We already have a thread on My Best eBay Find, but we don't seem to have anywhere to post any current individual non-sport card purchases not made online. So this thread is for great finds of an individual card or groups of cards discovered in person at hobby stores, shows, garage sales, flea markets, or anywhere else that is not virtual.

I would really like to hear about people's experiences of finding a wanted card or card set when and where it wasn't expected.

I was thinking about this the other day after I came across an old 1991 Imagine deluxe 68 card set entitled Wrestling Legends, which my LHS had dug up somewhere. I know technically Wrestling might be called a sport, but come on, its always been for entertainment and these were the same guys that used to fight every Saturday night on TV back in the day.

So here is a set that I didn't know existed until I saw it laying there, that also happens to include the autographs of eight Wrestling champions, four of whom are deceased. And it was still more than affordable. So who needs an eBay find? Who cares if there is or isn't a big demand? I can appreciate these cards and it's even better that I found them in person when I wasn't even looking.

So that's the idea, I guess. How about some other stories from non-sport card collectors having luck with the good old fashion way of finding treasure.

Ooooh, good call on the non-internet find thread issue!

I would have to think upon this a little more, but off the top of my head, I can think of one great find in particular.

About 8-9 years ago, my husband and I found a few boxes of Twilight Zone: Science and Superstition (which was new at that time) that were being sold by a dealer we had befriended at the Chiller Theatre show in NJ.

We pulled a Ron Howard auto from one of the boxes. We were thrilled.

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Two that stand out in my mind are the Die Another Day Expansion set with costume card I found for £15 at model fair which I couldn't find for reasonable money for years.
My best find was probably the Sophie Marceau WA16 Women of Bond auto card I found for £14.99 at Memorabilia show.

Honourable mention goes to the GoldenEye sell sheet I got for £15 at another Memorabilia show, which are hard to find these days.

Sadly it's really tough to find cards locally anymore, so my best card find story is quite old.

In the mid 90s I was at a baseball card show. . . I picked up a set of Garbage Pail Kids off of a random table. . . It was the only non-sport item I saw at the entire show. As I'm checking out this set a random guy comes over and asks if I'm looking for those type of cards.

Eventually we wound up meeting later on and this guy had a closet full of sealed boxes, and binder after binder of case toppers. . . remember this was the 90s when few people were actually opening cases and case toppers were tough to find. . . The guy had worked at a card distributor and was able to take home all of the case toppers from split up cases.

The guy knew what he had, and basically knew the values, but he just wanted to get rid of everything -- his price was crazy cheap . . . I want to say $600 for everything. At the time I was really broke, so I scraped together as much as I could and bought about a third of what he had. I went back a couple of weeks later to buy more, but someone else had some in and bought him out. I wound up with quite a few boxes, including some rarities like Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I think Twister, and piles of case toppers -- Star Trek Skymotions to Vampirella Gallery holograms most of them in quantity.

quote:

Originally posted by webjon:
Sadly it's really tough to find cards locally anymore.

Yes it is and I don't know how many posts this thread is likely to get, recent or old. But finding cards online is not nearly as sweet as stumbling across an unexpected treasure you can touch.

I'm lucky enough to have a card shop less than a mile from my home, and I've been going there for almost 20 years. I've got lots of packs, boxes and singles there over the years, but one day that stands out was a cold evening in 2001. I had stopped by and bought 3 packs of Star Trek 35th Anniversary. Went out to the car and in the dark, opened the first pack, all base cards. Then the second pack, and I can't believe my eyes, it's a sketch of Bones! My first sketch ever.
Then I open the 3rd pack, and I'm stunned, its a double autograph of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy...

Good ol' long gone LE's Collectibles in Corona, California had a little box of promos cards on the counter from which I found the rare "Two Become One" lenticular promo card from the Skybox "DC Versus Marvel" card set for the princely sum of $2. I still have it nearly 20 years later, and it remains one of my favorite "in person" buys of all-time.

The artist Steranko has always been one of my favorites, so I was delighted when FPG issued a card set devoted to his work in 1995 or so. I asked my local comic/card shop to make sure and get at least of a couple of boxes, one of which I bought the day it came in, and to my everlasting delight, the VERY FIRST pack I opened from that box held one of the rare autograph cards. Still have it. Still love it.

