Weekend Pickups (Part 1)

This past Saturday, I went to a local town-celebration day as I do every year with the intention of grabbing some lunch, exploring with 20youksox, and picking up some cards. There are usually several contingencies of folks selling items around the center of town. Among the items being sold, generally speaking, are your garden-variety junk wax boxes, along with the occasional mix-ins of little gem treasures which are either inhumanely overpriced or incredibly cheap.

Just to give you some perspective on the wide array of prices along the spectrum, I once bought a 2007 Ultra Josh Hamilton Lucky 13 RC for a pretty $0.50. The lowest I've seen the card selling for as a BIN is here. Then on the other end of the table, a lady was attempting to sell your prototypical late-80's junk wax complete set for $50. Not exactly the most price-aware sellers.

In addition those sellers, however, is a dealer who has been a staple in my card collecting journey since early on in my life. Every August, I'd wait with anticipation to arrive at the table, knowing that each year brought an entirely unique experience. He always had team bags full of 50 cards or so for 50 cents, and then some for a dollar. He had varieties of unopened packs from the 80s and 90s, some being your average junk packs and others being pretty unique.

Take this pretty incredible find as case 1A, an unopened 1996 Pinnacle promotional pack issued by Denny's with the purchase of every Grand Slam meal, which yielded this unique card. I'd heard about the food-issued hologram set, and knew that someday I'd like to have one for my own collection...I just never knew I'd find the unopened packs containing them.

If the previous find was case 1A, this is certainly case 1B: a 1995 Studio Chipper Jones. The card is brilliantly engineered like a credit card, all the way down to the laser signature on the back. It was the front card on the acetate team bag featured for 50 cents featuring a medley of various cards. I knew it was certainly worth shelling out a couple of quarters.

Another team bag, this one for a dollar, featured a 2012 Dustin Pedroia Topps Hertiage need for my Pedroia PC. Again, I knew it would be worth the price. Of course, when it came time to pay after I accumulated several other wants, I ended up paying a flat rate or everything of 5 dollars.

I had so much money left, I decided to dig through his quarter bin. What it yielded was incredible.

This is a yet-to-be-completed page from my Throwback PC. All of the cards are ones I had picked up over the weekend at one point or another. The ones I'm featuring I all snagged on Saturday. The set is brilliant; it's an insert subset from 2001 Topps Heritage, which features player painted in their respective teams classic or throwback duds. All of em were only a quarter a piece, and I knew they'd find a great home in my binder.