Possibly My Biggest Ebay Steal EVER: Or Why You Should Always Check Seller's Other Auctions

I'll tell you how much I paid for these two beautiful cards at the end...but first the tale.

As some of you know, I'm trying to collect Rich Hill's 2008 Heroes Rainbow. This is both easy on the one hand (because no one else in the world can possibly be trying to do this since it's Rich Hill) and difficult on the other (because any rarer cards/autos/patches sell for high prices thanks to sellers who want bang for their buck).

I'd been eying a Hill Patch/Auto /50 on Ebay that had 4 colors, including pieces of emblem and a stripe, but its price was a very sad $22.81 before shipping. So imagine my excitement when this beauty came up a few days ago at a much cheaper price:
Yeah, it's not a 4 color patch, but a two color patch with tons of stitching is still cool. And really, when there's 50 variations to a given parallel, any one of them gets the job done for me. So I love this card, very cool!

Now the Hill alone, given its price + shipping, was worth it. But I just happened to glance at the seller's other items, and he had some reaaaal beauties in there. We're talking great stuff, like a Jimmy Piersall Auto, tons of other beautiful patches...very nice stuff. And all at prices I could easily afford. So I sent the seller a message - would he combine shipping? I then put bids on 2 more cards - the Piersall and a card you'll see in a bit.

The seller's message came through right as I was outbid on the Piersall. But since he said he'd combine shipping, and since I won the other card, I wasn't too sad.

Here's what else I won:
Beautiful, no? It's a little hard to tell from the scan, but Manny's piece has stitching through the middle. Plus Tek's piece is bright red and Beckett's is grey, so you actually get 3 swatch colors on one card, which is neat. Only downside is Beckett's Marlins uni, but I'm willing to deal with that for the awesome that is this.

And oh yeah...did I mention this baby had 2 sides?
The lesser side for sure, but still wow. J.D. Drew, Papelbon, and Wade Boggs himself (you can tell even from the scan that his material is totally different than the other guys on the card, which is neat). Not a bad card, right? It even came with a certificate of authenticity to match that sticker next to Boggs, making it one of my fanciest cards too!

So I'm looking around online (read: Beckett and COMC), and the closest I can find in terms of value comparison-wise for this baby is this card (Or this one if you really devalue Wang a ton and love Papelbon and Drew more than life itself). Regardless, we're talking like a $30-50 BV card as an also ran with the Hill I picked up. Not too shabby!

And the price?

$1.98 (plus shipping, which brought the total to $4.93)

For one of the nicer Hills in my Heroes collection and one of the nicer cards in my collection period, I'd pay that every day. And the worst part? I passed up a sweeeet Freddy Sanchez 3 color patch /99 that didn't sell because I wasn't sure if he'd combine for shipping. I guess that would have just been icing on the cake though compared to the rest of this stuff.