within:

Strike Force

Defensive Gems

Global Impact

Star Rookies

The challenge to this set, other than the 520 cards, was trying to complete all of the "Griffey's Hot List" subset cards in Series Two. The subset, that was packed with many super stars at the time, fell 1:4 packs (at least I think it did) and was card numbers 415-424 in the set. Chasing down 10 of these wasn't so easy. Upper Deck baseball 1997 was one of the first sets to feature cards SPed in it on purpose to add value to the overall set.So I knew what I was up against especially knowing these were the last cards I needed to have all 520.

 

So pack upon pack. Box upon box. Card show upon card show and I finally acquired them after many months of the chase.I felt so relieved and couldn't wait to put the entire set into a binder to view.

To this day, this is still my favorite set despite the many I have put together since. This set will always remain in my collection in that same binder til I hand it down someday along with the story behind it. Along with this, I hope to hand down the art of set collecting as I will do my best to help keep it alive.