Sports Cards Mania

Traut

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The fact that the 99 ASG patch is a sticker auto with smudgy ink is a damn travesty.
It is borderline criminal. Someone had a great idea for a card that would have been total fire. Clean it up some and get him to sign on card and you damn near have a piece of art with a lot of nostalgic value. A defining performance from one of the greatest pitchers ever to take the mound.
 

Fishercat

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Just to add to what Traut said, Topps base seems to have a really high initial Ebay sales point and then it drops quick to a longer term point. If you go that way and you're looking at something that isn't crazy limited (like low numbered) or that you don't need right now, maybe hold off until people get their claws into retail and open more of their boxes. Series 2 has only been out a monthish and is just hitting retail up here and the various inserts I'm looking at are probably at 50-60% of their earliest price.

But yeah, like the /10 ASG Manufactured Relic Auto at $300 for a sticker vs. similarly limited Topps Museum or Luminaries autos on Ebay for 70% of that price seems to tell me that you can wait on that if it's a must have...I could be wrong but it doesn't align. Looking at the other $300 sold Pedro autos you're looking at PSA10 Graded Rookies that were hand signed, dual signatures with other great names, getting close to Dynasty patch/signature combos, Even the 1/1 Diamond Icons Pedro auto from last year went for 260. I dunno, real hard to justify unless it drops a lot or you get lucky from a pack.

And yeah, the shame is with a bit more effort that card would've been a real gem, now you kind of hope you find an ideal sticker which...for a /10 you don't have the luxury of, especially with both stickers not being great (Ebay has the 7/10 and 9/10 posted). It's kinda wild that 25 years ago Leaf was able to manage a product (at $10 a pack) with a guaranteed, on-card auto with a list of 250+ active baseball players on the signing list and now it's not possible to get a /10 auto in a flagship product to be on card. I'm not wholly opposed to stickers - sometimes they are a necessity and sometimes honestly it's not worth the resources to track down a player to sign 2000 cards produced in hand. But a /10 auto of a Hall of Famer in your biggest production run product? Nevermind the Wander 1/1 that was a sticker...
 
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NJ_Sox_Fan

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At least if you’re gonna have sticker autos, make them visually appealing

This is one of my favorite non on card autos I own

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Traut

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At least if you’re gonna have sticker autos, make them visually appealing

This is one of my favorite non on card autos I own

View attachment 53024
That is an awesome card. Nomar ends up as one of the great under appreciated Red Sox largely because of the injuries that took a toll and the way it ended. Had he been on that 2004 team when they won - I think he'd get similar love to Pedro.
 

Green (Tongued) Monster

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At least if you’re gonna have sticker autos, make them visually appealing

This is one of my favorite non on card autos I own

View attachment 53024
Schwing! That card has made me watch a bunch of triple threads rips on youtube. The idea of pulling something like this has me thinking about buying a box. I have always like ripping the many packs of standard topps and bowman, but these triple auto's and booklets are amazing. Do any of you regularly purchase products like triple threads or dynasty? If so, do you mind sharing some of your hits? looks like hobby boxes are selling for around $450.
 

Deathofthebambino

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Apr 12, 2005
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Schwing! That card has made me watch a bunch of triple threads rips on youtube. The idea of pulling something like this has me thinking about buying a box. I have always like ripping the many packs of standard topps and bowman, but these triple auto's and booklets are amazing. Do any of you regularly purchase products like triple threads or dynasty? If so, do you mind sharing some of your hits? looks like hobby boxes are selling for around $450.
Yeah, I wouldn't even know where to begin, but I've had thousands of cards from every product over the years. 53044530455304653047530485304953050530515305253053
 

Deathofthebambino

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Apr 12, 2005
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530645306553066530675306853069

I could do this all day. Driving me crazy that most of my Boston stuff, I can't post, because I get that "photo is too large" message from SoSH
 

Green (Tongued) Monster

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I could do this all day. Driving me crazy that most of my Boston stuff, I can't post, because I get that "photo is too large" message from SoSH
Thank you for these - A lot of great stuff. I have just been getting back into collecting the past 3 years, but only spending a few hundred each year. Looking to invest more, as I am really enjoying it. How would you rank the baseball boxes over the past few years? Both in terms of your enjoyment and the ROI?
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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Are they fake though, or were they told to do full signatures and most players cannot anymore hence why these weird almost print sigs are coming?
 

