Black Swamp Find? Tell me more!

[Lorewalker]

Originally Posted by BobC

Chase,

I hear you. That is a crazy story though. But if two of you have heard of it, I guess I have to believe it as well. So it sounds like it is not widely known if the entire Find has made it to the market yet either. If not, that is just crazy. It has been over a decade now since the BSF occurred, and one would normally expect that all the cards would have made it to the market long before now.

So how many cards were there in this Find? You've talked about someone buying the back half, and if Heritage got the 750 or so up front to sell, does that mean the 1,400-1,500 number mentioned by some others is somewhat accurate then? Or is that "back half" comment just a phrase someone threw out, and not really indicative that the 750 or so E98 cards that Heritage got to sell up front was about half the Find after all? Because if the Find really did amount to about 1,400-1,500 E98 cards, the combined PSA, SGC, and CSG population reports currently show a total of 4,106 E98 cards have been graded to date. In that case, the Black Swamp Find cards don't even make up half of the graded E98s out there. So using rounded numbers, if before the BSF there were about 750 graded E98s out there, then the 750 Heritage got graded took that number to about 1,500. And since there are around 4,100 graded E98s out there today, that means an additional 2,600 or so (4,100 - 1,500) have been graded since the BSF hit the news. And if about 750 of those represent the 'back half" of the total BSF, that means around 1,850 E98 cards (2,600 - 750) had nothing to do with the BSF at all. That is about 2-1/2 times the number of cards in the supposed "back half" of the Find. So at least it seems I may have been right about there being a lot of non-BSF E98's that were out there that came in to be graded. And I'm going to guess there may be a lot more ungraded E98 cards out there yet.

Never heard about this "back half" of the BSF before, just what the mainstream articles, stories, and the Strange Inheritance TV show all kept saying. Learned something new then. Would still like to hear all the real details at some point though, but it doesn't sound like we will.

The dealer that spoke to me of the back half of the find indicated there were more cards held back by the family that opted to keep them than were graded originally by Heritage. If Heritage graded 750 of them then there were more than 1,500 in all found in the home.

I am confident that cards were submitted more than once, especially the Hall of Famers. I am also certain that cards were graded by PSA and then broken out and sent to SGC when they were not happy with the grades. The more than 4,000 cards graded between both pop reports includes many BSF cards that were seen more than once. Someone posted that prior to the BSF being submitted there were roughly 627 cards in PSA's pop report. I would guess there were at least that many, if not more, in SGC's. Let's assume pre BSF there had been 1,500 cards in the combined pop reports. Another 1,500 from the find which leaves roughly 1,000 other submissions of E98s most of which I would argue are cards being resubmitted or broken out and sent to the other grading company.

Again, no idea why the choice was made to not state upfront that more than 1500 cards were found but only 750 would be coming to auction other than the family having kept that a secret from Heritage or that there was a concern it might have a negative impact on the 750 that were going to auction.