I have not collected Marvel cards since the 1990s but I saw on line people complaining about recent Marvel sets where the box price upon initial release was $500 and another from a few years ago that was $900. Is this possible ?

quote:

Originally posted by Tommy C:
Is this possible ?

Yes.

And if you think that's ridiculous, there are boxes of new sport card product going for $1,500 and up. It would seem like you can't even make up an amount that's impossible anymore, but you have to realize that this is not card collecting when it gets to this level. This is high-stakes gambling for the people who buy and sell this stuff regularly.

Yeah, there was that craze last year for a certain Wemby rookie that was a 1/1 refractor. People were buying cases of whatever had that just for a small chance of getting that card. Everything else was garbage!! I don't know if that ever surfaced. I didn't keep up with that.

quote:

Originally posted by catskilleagle:
Yeah, there was that craze last year for a certain Wemby rookie that was a 1/1 refractor.

It's funny how basketball, having the smallest team roosters, may have the biggest card gamblers of all the pro sports. And it's always on the rookie cards that have a relic, or autograph, or some 1/1 refractor from a super expensive box.

Wemby didn't come out of the championship final series covered in glory, so he's a bit tarnished at the moment. Everybody wants Jalen Brunson now, but his rookie was back in 2018-19 when he was with the Dallas Mavericks. It wasn't until 2022 that he shows up on a card in a Knicks uniform.

Still his 2018 Panini Choice Nebula rookie apparently sold a few days ago for $312,000 in a Fanatics Collect auction. That's a new record for his cards and it shows why Fanatics bought up Topps. They are involved in all aspects of selling licensed pro sport clothing, memorabilia, cards and collectibles.

I am old enough to recall 1995 when nearly all new boxes were $ 40. Later that year when SkyBox released the Disney Premium at $ 85, that was considered to be outrageous

quote:

Originally posted by David R:
I am old enough to recall 1995 when nearly all new boxes were $ 40. Later that year when SkyBox released the Disney Premium at $ 85, that was considered to be outrageous

I can remember $20 boxes, but at that time there wasn't a "hobby box" label, and you could actually buy individual packs from open boxes. Geez, I'm going back to when I was kid for that, but I'm thinking that card stores and comic shops were still selling cards by the pack well into the 90's.

The argument about pack buyers vs box buyers only got decided about 20 years ago when opening boxes of new product in hobby stores just stopped. You bought the box or nothing. Card manufacturers began constructing product for box buyers. Now of course it's the same argument, only its box buyers vs case buyers and manufacturers are formulating for case construction. Next step is construction for only multi-case buyers. At that point most of the card collectors will have moved on to something else, I'm sure.

I've actually quit busting packs/boxes and am just buying individual cards off eBay now. Recently I sprung for a couple of boxes of "Fraiser" and that will probably be all for this year. It was fun, but I didn't get anything I couldn't have got for less.

I don't know about Disney, but when sealed boxes crossed the $80 retail price was when I stopped sampling titles. Then the big mainstream titles all became premium cards and they crossed the $100 mark. At that point I became selective to only a couple of releases. Now SRP is $160 on average and high-end non-sport can be $250 - $300 and going up. It's not even I question of whether I have the money or not. How can I justify spending that much on brand new manufactured cards that are blindly bought? I can't and that ends that.

Yes, you could still buy packs going into the late 90's and early 2000's but you were getting into a time when comic shops cut back on selling cards. I recall one store having those Marvel boxes that had Sketchagraphs. I should have tried for one of those then.

One local shop found some old boxes in storage a couple of years ago so that that place has gone back to selling cards by the pack (Close Encounters for something like $7.50/pack and some 90's stuff). It also has some 90's Marvel chase cards in a display case for about $8 each. Some of those might be good deals if you want them but you can get a lot of that kind of thing for $4-5 each with free shipping on Ebay.