Traut

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Are they fake though, or were they told to do full signatures and most players cannot anymore hence why these weird almost print sigs are coming?
Scroll right on that reddit post and you’ll see another Acuna signature from 2022 Sterling.

That’s not Acuna’s signature. Search PSA authenticated ones. That Sterling one is unlike any other signature of his.

That handwriting looks an awful lot like the one on the Meadows card.

Every single one or these cards says signature witnessed by a Topps representative. And there’s no way that’s true.
 

staz

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Also:

Statement from Topps.
From a P.R. standpoint this is a good first step. The average Joe will conclude 'prolly just the players' agents rented a auto-signing machine.' A good next step: Find the root cause and then share it publicly along with specific countermeasures to prevent reoccurrence.

A big part of Topps' product is authenticity.
 

deanx0

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From a P.R. standpoint this is a good first step. The average Joe will conclude 'prolly just the players' agents rented a auto-signing machine.' A good next step: Find the root cause and then share it publicly along with specific countermeasures to prevent reoccurrence.

A big part of Topps' product is authenticity.
This surprises me. In 2012, after I was let go by WWE, I was pretty far along in the job interview process with Topps for a position that largely was sitting with players (mostly in Spring Training) and ensuring that they and they alone were the ones signing their cards. But maybe that position has been phased out in the name of making more profit.
 

Fishercat

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I am wondering if this is a Fanatics QA issue. There were videos in the Topps era of players signing remotely and signing an affadavit, so the risk of this is there (maybe a COVID concession) but that Meadows should have been caught on a QA for sure.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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I've pulled TWO gold disco/10 autos from Panini Prizm NFL boxes!

One player is out of the league and the other is a late round WR
 

Green (Tongued) Monster

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Thank you for these - A lot of great stuff. I have just been getting back into collecting the past 3 years, but only spending a few hundred each year. Looking to invest more, as I am really enjoying it. How would you rank the baseball boxes over the past few years? Both in terms of your enjoyment and the ROI?
Wanted to follow up on this with the group. I was specifically looking at trying topps triple threads or tier one. Any recommendations for either? Or do you recommend any others. The allure of those big hits are great but I think the ROI on bowman is better.
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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ROI on 95% of all boxes is a negative. I would say bowman you’ve got a better shot because it’s always possible an unknown will turn into a star one day, or that you can offload the color auto of some guy who hasn’t even sniffed AA yet for hundreds or thousands.
 

Kenny F'ing Powers

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Wanted to follow up on this with the group. I was specifically looking at trying topps triple threads or tier one. Any recommendations for either? Or do you recommend any others. The allure of those big hits are great but I think the ROI on bowman is better.
ROI on 95% of all boxes is a negative. I would say bowman you’ve got a better shot because it’s always possible an unknown will turn into a star one day, or that you can offload the color auto of some guy who hasn’t even sniffed AA yet for hundreds or thousands.
If you're serious about money from these, don't open them. Rule of thumb is to purchase singles/slabs, and to hold all sealed product for long term hold.

99% of the time, opening boxes will never make you money. If that's your expectation, you're in the wrong hobby.
 

Green (Tongued) Monster

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If you're serious about money from these, don't open them. Rule of thumb is to purchase singles/slabs, and to hold all sealed product for long term hold.

99% of the time, opening boxes will never make you money. If that's your expectation, you're in the wrong hobby.
I guess I should have been more specific. First and foremost, I am looking to build my collection of singles - mainly relics and autos. I don't necessarily care about set-building. I also realize that I would save a bunch of money buying the singles I liked off of ebay. However, so much of my childhood was spent ripping packs, and the surprise of the hobby box is what is the most fun for me. That is the allure of the higher end Topps product, even though they limit hobby boxes to 1-2 packs of 2-6 cards each.

