Here come the aqua-men!

 

My favorite parallel cards have always been the border color parallels. In the first few years of the blog, I'd gush over the Topps Chrome parallels, particularly the blue ones.

There actually weren't a ton of border parallels around at the time -- the gold parallels were ... uh ... the gold standard, of course -- and you mostly had to go to Chrome or some high-end set to find something other than that.

 

That eventually changed about 12 years ago and now there are so many color border parallels in your basic flagship set that it's impossible to focus on them all. It's overkill and some of them I don't care about at all. As an example, that gold foil thing that started a couple years ago is really pointless.

 

But give Topps credit for still trying because sometimes it stumbles across something I love, like this year's aqua parallels.

 

I love these things -- not the Chrome ones -- just the flagship ones. I didn't realize that these were Fanatics exclusives until a few days ago. I don't even know how you'd pull these cards, I just find them online.

 

I just aqua-ired these guys yesterday. I'm not going bananas and trying to complete an entire set of aquas. I just want the Dodgers, and even then this is a casual pursuit. When you have Shohei Ohtani on your favorite team, you learn to scale back expectations as a collector.

 

But I like these because they're not numbered, they're not rare and they're bright and glorious, but not in an obnoxious way like the yellow parallels.

 

I have always loved this particular color. I think it's an '80s thing again. The color was all over the decade (yes, I had a T-shirt this color). These parallels are more attractive to me than the golds or the royal blues. The crackle foil colored borders are nice and fancy but they're a little harder to chase.

 

I also landed the Kershaw aqua recently, made sure to get that. This is an indication of what this parallel means to me. I've become dismissive of most parallels (aside from gold), they've become so much noise. I'll grab one only if it's super easy and wanders across my line of vision. But for this parallel, I actually seek them out.

 

A page of them looks so nice.

So, yeah, I'll chase what's missing for my Dodgers but if there are a few I don't get, I'll move on. There's just too much I like to get super-focused on stuff like this.

But it's a good reminder how fun-and-mindless the hobby can be.