How rare are these things really?

I redeemed my THIRD Topps Diamond Diecut card on the Diamond Giveaway set today.

Earlier today, I was at Walmart, looking for Gypsy Queen. I don't really have much interest in GQ (maybe if it ever lowers itself to appearing in my sparsely populated area, I'll think differently), but I always like to check out the new stuff.

Unfortunately, Gypsy Queen is nowhere except for on 47 different blogs, which prompted me to grab another value box and consequently pull the Marlon Byrd diamond diecut.

To review, I have pulled a Babe Ruth diamond diecut (traded for a Jackie Robinson diamond diecut), a Roy Halladay diamond diecut (traded for a bunch of '50s goodness), and now Marlon here.

Is that normal that I should have three of these things already? Aren't they supposed to be relatively rare?

I suppose the perception of rarity comes from the fact that the set -- all 152 cards of it -- is available by only unlocking the cards, one by one, through the Diamond Giveaway site. For an entire set, you have to be crazy enough to try to trade for all of them on the site. It is very evident that some folks are trying to do that -- good luck to you all.

But just to figure out how many of these cards are actually out there, I went through the checklist and figured out how many have been redeemed, so far.

With the exception of two cards, each card in the set has been redeemed about the same amount of times -- in the 80 to 100 range.

Here are the cards that have been redeemed the most:

Chris Carpenter -- 120 cards
Neftali Feliz -- 112
Jose Reyes -- 112
Felix Hernandez -- 111
Mike Schmidt -- 110
Kurt Suzuki -- 110

Here are the cards that have been redeemed the least:

Bob Gibson -- 81
Ubaldo Jimenez -- 83
Kevin Youkilis -- 83
Tyler Colvin -- 85
Fausto Carmona -- 87
Rickey Henderson -- 87
Ryan Zimmerman -- 87

Of course, there are also black diamond variations of each of the cards, which if redeemed means you get all of your cards shipped for free. But for each card, only between 6-10 of those black diamond cards have been redeemed, so I left those out of the total.

I'm not sure how many of each card will be redeemed by the time this Diamond Giveaway site is over. But as of now, I suppose 120 or 81 of each card is pretty darn rare. Not exactly 1-of-1 territory, but on the exclusive side.

It's just that my brain is having a hard time believing the rarity thing when I've already redeemed three of them.

One other interesting thing that I found.

The last two cards in the Diamond Diecut set -- cards No. 151 and No. 152 -- have not been redeemed on the Giveaway site at all, at least not according to my searches.

Those two cards are both Yankees, Derek Jeter (151) and Lou Gehrig (152). The cards DO exist, because I've seen them on ebay. But I'm wondering if they are not available on the Giveaway site and only available as some pull out of a hobby box. I don't pay attention to such things, so someone may have to fill me in.

If it isn't available on the Giveaway site, I think that's crap. As much as I hate the Yankees and get annoyed by many of their fans, making two of the players unavailable in the customary way is a simple money grab, because Topps knows Yankees fans are manic about spending cash on collectibles.

Or it's possible that the search function was just being goofy (although I tried it many times and at different times).

Anyway, enough about the Yankees.

My Marlon Byrd diecut is now up for grabs. I'm hoping it'll land me either the Andre Ethier or Clayton Kershaw diecut. Some Cubbies fan will do that, right?

Come on, show some sympathy. I don't even have any Gypsy Queen around here.