Early 80s wax question
 

For early 80s donruss and fleer boxes how was the collation? Is there a lot of risk in buying boxes that are not FASC because they have been cherry picked?

I don't have personal experience opening any of these boxes, but this video should give you an idea of what you might expect, certainly from 1981 Donruss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvOXhb-9FE

LOL that video is hilarious.

Jabs sucks.

The early 81 Donruss were awful. The first shipment my local dealer got in had packs with 11 of the same card .. every pack. Not so bad for the one kid who got 11 Yaz cards, not good for his friend who got 11 checklists.
They sent those back.

The replacements were a lot better, but finding two of the same card was still a thing.

I don't think the wax of either Fleer or Donruss in 81 had a sequence. Donruss might have much later in the year, and it's possible Fleer had one. But that usually wasn't done with wax packs.
The cellos from Topps were sequenced by the people who opened loads of them. I don't recall when I started seeing ads offering to sell the info. Probably 81 or 82? I know I did the Coke/Brighams Red Sox in 82 when a friend got me a whole box. And that I'd gotten the idea from an ad. (Yaz was only on the inside of packs, and I wanted to know for sure which ones. )

Wow that box was crazy.

In my experience at the time, the packs were barely sealed. I know for a fact that some dealers would strip a 86D wax box of any Cansecos. They would also sometime place a "seeded pack" on top when there were a lot of customers around to generate buzz, since at the time the belief was 'one canseco, many canseco's.'

I do not know about other years, but the 1983 Fleer had a sequence. In 1983 I bought a case and opened every wax pack. I wrote down the sequence and could tell you every card in the pack just by seeing the top card. This same sequence was also for cello packs which was much easier since you could see the top card but not on the wax.
Bob

That's probably a bit harsh, no?

I love it when he goes through older boxes - he did a 1978 Topps Cello box rip that really brought me back.

He also travels around visiting and profiling local brick and mortar card shops which is good for the businesses (he highlighted the one close to me a few months ago, and they told me they'd seen an increase in business since).

I have no use for the modern stuff he does (which is most of what he does), but still. He purchased an very nice complete set of 1951 Bowman at the National and I just watched him do a faux "rip" where he'd inserted each card into plain white envelopes and randomized all 324 (with "redemption" cards for the slabbed Mantle and Mays).

No, not harsh at all.

If you look into more stories about Jabs, you will see that the guy absolutely sucks. This goes beyond just ripping packs.

Wow - I've done some looking and I have to admit, it sounds like you're right. Personally, it does seem like he's lost his life to this machine he's created, which is sad.

On the breaking side, I saw the break he did with the '79 box - I knew quickly they were all from the same sheet so all the people, and him, complaining that BBCE had given him a searched box was hard to take.

What about taking foul balls with his long contraption away from kids?

Then selling them as game used?

Won't even touch his personal life issues that he brought into his breaks.

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Jabs is a stain on humanity


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Or how about the 1972 BBCE OPC box that he ripped that ended up being a gum stained disaster (who knew that could happen?!) and then blaming BBCE for it and demanding a refund?

Jabs sucks.

I watched that one too. These breaks can be fun to watch but you have to know it's like playing the lottery and you might get burned.

During the 1979 box break when the commenters were about to take up torches and pitchforks and storm the gates at BBCE, I posted something like "if this box had been cut just from the Ozzie Smith sheet, and produced 7 or 8 mint Ozzies, I doubt people would be saying that BBCE got hosed and Jabs should pay him a little extra something".

The early Fleer cards are almost always perfectly collated. Fleer did a great job of getting you most of the set in a box.

I opened enough of the Fleer boxes to say they were good and 1981 Donruss was hilariously bad. You could get 10-16 of the same card in the box and multiple of that occurance

They did improve but it took a couple of years. About 10 years ago I opened a 1982 Donruss box and got 5 Ripken RC's out of the box but none of them were even centered better than 70/30. Distribution in that box was more like the 2nd go round of 81. Took till about 1984 to get better on their collation

Rich

And I think that 1981 Fleer vending boxes were set up in an A-B-C-D pattern that would get you 3 complete sets out of one set of 4 boxes.

Exactly as I remember it. Bought many unopened boxes of 1981 cards in 1981. Fleer had great collation and Donruss was terrible. I think I got 3 boxes and was not even close to a complete set.


This is also what I have heard.

Mike

That's entirely true. I spent a couple afternoons making up sets for the local shop from the "set/vending" case. Got a few dollars in trade value.

As a Cub fan, I remember opening the first two boxes of 81 Donruss and getting ONE Cub - the manager. It was common to get duplicates in the same pack. I would be leery of opening it today as the paper is thin, and the gum was gooey. I could see it bleeding thru 4-5 cards.

Just watched the posted video, yup, that’s 81 donruss. I still like the set, warts and all. Brings back good memories since the pics were mainly from Chicago.

Donruss to me back then were "exotic." They weren't in every store, and I wasn't familiar with the company. Topps was Topps of course, and Fleer produced those sticker sets in previous years which I bought when the drug store was out of Topps. But Donruss was a whole new thing. 1981 was a pile of hot garbage, but 1982 was outstanding, if overproduced.

I remember some of the non-sport cards Donruss put out in the late 70’s - seemed to be a lot of car-themes. I’m right across the lake from Chicago and couldn’t always find them. They got the license late, so went with any old picture I guess. Funny as in 82, a lot of fleet’s pics were bad compared to Donruss. I’ve been working on early signed Donruss sets, emphasis on the 84 (down to 40).

That would be down to the printer and art departments.

One of the photographers that sold pics to Fleer was a customer at the local card shop. His stuff looked good. Sort of sorry I didn't try to get some pics from the same photo shoots or something. I forget if he just sold the whole roll to them and they used what they wanted or if he sent contact prints and they bought only a few.