It was a great week for our little sports card shop here in Central PA. It was a great week for sports cards in general.
The owner was away on a vacation all week which meant for a hellacious amount of shipping for yours truly but beyond that, there were a number of really fun sports card releases to look forward to checking out during my moments of downtime.
2021 Diamond Kings Baseball was originally a subset that I enjoyed as a kid that in recent years has become a product in and of itself. It offers eight cards and 12 packs per hobby box with two autographs and/or memorabilia cards on average. That is a pretty standard formula for a box of cards and it is a nice breakdown at a (now) reasonable price. While it’s not MLB licensed, DK has been selling well in the first few days of release.
We also received a few cases and a number of loose boxes of 2020 Chronicles Football this week. This is always a very fun product to open or watch someone open as it offers a mind-boggling 17 different Panini brands within this one offering. There are very few veterans, so you will be seeing multiple rookie cards per pack. That sounds all fine and dandy and even a bit exciting but I can’t help but think back to the Chronicles Basketball offering last season. People were drunk off pulling multiple Zion, Ja, and Herro rookies but once the supply far exceeded the demand, the prices fell on many of those singles and base cards. To add insult to injury, only one of the 17 rookies were actually recognized as RCs in price guides.
Chronicles Football offers two autos and one relic per box, on average. One of our longtime customers opened our very first box and pulled a very nice Tua Tagovailoa Score Rookie autograph numbered out of 75. Not a bad start. We are selling these boxes in store for just north of $500.
With the NFL Draft taking place last week, we had a number of people in store seeking out packs and boxes to open, trying to find the new draft picks. Of course, there’s very limited product released at the moment, which consists of only the Leaf Draft releases and tbe annual Sage products. They all sold well in anticipation of and in the days following the draft.
As a lifelong Chicago Bears fan, I am cautiously optimistic about the selection of Ohio State QB Justin Fields and the 2021 draft as a whole. The front office traded up and nabbed a franchise QB and then surrounded him with protection and weapons throughout the rest of the draft. On paper, I am happy. As any Bears fan or football fan is well aware, we have not had the most success at the quarterback position over the last, say, 60 years or so. Here’s hoping the Fields is the answer at that position for the team in The Windy City for the next decade. Bear Down.
The shop also secured a few cases of the new round of TriStar hidden treasures autographed mini helmets. They sold well last go around but the helmets themselves left a little bit to be desired. With little star power and some odd choices on the checklist and even helmet selection I think they could have been better. We have yet to sell any of the new series but I’ll keep you posted with any hits as soon as we do.
Although we don’t talk about it very much we do carry a number of hockey products and this week we got 2020-21 Upper Deck SP Game Used Hockey in stock. Collectors are constantly telling us how much they appreciate the quality of Upper Deck products. I often wonder how great it would be to have them producing cards of the great young rookies and talents we see across other sports today. I can only imagine what high end Upper Deck produced rookies of stars like Zion Williamson, Fernando Tatis, Jr. and Trevor Lawrence would fetch in the open market… and how great they would present aesthetically. I can dream, can’t I?
Whether it’s in a dream or not, after this week sleeping sounds pretty appealing at the moment. So, I’ll get some of that and catch up again with you next week.
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