Mint Musings: Feeling the Urge for Some Set Building – In today’s day and age of high-end products and higher costs, something that often gets lost in the collecting world is the art of set building. Once upon a time, before the days of boxes over $1,000 and things such as card grading, people busted packs simply to collect cards of their favorite teams and to try and put a set together. These large sets would often provide a youngster’s only attachment to the baseball players they idolized.

Building a set often seems like a quaint notion in today’s market considering the amount of other options in the hobby and world in general. Given the fact that many products in the current market are based around smaller base sets, building a base set sometimes doesn’t seem as fun as it used to.

Adding in other challenges such as short prints can lead to frustration among collectors who don’t want to have to buy a large amount of boxes to finish off an entire set. While there are some products out there, such as Topps’ yearly baseball set and Upper Deck’s yearly hockey set, that cater to big base sets and set builders, it feels more and more like it’s becoming a lost art in the trading card world.

Primarily being a singles collector myself, it’s been a rare occurrence where I’ve felt engaged enough in a product to actually want to put together a set. Surprisingly enough to me, Panini’s 2015 Diamond Kings Baseball product prompted me to take up the challenge of putting together the entire base set.

When I first started collecting, I wasn’t a big fan of the Diamond Kings line. Mainly because the cards often proved to be tricky and unattractive for in-person autograph collecting, I never really gravitated towards them. That changed  with the 2005 Diamond Kings set. At a reasonable price point with two hits per box, I found it to be a fun set to chase with some nice hits to boot. For those same reasons, I was drawn to this year’s product, which made a return to the market after a long layoff.

Like the 2005 release, each box offers two hits per box, typically an autograph and a memorabilia hit. I’ve also noticed a number of boxes featuring an extra memorabilia card, typically a mini-relic. Writing product reviews, I’ve often had to focus on hits given the nature of the box. Every now and then though, I find myself spending some extra time critiquing the base cards of a product.

In opening 2015 Diamond Kings was one of those products that I caught myself saying over and over again how much I liked the base cards. Beyond Topps’ Gypsy Queen and Stadium Club products earlier in the year, I don’t remember another release this year where I felt that enthralled by the photography and design for base cards. I thought Panini did a nice job with the designs and covering up the fact that they can’t use MLB logos.

Being a Pirates fan, I found it cool seeing cards of both Hall of Famer Honus Wagner and potential rising star Gregory Polanco in the box. While there were plenty of big names to be found, I also found cards of older legends such as Dave Bancroft that don’t typically appear see in products.

I’ve gone through two boxes of Diamond Kings already, and chances are I’ll probably buy a few more to finish off the set. I’m pretty close already, and I could choose to go through a company like SportLots or Check Out My Cards in order to finish it off. With boxes around the $60 mark and plenty of cool hits to chase though, I think it’s worth busting a little more.

Being primarily a singles collector, this isn’t something that I typically do with my buying. I don’t mind this exception though as it’s proven to me that set building is still an enjoyable activity in today’s hobby. I know there are many out there that would disagree with me given the cost of cards or the difficulty in doing so. In a lot of cases, they’d be right, but sometimes an emotional feeling can’t be ignored.

If set building isn’t your thing, that’s perfectly fine as one of the greatest things about the hobby today is the amount of choice in what and how one can collect. Based on my own experience, I do have to recommend finding one product a year to try and build a set of. Who knows? You may have more fun doing it than you’d think.

Mint Musings:  Feeling the Urge for Some Set Building – Image Gallery


Kelsey’s ability to bring hobby coverage to the mainstream sports fan as the producer of ESPN’s Mint Condition has been a true asset. GTS is happy to feature his thoughts on the hobby in Mint Musings. The opinions expressed are his and do not necessarily reflect those of GTS Distribution.
Kelsey Schroyer

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