Latest Pickups

[G1911]

Broke my normal pattern to win these three. I don't care about slabs and bust free anything that isn't in my trade bait box, so I usually don't win anything graded over a 3. The silvers are my favorite set, and I'm building a couple sets of it, one as nice as I can get and one as beater as I can get (which is a ton of fun to do and incredibly cheap).

This set was listed last year, I won the James J. Corbett and since then the others have slowly sold. The final ones were put up at auction instead of BIN's, I put in what I thought of as lowball bids on everything, under the previously sold cards by a fair bit. Erne was $103, Carney $126, Choyinski $271. I thought I might get Erne because the card is obviously short.

This set has sequentially serialized PSA slabs (James J. Corbett's is different) and has been the registry set for a long time. I've assumed the cards came from a find of 24 cards (there was no Donovan in this set), presumably from a scrapbook based on some of the backs, but I don't know. Some size variance is normal in T220 silver; I don't fully understand why (because of the large margins on the sheet above and below the cards), but naturally short top/bottom cards tend to be those in the top row, especially Jordan. This Erne, in hand, is very short. Erne is also a top row card (the others are Frayne, Burke, and the James J. Corbett extreme SP rarity) and frequently found short top/bottom, but this is a bit extreme of a variance and it gives me some doubts this collection is unaltered.

I figured I'd throw them into my trade bait bin if I won anything, but I might crack them all out for my set now as I am not confident these are unaltered, it is very difficult to examine them properly without being able to directly handle, and I do not believe 2 of them to be accurate grades. I tend to find most cards graded in this set to be 1-2 grades inflated, they are very very generous on this issue and forgiving of corner damage, slight missing paper at corners, and even tiny corner creases. I would call my set mostly EX/EX-MT now, with a couple VG/EX's the graders would call 5-6 and a VG Donovan. The Choyinski here is the closest to an actual 7 if unaltered. They are still very nice condition and would go well in my main set of silvers.