2000+ Cubs Card Purchase

Yesterday, I mentioned I had purchased a large lot of cards. There's been a bit of a lull in the card releases so I had to make up for it somehow, right?

As some of you may know, I collected primarily Topps cards as a kid, trying to hand collate sets. They made up probably 85-90% of my collection. The rest were Cubs cards, and more specifically, probably Ryne Sandberg from the other brands. Through some trades over the summer, I've made a small dent in those other brands.

I'm not sure how it happened (as most of my time on ebay goes, I've found) but I stumbled onto a listing for 2000+ Cubs cards with a decent Buy It Now price and reasonable shipping. The pictures were good, although the disclaimer of "cards pictured may or may not be representative of the lot" made me wary. I didn't want/need a ton of dupes or cards I already had (I'm looking at you, anything from 1989). I let it sit in my Watch List for a few days but as you can probably tell, I bit the bullet.

I was pleasantly surprised when the package arrived; it was well packed in a flat rate priority mail box. I saw many cards I remembered from my childhood along with a few I had never seen, brands (or I should say subsets) I was not familiar with at all. The condition was overall great. Some typical uncentered '80s and early '90s cards. A few early gold cards where the gold was missing some flecks. But overall, sharp corners and edges. Cards I'm happy to add to my collection.

I'm kind of an Excel/numbers geek so after my first run through, I logged every card. Yep, every card. Kind of like I did for my box breaks over the summer, but much harder because I didn't have a checklist loaded up to go by and just record quantities. I kept track of year, brand, set, card number, player name and quantity.

Final tallies include:

Total number of cards: 2262 (2000+ was accurate, yay!)

Total number of different cards: 1317 (not too shabby for a lot this size). Also, I counted things like a 1992 Topps, 1992 Topps Gold and 1992 Topps Gold Winner as 3 different cards.

Total number of cards I didn't already have (or felt were upgrades): 729 (told you I was lacking non-Topps!) About 15-20 of which were upgrades. So ~700 new cards!

Oldest card(s): 9 cards from 1980 Topps

Newest card(s): 2009 Upper Deck Piece of History Derrek Lee (only 2009 card)

Different sets represented: 112!! This differentiates brands/years/parallels etc. Again, like the different cards above, I counted 1992 Topps, Topps Gold and Topps Gold Winner as different sets.
Most copies of single card: 8 each of 1992 Fleer Ultra Jerome Walton and Chico Walker

Least amount of card: Obviously the thousands I did not get, but there was a 805-way tie with 1 copy. There 512 other cards of which I recieved at least 2 copies.

Ryne Sandberg cards: 53 total, 40 different, 1 I didn't already have

Do I feel like I got my money's worth? Definitely. Final breakdown was a little more than 1 penny per card and just over 3 cents per card I needed. To buy all those cards on Sportlots at $.18 per card + a gazillion dollars in shipping to get them from a slew of different sellers would be well over $100. Heck this even beat a dime box. Yep, I said it. Beats a dime box! The only disappointment is that I probably won't be able to repeat this performance because the more cards I accumulate, the harder it'll be to find large lots of new/needed cards.

Sorry for the nerdy post with no pictures today, but I will try to do one more post with a selection of my favorites and cards I had never seen before. Including the one Sandberg I didn't have!