General Forum

A week or so ago I noticed the 2022 Leaf Metal Baseball had a Darrell Evans card for me to chase. Excited!  According to what I saw online there was one shown on the set CL as the base auto, thought that was lame. Last night one came up on ebay (a 3/7).  I now see what the card looks like and YUCK, same exact image that Panini used in 2017 and 2018 but an overall uglier card. Combine that with the CL's just added to TCDB it shows 59 variations for Evans' card. BTW I think there will be lots of fixes made to add the SN notes. So much for the excitement to add to my Evans PC.

 Normally I would buy or make an offer right away but often that just raises the price, and with 59 variations I don't care to put much effort into this release. I am watching a card on ebay thats been listed for about 2 years now that I mistakenly tried to pay too much for when it was first listed. Still for sale with a little reduction in price. There is a $ limit or in the case of 2022 Leaf, based upon the ugliness combined with 59 variations.

The moment you said modern Leaf, I dropped out. For my PC I have completely eliminated the thought of getting modern Leaf for many of the same reasons you mentioned on top of the whole completely unlicensed aspect. Kind of funny seeing it cut away like 1/2 a potential W/L based on total cards for that player.

59 variations is just way too many. It makes the chase not as much fun. 

Before this Leaf issue I had 43 Evans cards on my WL with a lot being 1/1's. Was at about 90%. Now the site shows 481 different Evans' cards (59 from just this 2022 Leaf). I cannot see how some try to collect cards of players with 5K or more different cards issued over the years.

Collecting players nowadays is near impossible. I know I will never get even close to 25% of Jerry Rice cards, there's just too many.  Im at 50% for Lavonte David and know that I will probably never get to 60% because of all the 1/1's. I have now started to collect Buccaneers players from the 70s-90s that don't have 1/1's and see if I can get every card for those players. It makes it more fun because there is an actual chance of collecting every single card.

Good luck on the Evans hunt, hope you can keep coming across some others you need

Heck in 2022 I slowed way down on chasing my player because it was getting way too insane to pay high prices for the same picture of Gwynn over and over. I have yet to grab a single 2023 card of him. As for Leaf I refuse to pay for those ugly things. The Leaf cards of Gwynn usually has just a picture of his shirt and a piece of game worn material. The picture of the shirt doesn't even have his name on it, just his number. I totally understand where you are coming from edk.

I don't collect many modern players for this reason, and initially I wanted to try and collect every Andre Dawson card but more recently have been focused only on the cards from the years he was playing. The unlicensed cards and large volume of parallels, variations, etc. just doesn't appeal to me much as a collector. 

From much anecdotal evidence, I'm finding more and more player collectors are moving to this "model" of player collecting (sticking mostly to cards rel;eased during their playing days). Seems to simplify the process.

I am much this way with Olajuwon cards.

I won't say "no" to his modern Panini cards but I also don't go out of my way to acquire them.

I am proud to say I do not own a single Leaf card. Something about them rubs me the wrong way.

I did avoid the post playing days cards for some time but with so few Evans cards produced I gave in and started acquiring them but 59 cards (with an image used twice already) in a single release is ridiculous.