Last night I began to ponder that virtually every year of Topps has cards that are condition sensitive that will command a higher price in near-mint to mint condition. Then what makes the 71 Topps Baseball cards more unique? The black border presents its own challenge, but that would affect virtually every card in the set.
Since there's a challenge in finding the best card possible under budget constraints and that the 71 is one of my favorite sets that I'm trying to tweak a bit, I wondered if other collectors have run into similar issues. If I had the purchasing power to assemble a registry set, centering wouldn't be much of an issue, and I don't think that I would spend that amount of money to get the perfect Bobby Murcer anyways. I spent less than $30 each for my Munson and Ryan cards, any improvements will cost far more that my initial expense and I'd still be far from perfection.
I still prefer sharper corners over 50/50 centering, but there's that drive to better some of the harder cards to find centered. So, I'm going to post some of the examples from my set to illustrate my point. Please feel free to share examples from your collections.
Phil aka Tere1071
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