I Foolishly Bought a Box of Topps Chrome Basketball

 I haven't bought a new box of cards in many years, probably since before Covid. Prices have gotten so ridiculous that even retail boxes cost too much for what you get in return. Usually what happens is that I spend too much money and end up with a pile of cards I don't want.

 However, I also happen to be an idiot, so I recently decided to buy a blaster box of Topps Chrome basketball. Topps recently regained the NBA license, and Chrome is their equivalent of Prizm. It's pretty popular among people who are even bigger idiots than I am, should any exist. 

I wasn't really sure what to expect and thought I would get at least something interesting, even if I knew that I would never get real value and would be better spending my money on something else. Really, I was paying for the experience of ripping some packs for the first time in years.

 This was my favourite card from the box. It's a common insert, but I'm a Raptors fan. Vince Carter is one of the team's all-time greats. The card itself is okay, and I was happy to at least pull a decent Raptor.

 

This is the total of what I pulled. Some base rookies and a few parallels. No numbered cards. It was a pretty bad box. Other than the Carter card, there was nothing else that I really wanted, and a lot of these cards are so worthless they aren't even worth flipping. I should have saved my money.

Collecting cards is kinda weird because when it comes to ripping, it's not really the same thing as actually collecting. There's really nothing in common with opening boxes and actually collecting cards. People that are ripping seem mostly like gamblers as opposed to collectors. Which is totally cool, if that's what you want to do. But it's not for me.

I think that if I get the urge to rip again, I would just find some cheap junk wax packs and get kind of a nostalgia trip from cards when I was a kid. Otherwise, maybe I could buy a box where I wanted to collect the base set, so all the cards that I pull I actually want.

Topps Chrome feels like a gambler's set. I do, however, like a lot of the parallels, as some of them are really great looking. I didn't really pull any parallels here I liked, but there are singles from this set that I would have been better purchasing with the money I dropped here.

How often do you open boxes?