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  #1  
Old 03-06-2016, 12:22 AM
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mouschi mouschi is offline
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Default When Your Favorite 90's Insert Costs $43,000

Imagine this:

You are at the counter of your favorite baseball card shop, gazing at all of the boxes of wax packs with tags cut out pieces of neon cardboard displaying the price of each.

Topps? Nah...

Donruss? Maybe next week...

Fleer? Hmmm...

Fleer Ultra? BING!

You grab a handful of packs of 1996 Ultra, hoping and praying to get a gold medallion card of your favorite player.* Or maybe a sweet insert of what favorite player.* What if it were a ... *GASP* Gold Medallion of said sweet insert???

Packs in hand, you rush home in hopes of landing a gold medallion insert of your favorite player.* Knowing you have better odds of hitting a unicorn on your bike on the way home, you still hold out hope.

Fast forward to today, I guess, I never really paid much attention to the odds of pulling these from packs.* While I wasn't particularly a fan of the base design, Ultra had a number of great inserts.

Let's break this down a bit here:* (As I was researching and writing this article, I found an interesting article that had already broken down some of this here, so apparently I'm not the only one who has taken notice of this: http://www.radicards.com/reviews/199...baseball-cards)

- There were both series one packs and series two packs.* Each series had 300 cards.
- The cost per pack was $1.50 each.

Odds of pulling a gold medallion card?

One per pack.* Odds of pulling this Jeter?* 1 per 300 packs.* Working alone at pack busting, that would put you at having to pay $450 to finally land the card of your dreams.* (Don't worry - you could probably make a thousand base sets while you are at it!)



What about this beauty?* 1996 Ultra Thunderclap.* Seeded in 1 of every 72 packs, it is tougher to grab.* Being a 20 card set, it may take you 1,440 packs to hit this bad boy.* Cost?* $2,160.



Let's move to a more difficult insert set.* Hitting Machine!* Beautiful, right? Absolutely.* One of these inserts could be yours at the rate of one every 288 packs.* As this is a 10 card set, you *only* would have to open 2,880 packs to get it.* Cost? $4,320



But what about a Gold Medallion Thunder Clap? At 1 every 720 packs, you are getting near unicorn level here.* With 20 cards in the set, it may take you opening up 14,400 packs to find this card!* Cost?* $21,600.



Last, but not least ... the big daddy.* 1996 Ultra Gold Medallion Hitting Machine.* Personally, I like the design on the Thunder Clap much better, but I can see how these may be more coveted.* These were MUCH more difficult to get.* At 1 out of every 2,880 packs (WHOA!), you To hit your favorite player in this 10 card set, you can expect to open 28,800 packs!!!!* The cost?* $43,200.



I don't know about you, but over 43 grand to open packs to find the card you want is a LOT of money to me.* Could you imagine how long that would take to open 28,800 packs #ifyouarentbrentandbecca* ?* We are talking 345,600 1996 Fleer Ultra cards being opened.* I wonder how many they actually made?

Today, many of these cards are available online, and many of the super stars can be found for $3-40 each (yes, even the Gold Medallion Hitting Machine cards!)* Well ... except for the Griffey.* That one seems to fetch $300-400 nowadays.* But in light of the fact that $43,000 worth of packs had to have been opened to get it, doesn't that seem like a bargain?

Aside from gawking at the cost of how many packs it took to have been opened to find a particular card, the greatest thing that I get out of all of this is a significantly heightened sense of appreciation for the "tough pulls" in my collection.

In 2016, we can easily grab the serial numbered cards out of 25, 10 and even 5 if we are quick enough to eBay once the breakers start to cracking.* There is something special though, about finding cards that were tough pulls from 20 years ago, preBay (see what I did there?) and imagining all the money that exchanged hands and the path it took to get into your collection.* For the player collector of someone in the Hitting Machine Gold Medallion parallel set, just imagine having 1,200 boxes of 1996 Fleer Ultra, and only being able to reasonable expect ONE of your favorite player.

1,200 boxes!

To me, that is diamond mining and the visual of having your man cave stuffed with unopened boxes just to get to the ONE* card you wanted adds much needed significance to a card that otherwise would just be sitting in your box with no significance beyond book value.* It gives each card a fuller story of how it made its way to your collection aside from the usual backstory of "I saw it on eBay, clicked buy it now and it showed up in my mail box 3 days later."

Hopefully this helps give you a new sense of appreciation for your collection again - whether each card was easily found at one per pack, or one per 30,000 packs.
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Old 03-06-2016, 11:41 AM
steve B steve B is offline
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And that's assuming perfect collation/distribution across the entire press run for those packs. Which is far from what happens.

So those dollar amounts are the minimum*

Steve B
*Barring the lucky happening of being on the good end of the odd collation/distribution. I bought a decent quantity of 94 Signature rookies that summer- only a 50 card set which I couldn't complete, and slightly over 50 signatures which I didn't even get close. I kept getting the same *&%) guy - Some Kid in the Yankees system, not even a potential Red Sox player. So I got three Jeter autos.
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Old 03-06-2016, 12:46 PM
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Rookiemonster Rookiemonster is offline
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I recently took a liking to the 1998 topps broaderless refractors . I have no idea what it would cost to get a certain card .

