10/6/23 card show report: cheap boxtober

I'm encouraged by the fact that I was able to get that Facebook Marketplace purchase post up last night so I'm back this evening to see if I can zip my way through another one. Because I'd like to give folks at least a couple days to look over that one and pick out potential trade bait, tonight I'm going to do the same with my show pickups from last Friday.

I continued my standard practice of taking the first Friday of the show off from work despite Michigan not playing until Saturday evening, largely because I feel like I might miss out on some good stuff if I wait a day. So early Friday afternoon I headed out to Taylor and spent around two or two and a half hours digging through lots of boxes. It was certainly worth the effort with the deals available that day. Dime cards were 100/$7 (and even better deals were there if you bought larger quantities but I'd had enough by then) and the next level up was quarter-ish cards at five/$1.

Here's a quick spending breakdown before I get to the scans:

• 100 @ $0.10 each = $10
• 125 @ 5/$1 = $25
• 10 @ 2/$1 = $5
• 7 @ 2$ = $14
• 5 @ 5/$20 = $20

That's $74 and he asked for $70.

Before I left I hit up the vintage guy I check out once in a while and grabbed eight of his $3 cards that go eight for $20. That means I left having spent $90 on some 255 cards--not bad!

Here we go with some trade bait. Please make your requests via comment/email/TCDb offer as always.

UD Finite rookies /1299; Moments & Milestones /150.

More M&Ms /150.

The rest of the /150 M&Ms, plus a Black parallel /25. The Studio Stars inserts aren't SNed but look awesome.

Bonds /10,000; Brown /2000; Ensberg /2006; Giles /150; King /3499; Reynolds /500. 
Ayanbadejo /1000; Denson, Huard, and King /2999; Graham /399; Hali /999; Mason /2009; McNown /2500; Moore /2010.

Moreau /2000; Redman /2500; Stith /1500; Westbrook is a Promo; Williams /500.

Pettis, Schaub, and Shiancoe /999; Stith /1500; Williams /999.

And now we get to my keepers:

These six items are among the eight I snagged from the vintage guy for $20. I'm very short on Bunning Tigers cards (and Yankee Killer Lary as well), Cash is always a winner, and the quartet of '74 Topps Stamps was too cool to pass up, especially since it added a new Freehan to my collection.

The dimes and $0.20 cards were as good to my collection as they were to the piles of trade bait I'm building. A numbered Bondo, a new Grandy, another Griffey for the set from which his card hails, Mr. Padre, the Professor, a sweet acetate Manning, and three of the four new Cals I added that day.

A numbered Pudge for under a buck? Yes, please! Not only did I hit all four of Griffey/Gwynn/Maddux/Ripken, but I also got both blog namesakes too in Grandy and JV. Cecil looks cool in UD holo form. Ripken and Ozzie were All-Star stalwarts. And my first relic of Skubal, who put on an ace-like performance to end the 2023 campaign, is a 2021 jersey from A&G for just $2!

I didn't skip the other sports either, coming up with a sweet acetate Iggy plus a $2 signature of former star Trey Burke. That was such a nice deal I added a second one to send Jeff's way (since that's exactly what he would have done for me). It's just my second autograph of his among seven hits so I thought it was a particularly good score.

As for football, I came up with a couple more of those Donruss Premium Press Proofs, and I'll have to see how close I am to a team set at this point, but it was cool that they were RC parallels of Haskins and Ojabo. Law is a 2000s Ultra Gold Medallion, Funchess represents yet another sweet acetate insert, and we finish up with a final parallel, an Elite Pink, to add to Ojabo's growing collection.

I don't know how often my favorite seller will have those dime and $0.20 boxes but I've really been enjoying the time I've spent digging through them for gems so I hope to see them at upcoming shows.

Anyway, as usual, I hope you enjoyed a recap of my show experience, and I'll remind y'all one more time to please feel free to stake claims to some of the trade bait above!

As for me, besides packing up some envelopes soon, I think I may go back to the blogger trades I need to cover, then sprinkle in some eBay pickups and more TCDb transactions.

2/4/23 card show report: We Bought a Dime Box!

Considering I'm planning on heading to my monthly show tomorrow, tonight's probably a good time to get the cards I brought home from February's posted and recapped!

