It took all week, but we’ve finally gotten to the best of the bunch. In 2016, I struggled to come up with five cards to showcase. In 2017, we had 45 cards to get through before the top 5. You can’t predict baseball… cards? Here we go…
38 cards in, you might be feeling some fatigue. But these last 12 are worth the wait. In a normal year, any one of them could be a legitimate best card of the year. But in 2017, 11 of them fell short. If you’ve ever followed a big case breaker, you would know that hits like this typically fall much less than one per case. Prior to 2017, I had pulled a total of 15 cards that would fit in this range. And while only one of 2017’s hits would (barely) crack my top 5, the sheer quantity of this level of quality is unprecedented in my decades of collecting. And that has me worried.
Not long ago, I commented on the contrast between my fortunes in 2017 and 2016 on Twitter.
At this rate, the best card I pulled last year might not even make my top 20 this year. Crazy.
— Collect the Mets (@CollectTheMets) September 14, 2017
And, with the best card I pulled in 2016 selling for just $30, this is indeed the case. It took one last big score from a case break to do it, but I pulled 20 cards in 2017 that topped my best from 2016. And now you get to read about each and every one of them! Settle in, this might take a while…
Now we get to the fun stuff. The $20-30 range is where you’ll find your expectation-level hits. As in, this is usually the best you can expect to get from a box. Now, when you’re spending $60-100 per box, you’re sure hoping for something at least this good to be in there. But all too often you’ll get a 99 cent “hit” and a base card will be the prize of the box. Enjoy it when these fall regularly, even though they won’t make back half of the price of the box.
What a year… After a dismal 2016, 2017 turned things around and delivered possibly the best group of hits I’ve ever seen. I bought a bit more unopened product than usual, somewhere around $4,000 if my estimates are right, but that yielded $1,550 in eBay sales, several nice Mets hits, and a few other big cards that I’m holding on to for various reasons. And that’s before getting to the various sets I’ve completed or gotten very close to completion (including a few extras to sell, trade, or give as gifts). And two dozen more Aaron Judge RCs on top of what’s in the sets or listed here. All told, I probably got at least $3,000 worth of cards for that $4,000. That actually doesn’t sound too good… But it was sure better than last year.
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