2018 COMC purchases: whateva, I'll do what Avant!

It's been a few weeks between posts, so today I'm finally getting around to showing off the first bunch of pickups from my COMC purchases near the end of last year.

Tonight is all about sure-handed possession receiver Jason Avant.  I'm not sure why things worked out this way but he's one of my top football guys in terms of quantity and quality.  Click on his name in the first sentence of this paragraph to see what I mean.

Speaking of quantity of quality, here's 10 great new hits for his collection:

First up is a five spot of vertical cards:  four autographs and a jersey relic.  The signatures hail from sets produced during his draft/rookie year of 2006 and include:

• Bowman Chrome Rookie Autographs Blue Refractor (#75/75), my third in the autograph rainbow
• Donruss Classics Significant Signatures Gold (#020/100), a fine example from that product
• Select Autographs Red (#02/25), a nice combo of foil and the color red
• 2006 Ultimate Collection RC (#247/275), a relatively cheap pickup from a high-end product

Meanwhile the jersey is one of his three versions of a 2011 Topps Triple Threads Unity Relics Emerald parallel (#01/18).  I thought I had others of Avant from this set but got him confused with Steve Breaston.

Next is a fun trio of horizontal stuff, all from 2006.  The first two are from Panini's fairly confusing Gridiron Gear product where a bunch of the variations on the cards were numbered to 50, making them hard to differentiate.  Fortunately I was able to deduce that the two you see are a Rookie Jerseys Combos Prime Autographs dual jersey auto (#21/50) and Rookie Jerseys Jumbo Swatch Autographs jersey auto (#035/150).  The "prime" pieces look great with the sticker 'graph on the first, and the signed pull-out swatch on the latter is a fun feature.

Joining those is one of the more mundane cards this evening (along with the Triple Threads above), a 2006 Leaf Rookies and Stars Longevity Target Sapphire Parallel jersey (#042/249).  That's an absolute mouthful from another one of those often confusing products (is it the regular Rookies and Stars Longevity parallel or the set named Longevity itself?).  The blue (you can call it "sapphire" all you want) looks great, though the Eagles' green kind of gets in the way.  Not bad for $0.88!

Last up tonight is not just one but two 1/1s, my first of the former Wolverines WR.  Up top is an autographed plate, the Cyan version, from Jason's 2006 SAGE Autographs.  A quick count tells me this is just the 13th of my 117 1/1s to be signed, and it's a Michigan uni card!

I was also stoked to grab Avant's Black plate from 2012 Topps since it's nice to have something more "mainstream" to pair with the college-only SAGE version.

Nine of these 10 cards came from one seller who was either a big collector of Avant or an Eagles fan at one point.  All but the R&S Longevity jersey came to me for a bit over $28, and I feel pretty good with paying an average of $3 per card for what you see here!

Before this post Avant sat on the cusp of a milestone at 49 hits so I was glad to get him over that hump and up to 59.  That jumps him to sixth place overall and makes him the ninth player to make it to 50.  Denard Robinson is likely to be the player that will get the club membership into double digits so keep an eye out for that!

As for his overall PC, I now count 112 different cards, more than half of which are hits.  I wasn't kidding about that quantity of quality, guys!

Next time I'll have more COMC football purchases, though I haven't decided which group to post yet.