Good timing

Sometimes it seems like just about every card collector but me, has a story of buying (or being gifted) something on the cheap that then shot up in price shortly thereafter.

I know that I own some cards that bought back in the 90's that have drastically gone up in price in recent years, but something increasing in value over 25 years isn't quite the same as buying a card that increases in value by 1000% two weeks after it's purchase. Granted, cards shooting up in price by ten-fold overnight is a relatively new phenomenon, but still, everybody has their stories.

It's entirely possible that this has happened to me in the last few years, and I just didn't know it. I've never been a prospector, and certainly never gone out of my way to collect rookies, but maybe up until two years ago when I was still set collecting, I bought a set need from a dime box, and then it went up in price over the next couple of years? I don't think that this ever happened, but if did, I didn't, and still don't, know about it, and therefor have no story to tell... or do I?

I think part of the problem too is that usually once I acquire something, I don't ever go look it up at a later date to see if it's selling for more than I paid for it. I've seen some folks on the Twitter who seem to be rather obsessive about this sort of thing, which is fine for them, I guess; it's just not the way I'd prefer to spend my extra time. That being said, I did unintentionally, while recently looking through a seller's auctions on eBay, come across a card that I had bought not that long ago, which at the time was on the verge of selling for considerably more than I had paid for mine.

I can't recall exactly when it happened, but sometime in the last two years, somebody, somewhere, decided that every single Marvel card ever made, needed to now be graded. And as per usual, the boom crowd agreed. Prices on all things Marvel shot up in price seemingly over night, and while a lot of the 90's base cards (which were printed in the millions) have started to fall back to earth, a lot of the inserts and parallels are still selling for much more than they used to. 

I'd be lying if I said that I saw this trend coming, but I'm not one for seeing what the masses will or won't be doing, so it was just by happenstance, that I decided to splurge on an item that I had wanted for a long time, just days before the Marvel prices went bonkers.

Prior to the boom, the Gold Holofoil chase cards from 1994's Marvel Masterpieces, had spent years selling in the $10-20 range. Given how the gold's could only be found in jumbo packs, and that jumbo packs weren't evenly dispersed across the country, $10-20 didn't seem too unreasonable of a price all of these years later. Even so, with me being sometimes overly frugal, and of course not expecting any changes to come, I kept holding out hope that I'd be able to find the two cards that I wanted for less than the going rate, which never ended up happening. However, someone added a couple of these gold's to COMC just days before the great price shift. They were one of those sellers who's initial price is crazy high, but then runs a constant sale to make everyone think that they're getting good deals. This was one instance where that actually held true, probably much to the sellers chagrin given what was coming.

At this point, the non-sale price is lost to me, but I do know that on sale, the above card was $14. This was a fair price at the time, but even so, I still almost passed on it. Thankfully, I had just spent the previous couple of days acquiring quite a bit of credit from the Challenges (this was of course before COMC decided to make the Challenges a complete waste of time), and decided to use my newly gotten gains to purchase this long desired card. The seller also had the gold Carnage for the same price, but it had a very punky corner, which at the time, in that condition, was not worth $14... though it probably would still sell for more these days.

Despite being surprised by what I saw going on with that eBay auction, I didn't bother trying to see what the final sales price, but when I came across it, the card was approaching $100 -- which just seems bonkers to me. I know that things have changed quite a bit, but I still have a hard time believing that this card that I was debating buying for $14 around a year ago(?), is now seeing people paying upwards of a hundred bucks for. After seeing this, I suspect that the gold Carnage will continue to allude me for many more years to come, because I have no doubt that it's up there in price right now too :(

Just for shits and giggles, I also bought another copy of the regular Holofoil too. These haven't gone up as much in price, but I'm still glad I bought it before the masses started to do their thing. I pulled two copies of this card way back when, and wanted a third just so I could fill a row on one of my Venom pages. Ideally, I'd like to complete the rainbow with one of the Walmart Bronze's, but I waited to long to get one, and with them being the rarest and all, I wouldn't be surprised if they never drop back down to pre-boom prices. And I'm not willing, or even able, to move up into post-boom prices to get one. It is kind of sucky, but the good news is that there's no shortage of other, still reasonably priced, items for me to seek out. I don't think that I'll ever run out of those.