Quote:
Originally Posted by mechanicalman
Oh I agree with you. I think what Goudey did was downright deceitful. At least Topps has the odds of finding hits on their box, much like the odds you see when playing McDonald’s Monopoly or a scratch-off.
The problem with this site is some folks try to make statements and other dudes read into them and assign value judgements to them. I don’t remember anyone arguing that one was good and honest and one was horrible. My personal argument was that they were motivated by different underlying dynamics, and therefore, not directly comparable.
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I’ve watched kids in card shops and card shows rip open a pack, flip through the cards, and throw away the entire contents of the pack just because there was no autographed, diamond encrusted, jersey card with MLB logo on it. It appears to me that these hidden inserts have become the entire hobby, and base cards are just pack-filler. I think this difference alone is enough to put the Goudey comparison to rest. One sleezy gum company completely left a card out of a set 85 years ago. No one here is saying that’s ok, but I don’t see how it relates to the current state of modern cards. Those kids bought more packs in efforts to complete their sets, not in search of a 1/1 card that they hoped would pay for college. At worse, they ended up with a duplicate and a fresh piece of gum. The motivations of the collectors were far different, irrespective of the motivation of the card company, which is always money.
I think this Jordan card is particularly annoying to the vintage collector because there doesn’t seem to be anything really special about the card other than rarity. It’s not a rookie, or even an early Jordan card. It’s not from an all-time set. It’s not autographed. It’s not some spectacular image. It’s just a card that a company printed 10 of. That’s it. You can’t blame a collector for imagining all of the amazing cards they could buy with that money, and being stunned that someone would spend it on this rare, if unspectacular Jordan card. I’m sure that vintage guys grumble when an LBJ rookie sells for crazy money, but they will usually conceed that a 1/1 LBJ rookie is a special card. This Jordan just leaves some heads scratching.