General Forum

Craigslist and other classified ads can be awesome. But for every good experience I respond to a see at least 10 ridiculous ads. Someone local is offering a "RARE" 1989 unopened pack of Bowman baseball cards for $20. In the summer I try to watch for local garage sales on Facebook too. Lots of duds but I've found some pretty cool stuff in the last two years since I got back into collecting. I also regularly check Goodwill and other thrift stores.  

In the summer, I like to be on the lookout for neighborhood garage sales.  Usually there's somebody selling some cards.

when looking at craigslist, eBay, or any other ad, I always get a chuckle when people describe their card lots by weight (i.e. huge box of baseball cards - 18 pounds!)

It sounds like you would enjoy some of the many "lots" of unopened packs on ebay. Being unopened packs, they can still contain rookies and stars. Generally, a "lot" of about 100 cards still in packs and from random years/brands can be had for less than $10. As said before, "right place at the right time" is a big source of huge groups of loose cards though. I've bought several collections over the past decade for around $20 each that included hundreds or thousands of cards. The majority of my NHL cards came from those type of purchases, but I always got some stuff I needed in sports that I do collect.

When my local NASCAR die cast shop closed his retail store in 2010, he gave me every card in the store. It took three trips and the smallest day of new additions to my collection was 990 cards. I had been a customer of his store since 2002. A lot of them were in poor condition but the price was right...I just finally upgraded one of them earlier this month that I'm pretty sure got sqished between the floor and a rolling chair. It was in pretty bad shape, even had a hole in it, but it was still part of my collection because I didn't have a better copy. Now I do.

I can go for unopened packs, and will probably take a stab at those at some point. I need to know when did card companies stop using wax packs that could be resealed? That's still in the back of my mind when buying "unopened" packs blindly from vendors. Even though I hit a jackpot with three packs of 1986 Topps football and found two Jerry Rice RCs, I have also purchased 1981 wax packs and found just about every punter and duplicates of said players in those that has caused me to mistrust anyone who sells them.

As far as being at the right place and right time, when I visited the local shop yesterday, we discussed the economy and how card shops and the like are the first to go when the economy is at its worst. And with only two such stores within our whole multi-million person population, I may have to stand in line to benefit from that situation.

I will try all these (and have checked some out already) and hopefully I get a stash built up and then my hope is to simply collect who I like and then trade to others who desire those cards. One thing I've learned from several of you is that you paid attention in kindergarten when the lesson on sharing was taught.

I will add that by buying many large lots off of Kijiji or Craigs List, I built up my For Trade list to where it is, over 65,000 cards mostly baseball of all years.  It has benefittedme greatly for this site as I have traded for nearly 5000 cards already sending out over 6000. When you add these to those I added to my collection when I first bought the lots, it really adds to the value of the purchase. But yes, it did take much ofmy time to sort through many boxes of cards and then to list them on this site.  Well worth the effort.

Oh I envy being able to spend time "working" with my cards. I enjoy looking at them, sorting them, trading them, etc. I'd be in Heaven if I had just accumulated a couple of hundred random cards ever so often that I have to sift through. Sigh...

Getting duplicates in a pack is not necessarily a sign of dishonesty. Upper Deck in particular was known for this in the 1990s. I once got three copies of the same card in a single pack. 

Billy,

I hope they were all of the biggest name star rookie of that year!

Nope! And what's worse is that I got a stack of duplicates more than 20 cards high but came up 5 cards short on the set from the box...(1995 SP NASCAR) luckily I have been able to complete it since.