Why buy retail?

Often times I ask myself why I ever buy my baseball cards retail, mostly because I have yet to come up with a good answer.

Case in point: I recently bought a $20 blaster of 2018 Topps Fire. There is no reason I should be buying a $20 blaster of 2018 Topps Fire. You only get 48 cards per blaster (over 40 cents per card), I'm not wild about the design, and most of these will be available for dimes the next time I'm able to hit a show.

This is what the sane part of me tries to tell myself -- and yet, more often than not, it's the compulsive side of me that ends up winning out and exiting the store with a blaster box nestled in my hands.

Topps Fire is what I call an accumulation set: my only real hope is to accumulate cards of guys I collect, which Fire and its star-studded checklist did indeed provide.

But is the promise of sheer accumulation a good enough reason to open a product? I don't know: if you're lucky you might hit a decent rookie whose cards you have little interest in paying more than a buck or two for on the secondary market (e.g. Acuna), but that's really the only cost-efficient excuse I can think of for buying retail, and it doesn't even matter to me that much because it's not like I'm a big rookie hoarder.

So yes, here's something like my 153rd different Cespedes and 126th different Trout, and while I'm happy to have them, standard run-of-the-mill cards like these are little more than accumulation fodder right now.

Unlike some other sets, Topps Fire doesn't even have specific stuff for me to covet because all the cards kinda blend together after a while (though I was surprisingly pleased by last year's Fire, I really wish this had been a one-off set).

I was fortunate enough to pull perhaps the only thing I actually pinpointed from the checklist with that Goose Gossage, because you just don't see too many cards of him with the Padres these days.

Fire's inserts fail to get me fired up -- instead I'm left to wonder what's with all the nuclear-waste-yellow tint this year.

Perhaps the possibility of an autograph is enough to get some people to buy retail, but not me: while pulling an auto was certainly a surprise, I can't say I got too worked up over one of some dude on the Phillies I'd never heard of.

Fire's eye-catching parallels are really the only distinct thing(s) about it, but again, the question: are they enough to justify the purchase of an entire blaster?

Probably not: but in the meantime, I should mention that I pulled this shiny Shohei (something called a Flame parallel), which in a small way made this blaster at least semi-worthwhile to me.

Really the main satisfactions I get out of opening retail exist in the abstract. The thrill of opening a pack wrapper, busting wax, scratching the itch, etc., etc. I guess sometimes it's more about the feeling of it than the cards themselves. In the end, it seems as though buying retail mirrors a lot of our habits as collectors: there's not much reason behind it, but yet we still do it.

Because nobody ever said collecting baseball cards was a sane person's business.