Trading with the LCS is cathartic

This past week was long.  The kind of long, as a teacher, that makes you wish Saturday was the beginning of Summer vacation (or the day you got to retire from teaching).

As Saturday was neither of those things for me, I decided to de-stress Friday afternoon one of the best ways I know how - by sifting through boxes upon boxes of cardboard.  I put my trade bait in the car in the morning and once the school day was done I made the 20 minute drive straight to Maverick's, a place I've mentioned on this blog several times before.

As a refresher, the place is 95% comics and collectibles with a little bit of cards.  And the singles that he has don't change a lot - I've literally found cards in the same place I left them when I came back a year later.  So it's not a card shop for everyone.  But it's definitely a card shop for me.  The owner knows his stuff and is a real nice guy, the prices/trade values are always fair, and it's easy to get lost in that place digging through cards for hours.  I should know...I've done it a few times by now!

This Friday when I came in, I brought my boxes with me (sometimes I leave them in the car and ask him if he wants to trade first, but by now I figured we're already good).  He saw me and saw the boxes and was like "Should I just start looking through now while you browse?" and I said sure.  An hour and a half later we had a deal, and here's some of the stuff I picked up!

I started with the lower end boxes, which are weirdly positioned between a bunch of action figures.  There's probably 6-7 400 counts boxes of cards, most half to 2/3's filled, and they're a mix of years but heavily mid 00's.  That's how I found so many Priest Holmes cards in there - all told nine new ones for my PC.  My favorite was this Fleer Tradition card from 1999:

If you sort by alphabetical order, it's now the oldest Priest in my collection.  But I just always love Holmes Ravens cards, which is the biggest reason I dig this card.

I'll only show off one more Priest, because you guys already see a lot of him on here.  But the set naming on this card was interesting to me:

upper Deck...Collectibles...Mini Jersey Collection.  Sometimes I wonder what the card companies are smoking when they come up with these crazy long names for sets!

I also found a cool Josh Scobee numbered card among the lower end boxes.  I've pondered buying this card on COMC before, so it was neat to be able to just grab it in person!

It looks great, and is numbered to boot.  Can't beat that.

I always end up with way more cards than I end up trading for - in the above box alone I found a Brandon Marshall /75, a Chris Archer Cubs rookie, and some other goodies that didn't make my final lot.  I make a big old pile as I wander the store and then we decide what is tradeworthy at the end and the rest gets set aside somewhere else.  It's a nice little system.

But at this point, I moved over the the quarter box.  It's not like everything in there is firmly a quarter, but in general it is.  Which is why I was really surprised to find this card in there:

The owner told me at the counter that he was wondering who would find this jersey.  He threw it in thinking someone would get a kick out of it.  I love jersey cards especially with weird breaks in them like this one has, so it definitely works for me.  That being said, this is also the first of several cards in this post that I grabbed with an end game of possibly selling or trading them - so I wouldn't be surprised if this card ended up in the collection of a DJ or Chiefs fan!

The owner had thrown another jersey card in there too, and I found it as well:

I've seen this card on COMC too, and it's notable for being one of the cheapest jersey cards on the site.  Jordan Shipley card values fell HARD so this card was probably worth a quarter.  Still cool to own!

The final quarter card I grabbed was this B.J. Sams:

Sams was a Madden guy, mostly for kick returning, and so I always kind of remember him.  I say kind of because I always confuse him with J.J. Moses - it's the positions and the nicknames I guess.  But it's nice to finally own a Sams card.

Around this time, I had been there a while (40 minutes?) and the owner called over to me to ask if I was finding anything at all.  I looked at my stack (probably 30 cards by now) and told him I definitely was!  I asked if he had found anything worthy in my trade bait and he assured me he did, which was cool.  Often times my bait is really low end, so I don't expect much value, but I did have a few decent autos this time to give me some possible credit which was cool.

I then moved on to the mid-high end boxes.  It's really all mid-end, because the higher end stuff is usually 10-11 years old and so most of it lost its value a long time ago.  But it's still fun to peruse through.

The first card I grabbed is actually very modern - this Andre Ellington RC:

Ellington has never lived up to his hype, but I always want to believe.  So I grabbed my first RC of his.  I then found another card of his and grabbed it too:

The blue is /79, so quite a bit more rare and neat to own.

I also grabbed a neat PressPass RC of Andre Johnson:

I've never seen one of these scratcher cards.  Apparently if you scratched the round that the player was drafted in, you could win a complete set or something.  They're not worth much, but it's always cool to find a scratch card that went unscratched.  And it's weird to see a RC Andre Johnson since he's now in his 13th year in the league

Here's another younger guy I found - Bills QB Tyrod Taylor:

I love watching this guy play.  I even had him on both my fantasy teams but have since traded him in both leagues.

One of the best cards of the whole trip was this Dante Hall card.  At first I barely realized who it was given the jersey number, but I was definitely excited about it once I realized it was a Hall RC /500:

I didn't realize the price sticker on the card (not visible here) until I got to the counter - it was $24.95!  The owner was like, "Do you know how much this goes for now?" and I said no, because I never track that stuff.  He looked it up because he figured it was lower, and found that it's now like a $3 card.  Which, for a kick returner RC is still pretty impressive, but obviously a shell of what it was once worth.  Regardless, I love it, and this is one of the cards from this trade that I definitely won't let go.

Another one of those type of cards was this Rashad Jennings autograph, which has been in my pile before but has been put back once or twice because I didn't have enough value.  NOT THIS TIME!

It's /399, and I think it's kind of neat how you can see the "S" from another sticker at the beginning of this auto.  Like Rashad accidentally signed two stickers, and then went ahead and used this sticker anyways.  Some would say it kills the value or whatever, I think it makes it unique!

This one had a $13.95 price tag, and still sells around $10-11, so I was worried I'd miss it yet again.  But I had around $15 in trade value left to meet when he got to this and a few other cards I liked, so he just threw them all in.  Like I said, the owner is an awesome guy.

One of those throw-in cards, and another one I've picked up and put down before, was this Brett Basenez:

Now I have no idea who this dude is/was (apparently a Panthers QB), but it's numbered 23/25 and I love low numbered stuff.  I admitted as such, and the owner was fine with passing this on to me.  I'm hoping it someday finds its way into the hands of a Brett Basenez collector or something since I finally freed it after seeing it in Maverick's for years.

The last two cards I grabbed were also low #'d, /50.  The first one has some personal meaning, as the guy is a RB for nearly all of my fantasy teams this year.  So Justin Forsett RC, come on down!

I figured he might be the most valuable of all the cards I grabbed (except for the Jennings of course) but COMC has it only around $3.  Regardless, I think it's a pretty sweet card and it might go into my random cards part of my PC like a lot of other good stuff.

And last but not least, I finally grabbed this Pat White Make Ready /50:

It was sitting with the Basenez /25, just where I left them both last time.  So I grabbed them both almost immediately, and was pretty excited when I got them both.  I definitely think I'll be able to find someone to take this card, even if it's just Dennis to pass on via trade.

So there you have it, every card I picked up for trade from my LCS recently (well all minus the seven Priest Holmes cards I didn't show).  The damage for this lot was just the Devonta Freeman redemption auto I won a few months back (who would've figured he was gonna blow up this year?) with some Giovani Bernard RCs/inserts and a few Nick Van Exels.  Definitely a trade I would make 10/10 times, as it got me some cool cards both PC and otherwise and should help me trade or sell in the blogosphere and forum worlds!  Thanks again Maverick's!