Here's this month's roundup of items that have recently caught my eye as a buyer ...

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PARALLEL POWER?
The Card: National League Wins Leaders (Spencer Strider, Zac Gallen, Justin Steele) 2024 Topps True Photo variant & Gold Foil parallel
The Price: About $11 total
Why it’s Buzz-worthy: The concept of this one is simple and it's striking -- knock off the border of a base card completely, using just its photo -- and I think it works. But there's also one thing here that's striking -- and not in the best way. These are arguably too rare to make that big of an impact with me and I think perhaps other collectors who might not bother to grab their players or even think about a team set or full set. How rare? They are one in 677 hobby packs and I'm confident they'd be more popular if people could reasonably collect a team run or set. Why? Because they're something dramatically different and you can compare the regular card and this version side by side. I also grabbed a Gold Foil parallel for this one this time after I bit on the variant ... just to say I had one. Even paying $10 for this was a stretch for me ... and those odds and that price might say that these aren't as popular as they could/should be. These are one in basically every third hobby case.
Grab a box right here: MLB cards are here.

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Mia Yim vs. Io Shirai, NXT -- Oct. 2, 2019 (WWE photo)

If you're a regular reader of this Collecting Game-used series, you've seen plenty of game-used baseball memorabilia, some NFL and then some other pieces here and there every month, but to finish off the series this year I figured I'd go with a first for me and my stash of photo-matched pick-ups.

This month, it's my first piece of WWE match-used memorabilia.

Since wrestlers are classified as independent contractors out there on the business side of things, they are responsible for their gear's creation and own it all when their time ends with a promotion, if they decide to move on or change their look for whatever need arises or for character changes. To simplify that, it means with some luck you can get Superman's cape from Superman instead of going through the movie studio -- and that simple metaphor is why I lead things off with the epic photo above.

My new piece is from wrestling veteran and former WWE star Mia Yim -- also known as Reckoning at the recent end of her recent run -- and she had all of those things in play that led some match-used memorabilia to my hands. She's had a pretty consistent gear style for most of her career until the name change and promotion and she recently posted on social media that it was time for some new stuff. That's likely a sign of some new chapters to come and that's how I found this piece -- she was selling the old to add the new. Another cool part? I was able to match things to a number of matches and even some cardboard from Topps. Heck, I even now know who made it for her.

You can see it in action above -- and get the details if you keep reading.

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