The world's biggest checklist fan

 

I am about the only card blogger that I can think of who has multiple blog posts dedicated to old-school checklists.

All those posts were generated by nostalgia, pure and simple. I cannot reasonably expect those checklists to return to current sets nor pretend that I enjoyed pulling them out of packs way back then.

But the look of them -- the very '70s look of them -- I do enjoy and they make me smile, as ugly as they are.

 

I can respect them for the purpose that they served at the time -- it was the only way to track your collection. The checklists in current flagship show up on the back of random action/celebration shots. Those cards have no purpose -- front or back -- and need to go. If you're going to placate a few old-school collectors by including checklist boxes on the back, make the fronts themed, something like notable highlights from the past year seems easy enough.

 

Anyway, due to the current treatment of checklists and recognizing that nobody needs to be pulling a checklist out of a pack today, I had moved on from longing for checklists. This is probably my most recent post on them. But I was over them then and am now.

Until this popped up:

The very second I saw this I felt like the world's biggest checklist fan. I took one glance at the price and immediately clicked "buy". Holy smokes, I've never wanted a checklist so bad.

Perhaps you don't realize what this mean.

This is a milestone moment. This is the first time in nearly 10 years of chasing that I have seen a buyback checklist from the 1975 Topps set. I've accumulated 500-plus cards from the '75 set in buyback form, but until now I did not own -- nor ever see -- one of the checklists.

Landing this card makes it feel like anything is possible in getting the rest of the buyback cards in the set, though I know realistically that's not the case. I landed another '75 buyback at the same time as the checklist. That one has yet to arrive but when it does I will have acquired 525 of the 660 cards in buyback form. That officially rounds up to 80 percent of the set!

And it took a little checklist to get there. Even after all these years I'm relying on checklist cards to complete a set.