You can still find relative deals on boxes from time to time. You need to jump on them quick because they can go right back up in price.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:

quote:

Originally posted by David R:
I am old enough to recall 1995 when nearly all new boxes were $ 40. Later that year when SkyBox released the Disney Premium at $ 85, that was considered to be outrageous

I can remember $20 boxes, but at that time there wasn't a "hobby box" label, and you could actually buy individual packs from open boxes. Geez, I'm going back to when I was kid for that, but I'm thinking that card stores and comic shops were still selling cards by the pack well into the 90's.

The argument about pack buyers vs box buyers only got decided about 20 years ago when opening boxes of new product in hobby stores just stopped. You bought the box or nothing. Card manufacturers began constructing product for box buyers. Now of course it's the same argument, only its box buyers vs case buyers and manufacturers are formulating for case construction. Next step is construction for only multi-case buyers. At that point most of the card collectors will have moved on to something else, I'm sure.

I've actually quit busting packs/boxes and am just buying individual cards off eBay now. Recently I sprung for a couple of boxes of "Fraiser" and that will probably be all for this year. It was fun, but I didn't get anything I couldn't have got for less.

in 1993 to 1997 Pete's cards and Comics would dump Comic Images 48 pack boxes per box! I was looking up some of the box prices for fun on eBay and was laughing at what people are charging now!

Oh, the good ole days when a box of 36 Star Wars S1 cards at Dart Drug or G.C. Murphy's was just $5.40. Boxes of Wacky Packages were just $2.40 for a box of 48. I had a paper route with the local Potomac News paper and it funded my collecting back then. Baseball, the early 90's did see box prices in the low twenties until 1993 Finest came out. Even UD was a bit more, but for Flagship Topps, they were on the cheap.

Today it's really hard to buy boxes at the prices they are at. People at one point were paying upwards of $440.00 per box for Stranger Things Season 5. Outside of pulling a Millie Bobby Brown auto, why? Every box is pretty much a loss, ROI is so poor these days. Gamblers/Addicts and new money (uneducated as far as the hobby goes) from the pandemic have prices soaring. Those folks really ran up prices since they would pay pretty much any price, especially for Pokemon. Sad part, the money is still there today, so prices remain too high.

I relegated myself to buying mostly singles now. But if I happen to find a box/boxes on the cheap, I will buy. My last box purchase was several boxes of 2026 Harry Potter Aura for $86.00 a box and 2025 Harry Potter Cosmos for $64.00 a box. I did get in on a case of Thor: Love & Thunder last Thanksgiving for $640 for the case. I also did a case of Alien 3 on E-Pack for $421.33 several weeks ago when they were blowing them out. Passed on the two X-Files sales, but only because I didn't have extra funds.

Someone was commenting on Facebook that with one of these $ 900 per box Marvel sets that a common base card was going for at least $ 20. What is even more offensive is that with many of these high end sets, you could even purchase a case of boxes and not be able to assemble a base set. Insane.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:

quote:

Originally posted by catskilleagle:
Yeah, there was that craze last year for a certain Wemby rookie that was a 1/1 refractor.

It's funny how basketball, having the smallest team roosters, may have the biggest card gamblers of all the pro sports. And it's always on the rookie cards that have a relic, or autograph, or some 1/1 refractor from a super expensive box.

Wemby didn't come out of the championship final series covered in glory, so he's a bit tarnished at the moment. Everybody wants Jalen Brunson now, but his rookie was back in 2018-19 when he was with the Dallas Mavericks. It wasn't until 2022 that he shows up on a card in a Knicks uniform.

Still his 2018 Panini Choice Nebula rookie apparently sold a few days ago for $312,000 in a Fanatics Collect auction. That's a new record for his cards and it shows why Fanatics bought up Topps. They are involved in all aspects of selling licensed pro sport clothing, memorabilia, cards and collectibles.

American football and baseball hadn't been especially popular outside of the USA, while basketball has been popular worldwide for decades, making for a larger card buying market for NBA cards internationally.

The popularity of Shohei Ohtani in baseball has led to a rapid across the board increase in the prices of MLB cards over the past few years, too.

The NFL has been holding 6-7 games per year outside of the USA, which helps a bit, but football cards have probably been the most reasonably priced of the trio up until now since the vast majority of sales remain US-based buyers. I say until now, because Topps/Fanatics has reacquired the NFL license (after Topps lost it around 12 years ago), so those boxes will soon cost more now, too.

