re: Baseball cards: A couple of sweet pulls

Im in for one with midget wrestlers.

I have a closet of baseball cards, for $35 I'll send you all I have of your team lol

Out of curiosity is baseball the only one holding value? Is the market for football and basketball worse? I was an avid collector as a kid. Would be fun to go back and do one for a basketball break just to see the cool crap. I'd imagine NBA ones have to be random teams.

Holy hell. I've never hit a Superfractor before. Congrats to whomever hit that.

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You seem to know baseball cards, how would you say they are doing right now? Are people interested? How does the market compare to 20 years ago? I am just curious I really have no idea

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I work with a guy who is big into this and besides it being a hobby to participate in, there is no monetary gain in it. It's just a fun hobby for him.

There is no comparison to the market 20+ years ago.

I watched a few breaks a few years ago. It is awesome when you see some of the hits they pull. The autos and the old relics. When is the next one? Might be interested in jumping on the Braves one.

Let me make sure I understand this. So 30 people pay $35 each to buy an $800 box. That means old boy running it has $250 per time to try to produce the stream and send the cards. Let's say he makes $150-200 each. How many times does he do this a week? I may need to get paid to open baseball cards as that sounds fun.

I think joneseys closed recently.

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Where do you even buy card packs or boxes these days?

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Outside of hobby stores, its mostly online. They know even have "retail" product, which is found in walmart, etc. and "hobby" product which is only sold online and in dedicated hobby stores. They did this to help keep hobby stores alive because they were getting crushed after the 90's when kids stopped collecting. To be honest all the shops started selling magic cards and pokemon cards because that was the only way to make money.

LINK

https://www.blowoutcards.com/
These two are some of the bigger online retailers. Basically the market now has gone towards premium products and prospects. Bowman Draft is an all prospect product that comes out in November and people go crazy for it, people pay insane prices for rare prospect cards. Lots of money to be made and lost. I know a guy that lost thousands, like 10-15k, when Oscar Taveras died in the car accident, his cards became 10-15% of value overnight.

On the premium side, I think the most expensive annual product is Topps five star. The cards are thick, like 5-7 normal cards stacked together and a case is $1000 bucks and contains 18 cards The highest run print of any particular card is 50, so everything is really rare, but still its crazy.

https://www.comc.com/

COMC is actually a cool site because you can find cheap older cards easily on the website. To sell cards on the website you actually just send them a giant box and they have a patented process that scans your cards and list them for you automatically, you just set the prices. And if you are buying you can buy a bunch of cards but don't have to take receipt of them right away and can wait till you have 100 or so then have them shipped to you.


I got rid of all my new shite a couple years ago because it was just ridiculous the prices and i wasn't sure anything was going to hold its value. I started looking at pre 70's cards to collect and it has more long term value. Cracking new stuff is still fun though. Also its pretty fun to go find boxes of the cheap shite from the 80's and 90's. You can find it for super cheap on ebay and bust open the players of your youth.

I actually experimented with running breaks on ebay but you have to lose some money upfront till you get enough followers and then ebay tried to stop it because it was gambling and you couldn't guarantee what you were selling.

To get an idea of some of the giant breaks people do, here is one that is 50 cases of the bowman draft product, they sell each player for their auto cards and non-auto cards. So if you win the bid, you get every card of that player for 50 cases. this one is from last summer, scorll down to see what people paid. bowman draft thread

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A case of Bowman's Best, which includes like eight boxes of packs, costs $800+.

So people put together like $35 a piece through paypal and the Twitch streamer, who in this case I know from being in the MLB the Show community, buys the case and everyone who pays gets to pick their team and whatever cards are pulled for that team, you get. The selection method varies for what product is being pulled, like for cheaper cases then you'll be randomly assigned like three teams and then can buy teams from other people who are in the break or can trade.

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That sounds really fun.

I used to collect heavily back in the 1980's. (As a kid, I bought cards in the 1970's as well and I saved them, but I never saw myself as a "collector" at that time.)

The last cards I bought as a collector that I can say I hit a jackpot with was back in 1993. I bought a box of 1993 Upper Deck SP's and pulled two Derek Jeter "Premiere Prospects" rookie cards. Of course, back then, Derek Jeter wasn't Derek Jeter yet, but he was already known as an up-and-coming rookie. So I cased both of those cards immediately and have kept them ever since.



(Card pictured from the internet, not one of my cards.)

I've heard that card has a nice value now.

Haven't really motivated myself to get back into collection for almost 25 years now, but at least I went out with a bang.

The system that you described sounds really fun though.