Returning collector and new member -- Where to buy reasonable vintage??

[swarmee]

Originally Posted by ASF123

COMC is dominated by some guy named Dean who will gladly sell you any card for 4x the going price - and apparently they won't ship your cards for 5 months unless you pay an extra fee that gets big if you want more than a few cards.

Use "-dcr" in your searches on COMC to remove all Dean's ungraded card listings. Dean's cards is a company in St Louis that sells those same overpriced cards on their own site (little cheaper there) and eBay.

Yeah, COMC doesn't ship fast unless you pay for expedited services. But they will offer a whole bunch of sales between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Usually there are 2000 different consignors running sale discounts on millions of cards during the BF sales. And you can leave purchased cards on site for years with no fees until you finally decide to ship them.

[DeanH3]

You can still find some nice cards at decent prices via auction style on eBay. It takes some patience. However, I will say if you see something you like, even at a slightly higher price than you'd like, buy it. The regrets I have are the ones I didn't buy. Good luck and welcome back!

[Casey2296]

Welcome.
Greg Morris cards has a good selection and a great reputation, Cleansweep too. Some sellers will have their own specific websites which helps avoid the eBay margin. The smaller auction houses are fun to watch/bid and very informational about the current market, they usually have higher quality items and can be trusted more.

I found I had to be very focused on what I wanted when I got back in so I built a 300 card excel spread sheet with all of the cards I wanted in my collection. It covered 1908-1971 but was very specific in which cards/years/players etc.

I found that helped me not just throw money at stuff, if it wasn't on my list I wasn't bidding/buying. Now the list has changed a bit but it was a good start for me to stay focused.

And this is the best place to hang out and meet great people in the hobby.

[ASF123]

Thanks to all of you for the advice! I like the idea of developing a focused target list...it will be really hard to narrow it down that much though. The few purchases I have made have been of the “Tobacco card with decent eye appeal for $25? Sure, ok” variety. I don’t know enough yet about prewar cards to know which ones I would really want.

On the high end, mid-grade 51B and 52T Mays are definitely on there, but it seems like every listing for one of those is $2000 above the “most recent sale” for the same grade in the PSA database - from like two weeks ago.

I know that SGC and Beckett slabs are in less demand than PSA (the whole grading mafia thing seems pretty absurd to me, but I’m a realist, and the market is still buying PSA for whatever reason). How much is the general price difference between them?

Thanks again for the responses - I’m looking forward to getting to know people here and picking their brains.