We all have cards we like and love. What is a person to do when they can’t stay focused on their goals when it comes to collecting? As new sets are continuously being released, every year, there’s a new set of rookies to chase.
For those who don’t know yet, I’m a huge Kentucky Wildcats fan. I have what I’ve come to call my #BBN PC, which is players that used to play at Kentucky in either Pro or Collegiate uniforms (which now will include current players, thanks to NIL). Within that collection, I have rainbows of Benny Snell (2019 Prizm) and Lynn Bowden, Jr. (2020 Mosaic) that I’m chasing.
I’m also a huge Atlanta sports guy – as I’ve lived around the city most of my life. For the rainbows I’ve started of Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, De’Andre Hunter – I’ve basically given up and as I know I’m not the only one chasing rainbows of these guys (or they’re well out of my price range) and figure I’ll have more success chasing my UK guys that haven’t made it big…yet (hopefully).
Now let’s throw in the sets that I’ve started chasing. If you’ve looked at any other posts on this blog, you’ll see that I have, in the past, tried to chronicle my set chasing experiences.
The 2019-20 Prizm Draft Blue Parallel Basketball set is the one I’ve chronicled the most and I dropped off when I was 65% complete. Some other sets I’ve chased: 2019-20 Prizm Draft Silver Basketball, 2019-20 Prizm Draft Pink Pulsar Basketball, 2021 Prizm Draft Football, 2021 Prizm Draft Green Football, 2020-21 Hoops Basketball – most of these I have not completed, and now the largest chase I’ve ever embarked on.
2021 Mosaic Blue Reactive.
Yep – a 400 card set of which I’m starting with 10 cards. This should be fun.
This post will continually be updated until set is complete…See current needs HERE.
A few nights ago while sorting, I came to the realization that I have 3 of the 4 Ja Morants in the 2019 Prizm Draft Blue parallel. I started counting. I had 27 cards of the 100 in the set. I’m not huge on completing sets, though I have been known to dabble a time or two, but the urge came over me.
I decided to track my journey through collecting the 100 card parallel set. I will add pictures and updates as they come. The following is how it has unfolded so far:
3/14/20, Sometime between 11pm and 1am.
I was organizing and sorting cards I wanted to sent to PSA (I’ve gotten over my anger with them. I’m sure I’ll blog about that at some point in the near future.) I love the way the Prizm Draft Picks Blue Parallels look. They aren’t numbered and I think were only found in retail. I had bought a TON of retail of this product so I started digging around. I rounded up 27 cards of the 100 card set. It was this moment where I figured this might be possible – but 100% based on if I could get the Zions (Williamson) at a decent price.
I started comparing sites like eBay, COMC, and Sportlots. The main Zions were selling between $40-$50, buy-it-now. That’s a little more than what I wanted to spend so I looked at auction prices: anywhere from the high $20’s to $40’s. High twenties is more my cup of tea, considering I had just sold a Zion Prizm Silver PSA 8. I know you’re probably thinking I’m stingy, but if you knew how I have built my collection – 90% through flipping some birthday money I got in 2015 – you might understand my stinginess. And if this is your first time here – I don’t flip everything. I do keep a very personal PC, of which this set will take part.
So the decision was made: Let’s do it.
List of what I’m starting with – 27:
Card Number
Card Description
2
Ja Morant – Blue Jersey
9
Jaxson Hayes – Burnt Orange Jersey
10
Rui Hachimura – White Jersey
12
Cam Reddish – Black Jersey
21
Grant Williams – Orange Jersey
25
Nassir Little – Baby Blue Jersey
26
Dylan Windler – White Jersey
33
Kz Okpala – Red Jersey
35
Bruno Fernando – White Jersey
43
Cam Reddish – CRUSADE
44
Ja Morant – ALL-AMERICANS
46
Isaiah Roby – Red Jersey
52
Jarrell Brantley – Black Jersey
53
Tremont Waters – White Jersey
54
Jalen McDaniels – White Jersey
57
Kyle Guy – White Jersey
58
Jaylen Hands – White Jersey
59
Jordan Bone – White Jersey
65
Ja Morant – Yellow Jersey
69
Jarrett Culver – White Jersey
73
Rui Hachimura – Blue Jersey
75
Tyler Herro – CRUSADE
76
Cameron Johnson – Baby Blue Jersey
85
Matisse Thybulle – Black Jersey
87
Grant Williams – White Jersey
95
PJ Washington – CRUSADE
99
Romeo Langford – CRUSADE
Before I went to bed, I placed a few orders.
eBay:
Zion Williamson Crusade #51. Paid $9.95 to the door.
De’Andre Hunter Crusade #78. Paid $1.50 to the door.
De’Andre Hunter #67. Paid $1.49 to the door.
Matisse Thybulle #19. Paid $1.50 to the door.
Zion Williamson All-Americans #100. Paid $9.95 to the door.
Sportlots:
Jarrett Culver #7. Paid .35 to the door. Tremont Waters #53. Paid .35 to the door. Nicolas Claxton #96. Paid .35 to the door.
Final Day Spent: $25.44 – Once Received, will have 35 of 100 cards.
3/15 – All day
It started out slow. My wife had to work – she’s in Urgent Care and I was home with our 5 kids -yeah, 5 – I always had dreams of being a basketball coach, but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Anyways….After breakfast there was some time to research from my phone, so I started watching eBay auctions.
As 5pm rolled around a lot of the auctions I was watching were coming close to ending, so I isolated the few I was most interested in and put in last second bids. Good news – picked up the 3 most expensive cards left to get.
eBay:
Ja Morant CRUSADE #11. Paid $6.99 to the door.
RJ Barrett #3. Paid $2.49 to the door.
Cam Reddish #74. Paid $2.00 to the door.
