Man, that took some work.

So, this is the award card you get when you’ve completed 8 different Series 1 Yankee team sets in 2017 Bunt. It’s nothing terribly fancy, but it is Bernie, so, of course, I had to.

There was a certain degree of quiet urgency to getting these sets done this weekend, because Series 2 is formally coming out on Monday, and if Topps does what they did with NHL Skate this year, that’ll be it for melding cards to climb through the Series 1 ladder for this year (and for a free player, it is virtually impossible to complete these runs without melding cards at this point, a thing they neglected to tell first-year users of Skate, or I’d have a much better Islanders collection there since I’m blowing off most of the other cards). Now, at present, when you go to the page in the app where you meld a Series 1 card, they’re saying that melding will continue until March 28th of next year (which means the production number for these awards will be about 4 times as big eventually), but Topps has been known to change their mind on the drop of a dime, because they’re sorta making it up as they go along with all this digital stuff, so I wasn’t going to leave it to chance, and it seems like a lot of the other regular and semi-regular users are of the same mind. For now, I don’t care, I got Bernie, and I actually did it without busting up my Gary Sanchez rainbow, to boot (which made it a lot harder).

Where this is a drag is that they’ve managed to make this whole thing feel like a really bad version of level grinding in an MMORPG. Which, when you’ve done this, oh…

…three times in the space of a week now…

…it gets a little old.

(Technically, I’ve done it 5 times, as I got the Pettitte and Posada award cards before I got to the Bernie, but I wasn’t actually after those, so we won’t be featuring them here.)

I guess I have to figure out how many more times I’ll drive myself nuts over it. If we do have another 8 months, it won’t be that hard to get more. There are a bunch of good award cards (Reggie’s next on the Yankee ladder, then Jeter, and I’ll have to decide if I’m gonna use my leftovers to try and get those; after that, there’s a bunch of other award cards you can earn for building the top 5 hardest team sets of each team…there’s Mookie Wilson, Ben Oglivie, Cecil Cooper, Dick Allen, and yes, Night Owl, there’s a Ron Cey award card, only the 3rd time he’s shown up in Bunt to date…), but it’s crazy-making to do it, and it’s also a bad habit for someone with serious obsessive tendencies to get themselves into.

I did get the 3 cards out of 150 that I wanted the most, though, so there is that…