I checked it would cost 17,280 for a certain. Assuming you had no luck at all .

Last edited by Rookiemonster; 03-06-2016 at 01:00 PM.
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Old 03-22-2016, 12:32 AM
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That's why I collect Vintage...
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  #5  
Old 03-23-2016, 12:03 PM
brian1961 brian1961 is offline
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Mouschi---

I thoroughly loved your post. A most thought-provocative commentary of the manufactured rarity world of collecting.

I would have to disagree on one point, my fellow collecting warrior. I usually am an understanding person, with a decent imagination, when it comes to visualizing the sheer amount of money, effort, time, and heightened anticipation in buying packs, boxes, and even cases upon cases of product in the hopes of pulling a rare card of one's hero. I well recognize the chances are extremely slim to virtually none that you will achieve that "ultimate pull". No doubt about it, doing so is a super bowl victory and winning the mvp, in our world.

Where I beg to differ is buying the rare card on eBay, or winning it at auction. I fully agree that procuring the rarity by the latter two methods does not come close to the "in the trenches" costly labor of buying, ripping, and pulling.

However, with my refined comprehension and imagination of the supreme cost, difficulty, and minuscule chances of pulling the white whale, I am able to cherish the card in all its inherent beauty, coupled with the knowledge of what I am holding in my hands and the immense rarity and difficulty of getting the piece initially.

There is a true saying that a man really appreciates what he has had to work hard for, and your scenario fits that to a "t". If I had the 43k to do the diamond mining you describe, I couldn't do it. Again, knowledge, understanding, and imagination save me lots of time, trouble, and the 43k.

I know your hero, Jose Canseco, was at his best prior to when the card companies hit on the idea of the manufactured rarities and relic cards. Be that as it may, I feel his Mother's Cookie cards would be a match, even though a very few dealers offered them back in the day.

Well, enough of my palabre. Again, good post, bro!:d

Last edited by brian1961; 03-23-2016 at 12:07 PM.
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Old 03-23-2016, 12:17 PM
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mouschi mouschi is offline
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Good insight!
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Old 03-23-2016, 10:56 PM
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Section103 Section103 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by steve B View Post
And that's assuming perfect collation/distribution across the entire press run for those packs. Which is far from what happens.
This. Exactly this. And this assumes that certain high value chase cards were even "distributed" in the first place. I can say with certainty that for a different decade, different sport and different brand - your chances of pulling a 1/10 were far less than even a normal calculation would indicate.
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Old 03-24-2016, 05:10 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Section103 View Post
This. Exactly this. And this assumes that certain high value chase cards were even "distributed" in the first place. I can say with certainty that for a different decade, different sport and different brand - your chances of pulling a 1/10 were far less than even a normal calculation would indicate.
I know exactly what you mean, same sport different company. They pulled star player cards and sold them in bulk to large dealers.

I recently opened a sealed wax box of 90 Donruss my brother bough new off the shelf back in the day and did not pull a single star player.
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Old 03-30-2016, 09:28 AM
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mouschi mouschi is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Section103 View Post
This. Exactly this. And this assumes that certain high value chase cards were even "distributed" in the first place. I can say with certainty that for a different decade, different sport and different brand - your chances of pulling a 1/10 were far less than even a normal calculation would indicate.
Who was this? I heard of Upper Deck (i think) selling bulk lots of UD Griffeys and such ... stuff like this happened for a decade? Was this for inserts or? Very curious.
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Old 04-01-2016, 07:18 PM
steve B steve B is offline
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I'd bet on UD. They got caught doing "stuff" at least twice, and somehow always seemed to just get a pass on it.

The first was the high number hockey one year during the era of announcing the sales after the orders had been taken. High number "Canadian" hockey was something like 900 cases, a big deal at the time. The packs had I think a few low numbers and a certain number of high numbers. (Or if I'm getting it backwards, they were all high numbers ) Pretty big deal at the time, and they got expensive quickly. Then someone found some packs at a show that were different in content from the usual ones. Some checking turned up that there had been "some" cases "found" at the plant and released. Like a few thousand more. hmmm.........."found" once the aftermarket got really expensive, and with contents totally different from the original ones.


The more recent one wasn't sports, but some game card that were authorized for. Pokémon? Dragonball? Something of that sort.
Anyway, dad buys kid a special pack at Wall-Mart, special rare foil card guaranteed! Apparently a card going for $60 at the time.
Kid opens the pack looks at the card and asks why it's a fake. Shows dad why it's fake- wrong foiling, wrong copyright, a couple other problems.
Dad complains to the store, the store complains to Treat (A huge repackager)and the rights holder. The rights holder demands to know where Treat got the fake cards......from Upper deck the company authorized to print and sell that licensed property in the US!
UD I think lost that license, but counterfeiting your own cards is pretty messed up. I can only assume they were sold under some description that avoided royalty payments or something.


But it could be any of them, I've had some interesting experiences with blaster boxes, either early for fringe products or late in the production cycle for more popular ones. Like Valor FB having two serial numbered cards per pack when the odds said more like one in 4 ? The loose packs didn't have the extra cards.
The Chipz were similar, two special ones in every pack of 4, loose packs only. I think the odds are for the assumed press run, and if the sales lag the extra stuff goes into retail. Not always, but fairly often the last few years.


Steve B
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