It took a few months this year but back in mid-March I made my first Facebook Marketplace card purchase of 2025: a pair of 5000-count boxes of random stuff for $60.
I drove east to nearby-ish Livonia (my hometown!) and met up with a guy who was cycling out some unwanted stuff from collections he'd picked up, and that's exactly the kind of stuff I like looking through at around this price.
These boxes turned out to be heavier on base than inserts but the latter were still prominent enough to give me some great trade content, and the former were useful in some ways as well. I'd say the split was around 60% baseball, 20% football, and 10% each of basketball and hockey, give or take (it's been a while so I can't remember for sure!).
Regardless, as always I had fun flipping through this stuff, and a good chunk of it has already gone out in trade packages, plus I may list some on TCDb eventually.
As for the reason most of you are probably reading this, here were my keepers, which amounted to a pretty nice stack:
This bunch skewed recent, as in the past five or so years, which was great for me since that helps fill a lot of holes for current Tigers and other PCs. In terms of older stuff, the 2007 Topps Tigers you see here aren't base but are actually from the team set, which I didn't already have.
The Tigers were well represented, as you'd probably expect from cards I picked up in a suburb of Detroit. It's great to see the '06 World Series guys together with some of the stars leading the charge for a surprisingly good 2025 squad.
Both of my blog namesake guys made the smallish group of horizontal cards. Curtis deserves all of the awards for being a talented player who was fun to watch in addition to an impeccable ambassador of the game.
There was just a quartet of Wolverines I needed in the basketball stuff, but this gives you a small idea of some of the brands that were heavily represented.
The football contingent was three times larger (and happily included some love for the defensive guys) and again this gives you a bit of a taste of brands I found.
2024 Absolute Retail and Prestige were by far the biggest stacks so it's no surprise I had multiple keepers from both. Some Prizm and Mosaic sets also popped up a good amount, just to a lesser degree.
When it came to hockey the local favorites also made lots of appearances, mostly to the benefit of the collections of two guys I loved watching in my younger days. Sergei Fedorov got a great bump to his PC with a cool mix of brands and designs.
Though most of his cardboard appearances here depict him with other teams, Brendan Shanahan also got a nice boost, and there's even a few in the next scan from his tenure in Hockeytown.
The HOF three-time Cup winner, all with Detroit, spent parts of nine seasons as a Wing, but was also known for multiple years with the Devils, Blues, Rangers, and Whalers. What a great trade acquisition he was as Detroit finally ended its Cup drought in '97.
Oh yeah, one Michigan Hockey card did manage to sneak into the pile: an early 2000s base of Mike Cammalleri, a guy who had a nice 15-year career of his own.
Like I said, these were fun to look through and sort into piles for my trading buddies, plus I still have some stacks I may list for trade, we'll see. In the meantime, I recently bought another lot from this same seller--around 300 recent baseball inserts for $50--but probably won't do up a post on them since I only ended up with a single keeper for myself. Some of those did make for nice filler in the 11 trade packages that went out to some of you today, though, so some of you should watch your mailboxes!
Next time you see a post from me I should be into Aprils acquisitions.