Finally, the 1998 Fleer/Skybox Marvel Silver Age set was, incredibly, not a big hit when originally issued, so towards the end of the year, or perhaps in 1999, I saw a pile of the boxes at a local warehouse show on clearance for only $25 each. I bought several of them (I wish I'd have bought them all, but there were way too many for me to afford). These boxes had one sketch and one autograph card per box. One of the boxes had the Stan Lee autograph along with a Spider-Man sketch by John Romita Sr. in the same box. Stan Lee, of course, is co-creator of Spidey, and Romita, the second artist to draw the Spider-Man comic is also the second greatest Spider-Man artist ever (after only the original artist and co-creator Steve Ditko). That has to be the best $25 I've ever spent on a box of cards, and yes, like the others, I still have those spectacular "hit" in my collection, even though I could easily sell the pair for at least $400. I think there's just something more special about finding cards like those yourself in a box as opposed to buying them as singles. Those cards tend to mean a little more to me.

This was not ebay related, but it was the result of an on line search

Back around 2000 or 01, I was still looking for the rare 1990s "101 Dalmations" Petsmart promo card by Skybox. SW1, I think it is

I did a google search and found a woman in Texas who had a Disney collectibles website. She was selling all sorts of things, but the only card related item was the SW1 !

Turns out she used to work in a Petsmart. She had no idea what the card was

She sold me 10 of them for 50 cents each !!!!

Inkworks Dr Who P2 & P4 $2 each at the 2011 Philly show

That's easy Raven, my best buy was a pig in the poke bought through The Wrapper magazine. Some guy in Canada had a classified ad with different stuff, including something he described as "monster stickers" 22 different for $25. He had a phone number so I called, trying to keep it brief due to long distance fees. He didn't know what series they were from because they were blank backed and didn't have any text or numbers or dates on them. He said they were color drawings so that ruled out everything I could think of (like the 1980s You'll Die Laughing stickers.) What ever they were, I didn't have them, so I risked the $25. Several weeks later I got a packet full of mint Spook Stories stickers, any one of which could cost that much. I was floored, since I never dreamed I could afford to collect those, but with that as my starting point, I eventually did finish that series of 48, one of my faves.

Once picked up a redemption card for Inkworks Lost autographed costume.

Dealer sold it me for 50p as it was expired.

Inkworks honoured it and I sold the card for £75.

I then purchased a ton of cards I wanted.

quote:

Originally posted by wolfie:
Dealer sold it me for 50p as it was expired.

Inkworks honoured it and I sold the card for £75.

I then purchased a ton of cards I wanted.

Worked out very good for you as a customer at the time, but in retrospect it was one of the issues that backfired on Inkworks and its dealers.

Since most expired redemptions were always honored, dealers didn't push to get rid of unsold sealed inventory. When Inkworks unexpectedly folded up nothing could be reclaimed by redemption, but the surprisingly huge volume of cards still in the vault were bulk sold. Inkworks autograph cards flooded the market in the Razor repackaging. Again good for collectors that didn't own them, but bad for collectors that already paid much more for them before.

Every time someone wins, someone else has to lose.

I thought I would revive this thread because I've found some cards this year in a local collectibles store. I was just walking around after visiting a bookstore. None of the finds are earth-shakers but more like nice little pick-ups because you don't see them on Ebay.

One was a SuperStars MusiCards promo (cello) pack I hadn't seen before. I'd seen the "Borden" pack but this one has "On Sale Now" in big letters against a green background (see below). It's the header card along with four regular cards from the set. The pack was $2 so I bought two, one of which I opened to see what's inside.

I also picked up a pair of 4-card Yo! MTV Raps promo (cello) packs for the same price. The cards are just regular ones from the set but I didn't have one and wanted to check to see if any of the cards were promos.

The store had several boxed sets from the 90's (Kitchen Sink issues) and various other hand-collated sets. Leaning against one of the sets was a bunch of cards sealed in a team bag. The front said "Felix III." It didn't look like there were enough cards to be the Felix III (Edition Quasimodo, 1996) regular set and the card showing on the back was actually a card front which I guessed was a promo card. "Felix" is the nom de plume of Reinhard Horst, an artist known for his 50's-inspired pin-up style with his own modern twist. The set was marked at $7 so I took a chance on it, figuring it could be a mixed bag of promo cards many of which I didn't have.

The team bag of cards turned out to be the Felix III 14 card promo set plus the two "Special Artist" cards which are also promos for the set. These cards aren't seen for sale much anymore (the kind of thing you'd find at shows in the late 90's), and yet they still go for only about $2 each.

All in all, I got maybe $35 worth of cards for $15 and I opened two cello-packs not knowing exactly what was inside giving me information to pass along to other collectors.

Jess

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