Alas with my collecting going back to the sixties when buying cards in packs was the only unless the store keeper had one of those machines that dispensed single cards at 1d along with either gum or some other confectionery. I still remember the look on the shopkeepers face when I asked to have the complete box when buying Barratt and Monty boxes in the eighties. We had a fellow collector who managed to get himself a "trade buyers" card enabling him to buy boxes from the local confectionery wholesaler.

quote:

Originally posted by JOHN LEVITT:
Alas with my collecting going back to the sixties when buying cards in packs was the only unless the store keeper had one of those machines that dispensed single cards at 1d along with either gum or some other confectionery. I still remember the look on the shopkeepers face when I asked to have the complete box when buying Barratt and Monty boxes in the eighties. We had a fellow collector who managed to get himself a "trade buyers" card enabling him to buy boxes from the local confectionery wholesaler.

Back in the 60s, the only cards I used to collect came in packets of PG Tips tea. I remember at school, one teacher used get pupils to stand up at the front of the class with cards they wanted to trade. Nostalgia is a wonderful pastime

Kevin

I have recently been trying to reorganize by Tea Card collection which are mainly in cigarette card size albums where the smallest card is approx. 70mm x 40mm and so far i have 13 of these albums just for Brooke Bond cards. Each of these albums contain between 300-400 cards. I don't have all the sets but it could be as many as 5000 when I include all the overseas sets. I know that in April this year Mark Knowler published a book containing images of all the UK cards which he states are over 3,200. It also includes images of the Albums and set completion forms. He has his own website teacards.com

regards

John

Prices aren't the only thing getting out of hand. So are runaway parallel sets, making obtaining a base set cost prohibitive. Here's an article on three such recent monster sets that employ that technique...

https://www.monsterwax.com/TooExpensiveMonster.html

quote:

Originally posted by monsterwax:
Prices aren't the only thing getting out of hand. So are runaway parallel sets, making obtaining a base set cost prohibitive. Here's an article on three such recent monster sets that employ that technique...

https://www.monsterwax.com/TooExpensiveMonster.html

I'm not quite sure what that article is trying to say. I get the point that some base sets can be too big and the inclusion of parallel cards in packs can make completion even more of a multi-box expense. But not all products are like that, RA still has a full base set in most boxes. Plus isn't harder premium base sets what card collectors were asking for anyway?

Collectors weren't satisfied when a base set and dozens of dups came out of every box because the set had no value. Dealers and flippers were dumping base sets at less than $15 because they had piles of them. The value of the box was hinging almost entirely on the hits because no one was piecing together the parallels or insert cards either. You can't have it both ways. An easy to complete set that also sold for a lot of money.

The kicker is that even the hard to make, multi-box base sets that were expected to have good value did not get it because no one wanted to spend $300 on a base set. So they weren't dumped for $15, they were dumped for $30. Meanwhile the cost of each multi-box product was 3 times the cost of that old box with a complete set. The improved and more valuable base set was actually reducing the percentage of content value to box cost.

So why blame card manufacturers when they are only responding to what card collectors said they wanted? Until they saw that they shut themselves out of completing anything and didn't want to buy the whole because then it was out of their price range of course. This falls under the category of be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

As for the article, why are they even mentioning product like Horror Legends Masterpieces, which is pretty much the same as Hollywood Legends Masterpieces? There is no base set to speak of with either one. They both are a collection of 1/1 sketch cards, some with autographs and some just the sketch. Do they mean to buy one of every artist? That's not a base set either.

I like those two products for individual card buying a lot. The quality of art is all over the place and some sketches look nothing like the subject. Some are decent and a few are really very good. The autographs are supposed to be guaranteed, although many are cuts that don't blend to well with the sketch. There is enough there for any autograph or sketch collector to find something they like at a reasonable price to match the box cost, which you really shouldn't buy blind because the risk is too high that you won't like the sketch quality or subject.

Still none of that has anything to do with a base sets or parallel cards and I don't know why it comes up in that article.