I am much more partial to blue refractors than any other color refractor that exists in the Topps Chrome parallel menu. Not only is it my favorite color, but it is the color of my favorite sports team. The Dodgers go spectacularly well with blue refractors.
I was particularly happy with the blue refractors from 2007-2012 because the deep blue color selected matched the Dodgers' color scheme (they possess the perfect blue -- not too dark and not too light).
That is why I favor blues over any color refractor, regardless of rarity. A blue refractor could lack a serial number and a gold refractor could be numbered to /10 and the more desirable refractor for me would be blue all day every day.
Because of this, I've tried to accumulate at least one Dodgers blue refractor each year for the last seven or eight years.
And I've been thrilled with just about all of them.
(I somehow missed a 2012 blue refractor, quite possibly because I was so irked by the design by the time Chrome came out that I didn't bother).
But then something horrible happened in 2013.
Topps changed the color for its blue refractors.
They now looked like this:
That's awful. Where's my deep blue beauty?
With the large amount of real estate devoted to the border in 2013 Topps, I was looking forward to the blue refractors and instead was smacked in the face with wimpy light blue that dissolved into silver. This looks no better in person either.
I understand that Topps has to change things up to continue to be viable and interesting, but DON'T MESS WITH MY BLUE REFRACTORS! It's the one thing about Chrome that made me the happiest!
The first blue refractors -- I think (I'm not much of a Chrome historian) -- showed up in the Chrome base set in 2006. And those refractors kind of look like the ones in 2013. A little too pale and bland for my taste. But maybe Topps was going back to its roots.
2014 came along and things weren't much better.
I could tell the blue wasn't the same as it was in 2013, but it still was much too dainty for my liking.
That looks great if you're a Kansas City Royal from 1978 wearing a road uniform, but we're talking about the Dodgers here!
I was despondent. And I basically shut blue refractors out of my mind after that. What was the point? They had been ruined.
2015 Topps Chrome came and went and I didn't even bother to look at the colored parallels. We were obviously going in a direction that wasn't mine. Time to get out.
I don't know how I stumbled across it, but I was paging through Dodger card possibilities online one day recently and I saw a Dodger Chrome card from 2015.
WOW!!!
Blue was back!
And more beautiful than ever!
I loved that card so much that I had to have it. And now I do. And I liked the card so much that I got another one to go with it.
I don't think I can find a card in my collection that is in more color harmony than this one.
I was so pleased that Topps had come to its senses that I started to think everyone had finally realized that the 2015 Chrome blue was the way to go -- from here on out.
And then I saw 2016 Topps.
Obviously, the base set doesn't have a border. So we can forget my favorite way to make parallels -- colorizing the border. I don't know how Topps is going to make colored refractors in its Chrome set this year. I fear it's going to be the way it did the color parallels in the base set -- with that colorized netting in the corners.
If that's the way the blue refractors are going to look in 2015 Chrome, I'm not going to bother with them. Sure, I'll take any sent my way, but that is not my idea of a supreme blue refractor.
Now that we've seen a better blue, I don't know why anyone would want anything else.
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