As far as ROI goes, I have purchased Bowman releases in 2019-2021 and have been lucky to sell some of the hits and recoup a lot of what was spent. That is also enjoyable for me. For this year's release, they not only raised the prices, but decreased the number of cards and hits in boxes. I stayed away as a result. Same goes with Topps Flagship. The number of packs in Hobby and Jumbo are fun to rip through, but I just don't care about all the base cards. I end up selling the variations and SP's. I want my singles collection to be more like the above pictures and less of the orange border /25 base cards, or mother's day pink /50 base cards.

With that said, I am planning on buying more flagship the next few years, since the 1987-1990 Topps releases were my favorites, and bring back so many memories. But this year I wanted to try something different, which led to my original request, and as you can tell I am back to being a beginner in this hobby. For me there are many different pros and cons of each product, so I am turning to the experience of the group. Feel free to PM me if needed - I don't want to clog up the board with self-serving posts. Thank you all.
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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Opening boxes is still the most enjoyable part of the hobby for me. Buying singles off of EBay, FB groups, etc. is “boring” which is why I still buy the boxes from time to time. Big difference is in 2009, I was buying cases of Bowman Draft at $600 and now that probably doesn’t get you 3 boxes of this current years Bowman Draft.

TTT, Sterling, Museum, Dynasty etc. are all a ton of fun (if you like the style of cards) just know that you’re far more likely to land a Felix Dubront auto than you are to hit anything like a Trout/Acuña/Vladdy/insert Star here. The price points have become fairly ridiculous on some of these boxes which is why even though it’s far less fun I do wind up buying more singles now than ever before.
 

staz

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Been opening Topps Series 2 packs from a hobby box lately (my very first!), and after 18 packs I have zero duplicates: 250 unique cards, and 233/330 towards a set.

Do all hobby boxes ship this way, or is it just dumb luck? Or maybe commonplace? I have no clue on how random (or intentional) Topps packages its cards.
 

Fishercat

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Been opening Topps Series 2 packs from a hobby box lately (my very first!), and after 18 packs I have zero duplicates: 250 unique cards, and 233/330 towards a set.

Do all hobby boxes ship this way, or is it just dumb luck? Or maybe commonplace? I have no clue on how random (or intentional) Topps packages its cards.
My understanding is hobby boxes are collated to avoid dupes in the base set but jumbos may not be.
 

deanx0

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My understanding is hobby boxes are collated to avoid dupes in the base set but jumbos may not be.
I bought one Hobby jumbo box of Series 1 and got all 330 cards and one Hobby jumbo box of Series 2 and got all 330 cards of it. So Hobby Jumbos are collated that way too I believe.
 

Green (Tongued) Monster

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So I decided against buying a box of Topps Triple Threads after looking through ebay. I absolutely love the look of their relic cards. I ended up buying three different relic cards numbered to /9, one of them autographed, as well as a relic card numbered to /27 for less than $90. And there is still room in the budget to get my pack fix next month when stadium club releases (maybe).
 

NJ_Sox_Fan

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Picked up both of these recently - Houck for obvious reasons, and the Franco mainly for sentimental reasons (and I like the look of the card)

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Kenny F'ing Powers

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Bowman draft chrome boxes go on sale in September. I'm definitely getting in on that to go fishing for autos.

Do we want to try to get a group break going?
 

Traut

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Scored this card from Topps Now. I was too late to get anything with lower numbers. But /49 and I will love this card forever.artbb-16c2s-22tn-0587b_.png
 

Seabass

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It happened to my buddy. His mother in law called him up, said that his father in law had some cards in the attic, whatever they were worth she'd split the sales with him. His text with this picture said this is "a hundredth" of what he's got. He's got two kids, this will probably put them through school, right?

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