Quote:
Originally Posted by vintagebaseballcardguy
Ok, you T206 collectors, let me ask you this: do you feel compelled for all of your T206s to reside in a PSA/SGC slab at the time of purchase? Like post war card collectors, I have seen some of you all post pics of your T206 purchases with some slabbed, some not. Much like dealing with the big post war star cards, I would assume the big stars would be slabbed due to concerns over trimming, doctoring, etc. What about the commons? I mean, if you collected 150s how would you handle that? Slabbed or not?
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I know I'm in the minority among T206 collectors, but I prefer to collect them raw, keeping them in toploaders or CardSaver IIs. For one thing, it's almost always possible to get them cheaper that way, and I can put them in plastic pages, hold them in my hand if I want, and display them however I choose. All but a handful of my 250+ T206s are raw, including all of my 30+ Hall of Famers, and in fact I've cracked out a few that were slabbed when I got them. If I want to get some or all of them slabbed at some point down the road, ahead of a sale or whatever, I can do that. Part of this is because I started seriously collecting T206s (and other T cards) in the early 90s, before the grading companies were a major factor. (I know PSA was founded in 1991, but in its early years, as I recall, it was only used for very high-end cards, of the type that were way out of my league.) But I'm also a big advocate of buying the card, not the holder; I look for cards that have good eye appeal but are reasonably priced, and I'm never thinking about a card's resale value, just whether it would look good in my collection. It helps that I have never dealt in the really high-end T206s, having seldom paid more than $100 for a card until just recently. (Though some of the cards I got 15-20 years ago are worth quite a bit more than that now.) If I were to spend $500 or $1000 or more for a card, I might be more inclined to go for a slabbed card, but the TPGs are far from infallible, as most people here know. For the cards I buy and am interested in, my own eyes and experience are enough to evaluate a card.