I know I'm a little late on this post. I went to my first card show in over a year and it was a blast. I literally spent opening to closing at the show and had a great time. Going into the show I knew prices were high like everything else these days. I brought my usual amount of cash but figured I'd be priced out of a lot or not willing to spend it. The show was full of dealers and people. There was as usual a nice selection of low to high end and dime boxes in between. Plenty to choose from.
I did something I usually don't do as I mentioned in the previous post. I put together a trade/sell box of all my extras that I didn't really care for and figured other people might like. I had zero expectations, if I came back with every card no big deal and if I sold them all, great.
I ended up trading about 2/3rd's of the box to 1 dealer in a pretty large deal for me. He had laid out in his showcase a 1986 Fleer set with the Jordan's for 15K or best offer. I asked him the question what would he take for the set without the Jordan's. He said no one had asked him that before it's usually the opposite question. I already have the Jordan's so no need to pay the big bucks for them again. (although mine I got years ago when they weren't big bucks). Eventually he came to a number of around 3,500. I did not have that kind of cash on me, so I just asked if he wanted to look into my trade box. He rifled through and started pulling cards. Had a nice little stack. He priced them out in his head to about a grand. I then went through and I was around 1,100 so close enough. It would've taken him a while to piece them out since it was a random selection of cards. After some back and forth (he really didn't want to give me a grand and honestly it wasn't about the money for me) he made an interesting offer and said he would give me the 86 Fleer set minus the Jordan's for 1,500 and the cards. I didn't have that much cash on me and wasn't willing to hit the ATM. He then offered to go through the trade box again and I talked him into a couple of the cards. He ended up with another stack of about 1,000 dollars worth of cards. Valuation wise we were super close. No deal breakers. I ended up giving him the 2 stacks of cards and 550 cash for the set and a Bryce Harper auto.
Harper auto from 2018 Tier one. I liked the full signature and on-card (part of the stack of cards I traded him had a Harper sticker auto in it).
Some cards were already graded. One being a BGS 9 Dr. J. The set also included all the stickers. Some of the key cards look real nice. Probably in the PSA 7-9 range. Some of the commons *maybe* I get a 10 in there somewhere. The hope and thought is get them all graded and see what shakes out. I could potentially score huge. If I piece it out right afterwards the idea would be to go after a 1952 Topps Mantle. This would be a years long project and that's ok but it's good to have goals!
This deal took a good bit of negotiation and back and forth but I'm still really pumped about it. Happy to have this iconic set in my collection.
I still had a few cards left to trade and went over to see a dealer friend of mine that's always at the Philly show and does online breaks etc.
Ended up doing several small deals with him and ended up with some cool stuff.
He likes to do box breaks and had some old school boxes. I gave him 40 dollars (literally after selling him a card for 40 dollars so in essence traded a card for these) to do a half box break of 2000 Topps Gallery. He let me split the packs randomly and pick the pile I wanted. I got lucky and pulled the Griffey Gallery of Heroes insert and the Jeter/Soriano insert. They are both real nice cards.