The Junk Wax Dilemma

I have had a lot of fun over the past month sorting out a bunch of cards that I had from the junk wax era.  Loads of 1980s and early 1990s Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer, and Donruss sets.  There were so many great sets, whether we are going to talk about some of the cool designs.....

like the black borders around the tops of the 1986 Topps cards to some of the really great names in the game who played during that era.......

I don't care that the cards are more or less worthless in terms of money, it's still cool to see players like Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken, Kirby Puckett, Ozzie Smith, and a young Ken Griffey Jr..  In sorting out these sets one of the problems I have run into is the fact that a few of these inexpensive sets are incomplete.  Some of the sets I am literally a card or two away from finishing off and I will have no problem tracking down the cards.  Others not so much.

Take the 1990 Upper Deck set.  I am just about 100 cards short of finishing off the 700 card set.  I am sure that I could probably find the card easily, but it's hard to justify spending too much money on cards from this set.  For example, one of the cards that I am missing is Gary Pettis.  I could buy a copy of his card for $0.30 off of a site like COMC.

However, if you multiply that out by 100 it will likely cost me about $30 to finish off the set buying single cards.  Pretty sure the entire set is not worth $30, but at the same time it seems a waste to just ignore the fact that I have already assembled the majority of the set.  What to do? 

The set is rather cheap to buy, but so are the boxes.  While I have been trying to little down my collection in recent years, the funnest way to find the last 100 cards for this set is clearly to open a few boxes....

In fact, I bought two of them since the boxes were 2 for $12.  I am a sucker for a good deal.  Plus this box brings back some great memories from my middle school years.  These were the best baseball cards around.  So much to love about this set even if it did not turn out to be as good as the original 1989 Upper Deck set.

72 foil packs of fun.  I started working on the first box earlier this weekend.  I have already pulled the Kevin Maas, second year Griffey, the cool Nolan Ryan commemorative card.  Lots of other cool cards too, check out this pair of rookie cards that came out of my first pack of cards....

There are plenty of other cool cards in the set too.  I really like these types of cards.......

What are these called?  Wade Boggs has a card like this too.  I am going to have to finish opening up the box and then go ahead and see how close I am to completing the set.  Again, I am not sure that I really need seven to eight hundred Upper Deck cards from the junk wax era, but I cannot think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than reliving a cool baseball card product.