The Immortals Exhibit

          This is by far my favorite set obviously because its only Ichiro! I have dedicated the corner of the Ichiro Vault (man cave) which is all Ichiro anyways to the Immortals Plates. I have some base cards displayed throughout while my high end autos from the set are kept in the lockbox.  
 I have never been a big fan of printing plates to be completely honest. But of course like all things there are exceptions and that of course is printing plates of your main PC guy. I have only accumulated 2 Ichiro printing plates over the years as there were not many that caught my eye. The Leaf company decided to release there whole line of printing plates on ebay recently and I thought it would be great to grab a couple. A couple of plates soon turned into a whole mess of them. Ichiro does something to my brain where all senses of logic and moderation goes out the window.I quickly gathered almost every single Black printing plate (these are my favorite looking plates of the 4) in the whole set and a handful of others that I thought looked nice. I decided to print out the 3 page promo sell sheets as well to hang below the 3 display cases of plates. Overall I have 63 new plates for the Immortals collection.
       Photos below are of the plates and various singles of the set. I just received a nice lot of base /5 and /20 cards from comc but im so tired from the workday I haven't had the energy to organize and take photos of them. You get the jist of it all anyway eh? Hey who am I talking to? ok bye.
 

The Immortal Plates 

Close up w/ Leaf Sell Sheets

Base Cards /51

Base /5 & /20

Base Gold 1/1 w/ set /5, /20, /51 & Black Plate not pictured

Base Auto /5

Pendulum Auto /5

Mays Ichiro Dual Auto Book 1/1

Immortals Part Deux

Well that didn't take too long did it??? As I hoped to hold off on the autos in exclusive Ichiro immortals collection an incredible deal arose and could not be passed up. The card was one of the most coveted in the series and one of the blowout card forum members actually pulled it. It was ironic how beforehand I commented how this card was beautiful and would make a "killing" off an ebay auction. So assumptions were this card was way out of my price range. As the card eventually made it to ebay in auction style, I made a very very conservative max bid with about 1 hour left as the highest bidder. As auctions for these high end cards almost always go 3x-4x the bid totals in the last minute as everyone throws their best # out there. I was 99.99% sure I would not get this card and a strange thing happened, no one bid it up! Was it because it was in the middle of the nfl playoff games? Did everyone blow there money from xmas? I'll never know and I literally won the auction around $700 below market value compared to similar selling cards. Card forum members called it the deal of the century and even suspected the seller would back out of the deal. Luckily for me, the seller was honest and I got this "crown jewel" for my personal collection at a ridiculous price and in perfect condition. I also picked up 4 more base cards as well during the week. If you add it all up, I spent less than $150 less than a retail sealed Ichiro Immortals box for the same box set+1 additional base card and with a killer 1/1 auto book I doubt I could have done any better with the gamble of a sealed box as most returned about 3/4 their value. Best week of pickups I have ever had. Still doesn't match the excitement of obtaining the '12 Ichiro Chrome SSP, but it comes very close!!!

Ichiro the Immortal

You have to be a pretty unique player to have a whole set dedicated in your behalf. Once I heard they were going to make set dedicated to Ichiro I was thrilled. Though the price point was a little steep I knew I had to at the least grab a base card from ebay to have in my collection. As much as I was tempted to spend $800 on a box it wasn't worth the repercussions to be had from the wife of buying and justifying such a purchase. They only made 300 sets each including 5 cards, 1 auto and 4 base.  The autos have held strong in price though some variations have dropped in price to the point where its becoming a good value in purchasing these autos in the future. But until then I will enjoy this beautiful looking  #/5 base card.