New stuff Friday!

Well, I can't say I've had much to post about recently, considering the relative dearth of decent new stuff to bust, and a completely rational decision to stop buying such a ridiculous amount of stuff anyway.  Still, I make it a point to check the BlowoutCards buy/sell/trade forums a couple times a day, and last week a particular thread piqued my interest.

In it a guy was offering $5 lots of cards (usually in groups of 6-9) first come, first served.  The thing about them, though, was that they were generally pretty damn good.  In most cases 50% or more of the lot was certified autographs, with some in-person signed cards mixed in.  Occasionally there were duds (he claims he picked these randomly) and sometimes the price went up to $10 or $25, and those weren't always as attractive, but the huge selection of stuff combined with ridiculous prices and a page refresh competition that wore out F5 buttons nationwide made for a hugely enjoyable thread that went 70+ pages (each 10 comments).

Yours truly was able (and willing) to snap up three separate lots--oddly enough, a $5, $10 and $25 each.  I went for those that looked reasonable enough considering the short amount of time I had to decide (the guy was putting lots up about one every 10 minutes, then they would usually be snapped up within probably 30 seconds).  Here's a look at what I ended up with--a group of cards that easily are worth WAY more than $40 (delivered!), including some worth $40 by themselves:

Group 1:  Highlights include auto/RCs of Takashi Saito and Mike Jacobs, plus a sweet Hanley Ramirez ManuPatch

These Tristar autos all came in one lot with some other stuff.  A couple of decent name players, including Mayberry and Schafer.  The first two are Green parallels #d to 50 and worth a few bucks, so this lot proved to be pretty nice.

A few 2009 and 2008 Donruss Elite autos, all of which, again, have some pretty decent value now, and might even jump up a bit in the future.

All of these are in-person autos (I believe the guy stated he got a lot of them from minor league games, which is pretty believable).  A pretty nice group considering it includes Cliff Lee, plus top prospects like Drabek and Ramos (and Hosmer's nothing to sneeze at either).

So all in all, some pretty good value out of a thread that was just about as enjoyable as busting packs considering the gambling involved, plus there was even a little skill thrown in too (I got so good at obsessive refreshing that eventually I essentially had my choice of every lot, but only went with the ones that looked inviting enough).  When's the last time you got 25 hits out of two or fewer boxes, much less anything that cost $40?  NEVER, THAT'S WHEN.

Here's hoping the guy does another one of these in the future, but for now I've gone a long way towards reloading my auto/trade bait collection that I depleted after selling off a huge lot of mostly crap on eBay.

I should not that I'm not especially attached to most, if any, of this stuff, so if you see something you like, just holler and we'll work something out.  Also note that I think some of these cards seem like prime candidates for contests/giveaways, so keep an eye out for that in the future.