Poor to fair

Normally when you come across something on COMC that's listed as 'poor to fair', it's not hard to see why. Whether it's the rounded corners, noticeable creases, paper loss, etc., you're not usually gonna be left wondering why it's earned this particular distinction -- but sometimes, and it doesn't happen very often, you are. Such was the case back in November during the Black Friday sale when I found two 1975 Hostess panels from the same seller, both being listed as poor to fair, with neither having any obvious flaws.

When it comes to questionable items, I rarely take chances on that site anymore (they're missing a lot more creases than they used to), but again, these two panels looked fine to me, and nobody else was buying them, so I figured I'd give them a go.

I haven't really talked about it much, if at all, but I am collecting the Hostess sets in single and panel form. I don't actually believe that I'll ever complete any of the sets in panel form, but I like the way that they present, and am always curious to see who was paired with who. The above Carlton/Cey panel is my first one that still has a bunch of the box attached, which I do really like, but those seem to usually carry a bit more of a premium.

It took a bit of searching once they arrived, but I did find a small wrinkle (that doesn't go through to the back) on the upper right part of Steve Carlton's card. And while I'd prefer that it wasn't there, it's not egregious, and I don't think that that alone should've knocked it down to the lowly poor to fair category.

I've checked this one multiple times, and can't seem to find any issues whatsoever. I can't help but think that maybe it was accidently labeled as poor to fair. Of course, if it that was indeed the case, I can't help but wonder why the seller didn't protest the label? I guess it doesn't really matter anymore though, as it's now mine; and I've labeled it as 'neat to pretty cool'.

From what I've been able to gather, both of these panels are two of the more common ones from the '75 set, but at $2.80 apiece, I'm awfully glad I decided to take that chance.

Giving BSC a go

I can't remember who it was at this point, but a fellow blogger mentioned BuySportsCards.com (or as the kids call it, BSC) sometime in the last six months or so. I had been unaware of the site prior to his posting about it, but like most collectors, I'm always on the lookout for new places to buy things, so I didn't waste any time checking it out. 

I found the search function to be quite clunky, and not very enjoyable to try and use. And I guess because of that, and the fact that I didn't buy anything right away, my brain did what it's so prone to doing with new things; which is to completely forget about them. And so it went for many months, until just recently when I was typing in a website and the autofill gave me BSC.com. I guess there's something to be said for not ever clearing ones search history.

After re-finding about the site, I decided to give it another go. It was still clunky, well, at least until I figured out that you can use the main search bar when you're on a particular seller to look through their inventory. This improved the sites usability (for me) ten-fold, as I had been trying to search via the crappy filters that are on the side of the screen.

Now that I knew what was what, I promptly found seller, The Set Builder, who had a couple things that I wanted, which were also very reasonably priced, so, I figured I might as well put in a small order and see how things went. I'm pleased to say that they went quite well, and that this was the first of what I'm sure will be many future orders.
 

The site seems to be similar to Sportlots, in that a lot of the items don't have photos (they have stock photos instead), though certain sellers have actual photos for their listings. The guy that I bought from was one of those. 

My order consisted of just six cards (I figured a smaller order would be best to test the waters with), which can be easily be broken down into a pair of trios. First up is three from the '69 Topps football set, highlighted by a new to me Papa Nerf. I could've swore that I had that particular card already, but apparently I didn't. Now I do.

Unlike Fred, my knowledge of Johnny Robinson and Tom Sestak is quite limited, but, and no offense to either, they were gotten strictly for what was printed on the backside of their cards...

Not the most exciting pieces of Fran Tarkenton's puzzle, but I believe that these two bring me to now having 6 of the 10 pieces. That's 60% completed for all of the mathologists out there. It's worth noting too that these two pieces combined for less than 90¢. They would've been over $4 had I purchased them from COMC.

My other trio was made up of three more copies of Carlos Brown/Alan Autry/Bubba's lone football card. These three cards are why I ended up choosing this seller. Given their price (less than $2 for a NM and two VG's), I would've bought these alone had there not been anything else of interest to me; so the 69's were just an extra added bonus. I haven't looked yet, but I'm pretty sure that I'm up to 8 copies of this card now. My original goal was to fill a page, but at this point I don't think that I'm gonna be able to stop with just one more copy. I wish I knew why older me enjoys seeing multiple pages of the same card so much, as it's the polar opposite of how my younger self collected.

The total for my order was five-something, $1.35 of which was for shipping. Not bad for six vintage cards in relatively decent shape.