David Segui, 1993 Upper Deck #792

In my times of greatest need, I know that I can always turn to other card bloggers for inspiration. If the things that they inspire me to do are wildly impractical and unusual, all the better! In this case, we're talking Frankensets.

Put simply, a "Frankenset" is a card set that is pieced together from multiple years/brands/what have you, but still numbered sequentially. It's usually housed in a binder, because that's just the best way to organize and gawk at your cards, you know? The first example of a "Frankenset" I came across was Ben Henry's "The 792", which made an entirely new set out of spare parts from all of the Topps base sets of the 1980s, with one card for each number from 1-792. A few of my other favorite hobby bloggers, Night Owl and Cardboard Junkie Dave, have each put together 350-card Frankensets of Allen and Ginter minis. Night Owl also has a night card Frankenset, and now Dave has a 2000s Topps Heritage Frankenset. This is where I say, "Me too!". But I'm not content mooshing together a bunch of half-finished Topps sets. Oh, no.

I'm making a 792-card Orioles Frankenset.

I've been wanting to put my O's collection in a binder (or binders...there's a lot of them, you know) for quite some time, but I couldn't decide how to sort them. If I put them in order by year and set, I'd drive myself to madness trying to rearrange them any time a new card came home with me. Instead, I'm just going to show off a hodgepodge cross-section. All years, all brands, everything is on the table. It's going to be murder winnowing down the low-numbered cards, but I look forward to the challenge. Some decisions have already been made; David Segui will anchor the set, as this card is my only #792. As far as the odds of completing the set, a quick check of my database shows me that every number from 1 through 500 - and most cards from 501 through 700 - are already covered. It gets a bit hairier in the 700s. I'll seek out those numbers that are missing. And if any card number doesn't match up to any Oriole, I've got a potential workaround. I'll seek out serial-numbered parallels or inserts where the serial number matches the missing card number.

Though I've got the groundwork laid, I won't actually be compiling the Frankenset just yet. I still have sorting and consolidating to do for my collection as a whole, and I'm really trying to stick to one thing at a time right now. But for the short term, I've got the idea, and I've gotten at least one blog post out of it. That's a start.