2008 UD Heroes Hobby

I wanted to buy a pack of something new at the card shop last week, and it was this or BowChro. Let's see if I made the right choice.

139 Steve Carlton
29 Clay Buchholz
162 Stan Musial
105 Jose Reyes #64/299
182 Ichiro & Kosuke Fukudome
130 Rich Harden
159 Chris Duncan
5 Randy Johnson

I think the right choice would have been to look through the $5 relic box. The big hit of the pack was a Jose Reyes card that looks exactly the same as all the others except for a teeny little serial number. Numbered parallels should look at least a little different from the base cards. How hard would that thing be to fake? Lefty and Musial are nice though, but not worth five bucks. I've had questions recently on why I would bother buying worthless retail packs. Well, look at this pack right here. 8 cards for five bucks and I got a disappointing parallel. For four bucks I could have bought two retail packs and gotten more cards including two black parallels that at least look different than the rest. Would I get a numbered parallel or a relic or an auto in a retail pack? Probably not, but who cares? The numbered parallels are worthless unless it's of a player you like, relics are a dime a dozen nowadays and it's really a crapshoot to pull an auto out of a random pack of any hobby product even if they are guaranteed in every box. So why not buy a hobby box then? Listen folks, all wax is for suckers. Even (especially) hobby boxes with hits in every box. For the price of any Hobby box, you can take that money and go through the case at your local card shop and get a handful of autos, relics or rookies and the best part is you are choosing the cards you want and not just getting the luck of the draw.

ALL WAX IS A GAMBLE, HOBBY WAX ESPECIALLY SO.

My hobby is collecting cards, not gambling. So why retail packs then if wax is so sucky? Because ripping wax is fun and building sets is fun and retail wax while not having the bells and whistles generally gets you more cards for the money. It's much cheaper and there's a hell of a lot less pressure to get something good. Drop a hundred bucks or more on a hobby box or tin looking for that hit and you better pull something good out of that thing. A Clint Sammons autograph or a Randy Winn patch ain't gonna cut it. Drop ten, twenty bucks on a blaster for a set you like, you got a nice low-pressure rip where you like the cards first, and any crazy insert is just a bonus. Yeah, pulling some pricey auto or patch is always fun, but I've seen gamblers drop thousands of dollars that they really couldn't afford on cases of high end stuff looking for that elusive hit they can flip for a profit and quite frankly they didn't look like they had much fun at all. I drop a Jackson on a blaster of some set I like and I get a couple of hours of ripping, sorting, collating, scanning, writing and posting about the worthless things. And really, when it comes down to it cards nowadays are worthless, even the high end hits. Don't believe me? Check a Beckett from 1998 and compare the hot list prices to the ones in a Beckett from 2008. If you can find them in there of course. Now imagine what those big hits from this year's hot hobby wax will be worth in 2018.

I don't care about that, because this is how I spend my entertainment dollar, this is what I like to do for fun, and if I can't flip the cards on eBay for a huge profit, who cares? I go to the movies for entertainment too and I don't worry about how much the used tickets are selling for on eBay. I have fun going to restaurants and I don't fret about barfing up my meal and trying to sell it for a profit because I got a mojo truffle in my dinner. I rip old wax and retail wax because I have fun doing it. Buying hobby wax in search of that huge hit just isn't my thing.