General Forum

The hardest card for me was trying to find a decent Sandy Koufax Rookie Card. I was never able to find one. The best purchase that I ever made was purchasing one of only 755 in existance from the Decathlon Home Run Series of Hank Aaron. I saw it in a Toronto Card show in the early 1990s and decided that it was a very nice item to add to my then personal collection. This is one item that I'm going to hang onto for at least another 10-15 years before I even think of selling it.

Kevin

1909-11 T206 Ambrose Puttman. He was the last card I needed for the common player in that set and took me 6 months to find it.  Seemed like E-bay had a boycott on that card I bought the first one that came up once people started listing him again

I was looking for the 2004 Topps Fan Favorites Jake Scott Auto from the year the set came out until last year and never saw one.  Granted, it's limited to 90 copies but I'd seen lower print run cards over my time searching.  Finally last year one came up on eBay and I was ready to go after it.  Despite going WAY over what it's listed for in Beckett, I still lost the auction at the last minute. Then 5 minutes after the auction ended, my phone rang.  My brother called to tell me that he got everyone in the family to go in together to get it for me for Christmas!  This is going to be my all time favorite set with an amazing story.

Yep.  "The ones I haven't found."  The most confusing one for me is one once listed as Piniela  2009 Topps Walmart and Target variations #410.  Now just Topps Black #410.  As opposed to Topps Black Sn 53 #410.  Have the Sn'd card.  Can't figure out or find the "Topps Black."  Ebay, COMC, everywhere no luck..  7 years +.

Yes.  This is a cry for help.

Fritts

I can think of a few cigarette cards from the early 1900's. Generally it's a case of buying complete sets or poor quality singles on places like eBay.

Of the many things I collect, there are many things that I have that fall into the "rare but no known value/no market" category.

For cards it would be a 1895 triple folder tobacco card that I had bought for $1 at a rummage sale, and then sent to SGC for grading. It was so rare that I could not actually find what set it belonged to. It was identified by the people at the old network54 non-sports forum and those people had said that the only info was in the old catalogs that you had to have a subscription for. Once it was identified, mine was only the 2nd graded and potentially the 3rd known to exist. But there is no market and no sales history for that card so it has no actual value other than $19 (the price I paid plus cost to grade).

There are other things, such as the un-numbered proof or replacement cards from Pacific that came out of their bankruptcy auction. To this date I have yet to find any "duplicates" of the ones that I had acquired, especially not any of the 02-03 Pacific Nights SE which would be the easiest to identify.