TCDB Kirby Puckett Project: Final Results

The player collector post 2000 has had to change their mindset from when I was a kid.  It is not unreasonable for me to say I am going to collect every Kevin Wickander card.  In TCDB he has 78 cards listed, and while I'm not near close to that goal (I have 27 cards), there is not a card in that list that should be impossible to get.  The difficult ones would be Tiffany cards, minor league cards, team issued cards, Desert Shield, and 1997 Donruss Signature cards, the rarest being 100.  

Kevin Wickander is not a Hall of Famer, nor a fan favorite.  No intended shade here, just saying that he hasn't had a card made since 1997.  So I can actually collect all his cards and be done.  Kirby Puckett has not played since 1995 and continues to have cards made.  So, even if I collected every single Puckett card, by next month I will be needing more cards.

Wickander's lowest serial numbered card is 100.  Tough, but not impossible.  Puckett will have 10-100 new cards each year that is serial numbered to 1.  Just looking at 2021, Kirby Puckett had this breakdown:

Non-serial/ no announced print run : 130 cards

SN/PR 101+ : 22 cards

SN/PR 2-100 : 226 cards

SN/PR 1: 134 cards

Yikes!  134 cards of only 1 copy!  Heck, 130 new cards without print runs / serial number seems crazy high for 16 years after playing.

Other differences in the Wickander / Puckett collections.  Wickander never had a Project 70 card.  Topps could announce a new Puckett card every day if they wanted to and "true" collectors would have the opportunity to buy it.  Wickander didn't have major card producers creating vast amounts of cards without licensing like Panini is doing now.  Wickander never had cross sport cards like Leaf is producing for Puckett.  Wickander doesn't have memorabilia cards.  

All in all, having more cards to collect is great, and its providing solid life lessons: 

• You can't have everything you want
• Everyone collects different
• Prioritize
• Have fun!

So we've reached the end. All cards added, weird sized ones, box bottoms, uncut sheets, and whatever else I could find.  I'm still going to go through the list to make there isn't anything I'm obviously missing, but this will be close to the final tally.  Of the 4271 cards in the TCDB database, I have 28.6% of them.  What place did I finish?

Fourth place isn't too bad, only 14 cards from third.  114 cards is reasonable to get to second place.  Congrats embagley, you'll be hold 1st Place for a while!