What cards did you get for a steal, although you didn't realize it at the time?

[abothebear]

I bought a 30s R card lot in order to get a few Gold Medal Foods cards I needed to complete my set. I paid $126 dollars for it, which is the most I have ever spent on a single card purchase. But I was fairly confident I could sell some of the cards and mitigate the cost. And that definitely proved true. I got the last Gold Medal card I needed - a tough-to-find Firpo Marberry, and was able to upgrade four others in the set and sell the duplicates. I sold about half the remaining cards at the time and recovered my cost. But I wish I still had them. The condition on these cards was prisitine for R cards, and I probably should have gotten them graded. I still have some of the bigger cards from the group. All told, if the market remains, I probably got 15X the value out of that lot.

To sum up according to the point of the original post, the surprise of it was two-fold, some of the cards included in the lot ended up being better players and more rare issues than I thought. And the superior condition of all of the cards was something I didn't realize was as big of a deal as it was until recently.

[Ronnie73]

In October 2015, I bought a T206 Jack Powell with an Old Mill back. It was just another card for my master front/back set. I paid $65. Some time in 2018, I was searching my card backs for EPDG's, because someone here on Net54 had asked if anyone had a certain EPDG back print flaw. My cards are in alphabetical order, so I had to skip through the backs until an EPDG back came along. Nearly all my cards are off backs. So, as I was quickly passing the other backs, I stopped at an Old Mill back, because it just looked different. It turned out to be a Blue Ink Old Mill back. Even after all these years, I still haven't gone back and checked my other Old Mill backs. I have 240 Old Mill's, but only 46 of them are from print group one, which are where the Blue Old Mill's can be found. So I had the card for about 3 years, before noticing the variation.

[puckpaul]

Agree with the prior post that just about anything vintage i bought years ago could qualify, though I will go with this one as a steal. It surely was a nice card, but never expected even mid-grade versions to appreciate anywhere near as they have. Paid $100 raw for this at a show in the late 90’s. Had it graded a few years ago.