I am seeing Green and Gold

Despite the title, this isn't a post about the Oakland A's or the Green Bay Packers.  When I started to focus on my Giants collection beyond Relic and Auto cards, I would occasionally search on eBay for Giants team sets.  I don't do that too often any more as either through trades or purchases I have portions of many team sets and my stack of duplicates is way too big. I would prefer to wait it out and make trades or buy singles for the cards I need.

However, recently I picked up a couple nice team sets I thought out I would share.  First up is the 2000 Pacific Paramount Emerald Parallel Team set:

Pacific cards fascinate me.  They mostly came out during a period where I was doing little to no collecting.  I moved 4 times in a 3 1/2 year stretch and most of my cards were packed away and other than going after a Topps base set, I didn't do much in the way of card purchasing.  Based on my checklist there were 10 different sets produced (base, copper, gold, green, holographic gold /199, holographic green /99, holographic silver /99, platinum blue /67, premiere date /50, and ruby).  Outside of a Holographic Gold Marvin Bernard, these are my only 2000 Paramount cards in my Giants collection.  I do have 6 different Rickey Henderson cards from this set plus his update.

I like these cards.  Of course I am a fan of the Orange background.  It appears to be muted scenery from the actual photos.  The photos are all full body shots with the players in action.  The Pacific Paramount 2000" logo is kinda big but at least it is easy to tell what set these are from.  The team logo is nicely displayed and I like the Green script for this parallel.  Finally the 8 players selected for the Giants team are the 8 key players from that season which I tend to appreciate.  Overall a nice pick up. I doubt I will track down any additional team sets with the possible exception of the base but I will keep my eyes open for cheap versions of some of the parallels.

The other set I wanted to share is much newer and something Topps collectors are quite used to, the Gold parallel set of the Topps flagship base.  This year's of course are numbered to 2012 although they mixed it up this year and included all 3 series in the Update set.

Here are the Series 1 cards:

 Interesting selection as Shierholtz and Keppinger didn't end the season on the team, Whiteside and Pill were in the minors and Wilson was hurt most of the year.  The rest of the players played pretty huge roles in the World Championship season.

Here are the Series 2 cards:

This grouping has a much higher representation rate.  Surkamp had Tommy John surgery and was out most of the year and injuries derailed Freddy Sanchez.  Otherwise the rest of these players were around and contributed mightily with the except of Aubrey Huff who wasted space on the bench and wasted $22 million dollars of salary money after his strong 2010.  I appreciate what he did in 2010 but am happy he is gone.

Finally the Update cards:

The Giants have a few more cards in Update due primarily to the 4 All Star cards.   Great representation of the team here.  Of course not a fan of Melky but he had to be included.  All these guys played big roles (although you could argue until scoring the winning run Theriot didn't contribute much after Scutaro joined the team).

The last couple years I have been able to trade and pick up single cards here and there to build the gold parallel sets but with needing so many out of 1 set I decided to go the team set route.  I was able to pick these up for just under $33, not too bad for 32 cards.  I actually still need card #92 which features Tim Lincecum as one of the leaders along with Roy Oswalt and Chris Carpenter. If you have one for trade let me know.