Zion Williamson #1. Paid $34.95 to the door.
Zion Williamson #64. Paid $26.50 to the door.
Sportlots:
Coby White #8. Paid $3.70 to the door. Tyler Herro #15. Paid $3.20 to the door. Brandon Clarke #86. Paid $1.65 to the door. Nassir Little #90. Paid $1.45 to the door.
**Note I also bought a Ja Morant #65 Green Parallel from the same seller. I split my shipping costs of $3.50 among each of the 5 cards for .70 each.
Final Day Spent: $82.93 – Once Received, will have 44 of 100 cards. Total Spent: $108.37
I now have ALL of the Zions and Morants and have only spent a little over $100. I’m pumped. Before bed, I took a break and played a little Call Of Duty Modern Warfare.
3/16/20
Today was busy. Between work, and all the kids at home today due to the Coronavirus school closings, there wasn’t much time to get any shopping done. But did have 1 pickup on an auction at the end of the night:
eBay:
Carsen Edwards #98. Paid .99 to the door.
Final Day Spent: $0.99 – When received I will have 45 of 100 cards. Total Spent: $109.
3/18/20
Decided I’m going to wait for what I’ve ordered at this point to come in. The card market is seeing mostly decreasing prices, so it seems like a good idea to wait a week or two before spending more.
It’s a lazy Sunday so I figured I’d update this post. As it stands I’ve receieved all of the ‘big 8’ – Zions and Jas. The rest of what I need to find is mostly third and fourth tier players so should be easy to finish, as long as I can find the cards. My goal is to stick around an average of $1-$3 per card for the remaining 45 cards I need to complete the set. Here’s a few pics of what I received over the last few days:
3/24/20
Order Today:
eBay:
#22 – Grant Williams ALL-AMERICAN #29 – Keldon Johnson #32 – Cameron Johnson CRUSADE #82 – Nickeil Alexander-Walker
Total Spent $4.75 Overall Total Spent: ~$129.00
3/26/20
A 7 Card mail day!
3/27/20
A Quick Update: I’m currently sitting at 59 of the 100 card set, so I still need 41 – I’m still waiting to receive 9-10 cards. I just realized, I accidentally ordered an additional Carsen Edwards #98 – oh well. Slowly but surely, I’ll get there. This whole coronavirus thing had me switch focus a little bit and put more money into the stock market which is so far down, it would have been irresponsible to not. The last three days have been good to keep the DOW over 20,000, but today the market is down another 865 points as I write this. Lately, the market loves it’s friday sell-offs.
Anyway, I’ll update this again soon as I’m expecting another handful of cards today. Some good ones coming in – where I might have my first complete page! Actually, I’ll shoot a video of the page fills so far after I get the mail today. As I was writing this, I got inspired and placed an order:
SportLots:
Once received, 35 cards remaining.
07/20/2022: Final Update
I’m just getting back to this blog as I want to chronicle some other chases I have going on. This set was completed later in 2020. Sorry for the lack of updates here.
As this is my first blog post here, I should probably provide a little background into my situation and must first admit that this is WAY behind the times – like 5-6 months late. Anyways….
I don’t have disposable income. While my wife and I have good jobs and earn a decent living, our student loans are out of control. When I got back into #TheHobby back in 2015, I started with a few bucks. I bought some cheap autograph cards because I thought they were cool and I couldn’t believe how cheap I got them. Decided to sell my original purchases when I found other ones I wanted. This began a vicious cycle into the flip life. Before I realized it, my collection that started with just a few bucks had grown a couple hundred times over. I still don’t have disposable income, so everything I buy in cards, is based off of my original $75 purchase and the subsequent flips since then.
In 2017, I decided to try my hand at getting cards graded. I did pretty well for my first submission to BGS. I was able to flip 6 of my original 25 submission cards to pay for the entire submission. I came to a realization that this method would help me grow exponentially.
So I scratched, clawed, and saved until in 2018 I could afford a 100 card submission to PSA, which at the time gave me bulk pricing of $7/card (currently $8/card). Since then, I’ve sold 75% of that submission. A few of the cards I’m holding as investments and a few were for my PC. About 10 remain unsold. I saved the first half of money sold to pay for my next submission. The rest has gone towards new purchases and supplies.
Then, news of the grading scandals of 2019 started popping up. BGS had been found to be giving employees preferential grades. PSA was found to have been providing ‘good’ customers preferential grades and grading trimmed/altered cards for those same customers and working hand-in-hand with top eBay seller PWCC to grade altered cards. SCG had also been found to have graded some trimmed/altered cards.
I understand there’s going to be fraud in just about every industry. But vendors and the companies seen as leaders in the industry should be combating these problems, not encouraging them. I’ll admit, I’ve had a few cards turned back in my submissions for not meeting the minimal standard size. I never took a ruler to anything I submitted in the past, so when I got these sent back, it gave me a false sense that these ‘authenticators’ were doing their jobs.
So, PSA, who was my favorite grader before these scandals – primarily because of reputation and pricing – came out with a statement from their parent company, Collector’s Universe’s, CEO Joe Orlando:
For a company who’s acronym PSA stands for “Professional Sports Authenticators” this does not breed confidence in the SOLE PURPOSE of their company/brand. PSA should be ashamed.
So, again – I’m small-time, all things considered. But what used to be a way to build my collection, is now a moral dilemma. Do I continue to send PSA and BGS my cards and money, knowing that I’m not an insider with them, so I’ll never get any preferential treatment like other customers. Do I hold out until a new digital grading company comes along (more on that in the future)? Do I stop collecting altogether?
While I try to sort out my moral dilemma, I’ve put my grading money into an interest-bearing account for the time being. Hopefully, this gets figured out soon. In the meantime, I’ve started selling LEGO-type minifigures on eBay and RageFace Toys.