A few weeks ago I headed to Taylor as I usually do once a month for my favorite show. This time there was a twist, though. Not only did my usual seller have an assortment of dime boxes to peruse, but he had a sign near them offering them up for $25 each! That definitely piqued my interest. I didn't immediately jump on that, though, and I took a while compiling 50 cards from those boxes plus nine from the $2-or-3/$5 selection.

It felt like kind of a waste to head home with just 59 cards for $20, though, so I checked with the seller about the dime box offer. Did he care if I built one dime box out of the six or eight or so that were there? "Do whatever you need to do," he replied. I made sure not to take advantage of that by stuffing the hell out of one of the 3200-count boxes, plus I had no intention of spending an hour-plus filtering out specific cards. Basically I tried to grab handfuls of what looked good from each box, focusing mainly on baseball with some football along for the ride.

In the end I was happy with what I put together, which you can kind of see for yourself in the image above. It worked out to a bit more than two rows of baseball, a bit more than one of football, plus maybe half or slightly more than one row of basketball that I didn't notice. The dude let me fold the 50 dime cards I'd grabbed earlier into that box, so my total was $25 for that plus $15 for the nine two-buck cards I'd grabbed. I returned home to the fun of flipping through that box.

And fun it was! I pulled a few things for myself and lots for others which will be heading out in trade packages. Nothing extremely valuable, not that I expected there to be, but I got my money's worth in useable cards and entertainment value, that's for sure. It's possible I'll list some of what isn't already earmarked for others on TCDb, such as solid groups of recent Topps flagship and Heritage commons, but even if I don't I'm satisfied with what I pulled.

Here's a quick look at my keepers from the dime and $2 boxes:

The baseball content included a new Heritage Cronenworth for me plus a few former Tigers, one of those appearing in a Detroit uniform. Subsequent runs through the box produced two more for my collection: another Scherzer (also as a Met) plus an Indians card of Victor Martinez, a guy I don't go out of my way to collect but whose cards I do keep.

The dime box produced four new basketball items for me in former Wolverines Caris LeVert (x2), Jordan Poole, and Duncan Robinson. '20'-'21 Donruss was the most prominent set from the basketball group and I'm considering putting those up on TCDb if I think they'll generate a few trades. Meanwhile the McGary jersey of course came out of the $2 box and it looks nice with a die-cut design and solid blue swatch. That's my fifth relic and eighth overall hit of McGary.

Switching over to football, a couple transfers were the stars here. My original perusal of the dime boxes while at the show produced the pair of Thomas Rawls (who transferred to Central Michigan) cards, and after I scanned everything I came up with one more base card of the RB not seen here. Ex-Patriot Chase Winovich was a fun find as well on a solid Donruss design. And GOAT DB Charles Woodson adds to his lofty PC total (TCDb says 331) with a select base card from a couple years ago.

The $2 box supplied the rest you see here, including my first two hits of transfer TE Devin Asiasi, who was a great recruit that headed home to UCLA after spending the 2016 season in Ann Arbor. New England took him in the third round in 2020 and he caught one TD pass for them later that year. After a single appearance in 2021 the Bengals picked him up and he got in 12 games this past season, catching a pair of passes.

I believe both autographs you see from 2020 Panini Illusions were together in the $2 box, an exciting find for me because I previously had zero hits of him to my name and I'm making more of an effort to track down certified autographs of any former Michigan Football players I can. The card in the dead center of the scan is the base version of the Rookie Signs insert and is numbered /199 while to its right you see the Black version which is numbered /50. These additions make the single-season Wolverine member #238 of my UM Football PC.

And last up is a solid looking relic of highly ranked WR Nico Collins, who left college having not seen as many targets as he deserved, only to be stuck with the Texans and their abysmal QB options. He's seen here on a rookie year 2021 Panini Playbook jersey card that counts as his fourth relic in my PC and fifth hit overall.

Barring unforeseen circumstances I should be heading back to Taylor tomorrow having opted against going today due to a snowstorm that currently has it looking beautiful outside, if not conducive to safe driving. I don't expect to be bringing another dime box home but you never know! I look forward to seeing if I get any further value and entertainment out of that and in the meantime hopefully I'll have more great items to include in upcoming trade envelopes after tomorrow afternoon.