Question about starter set

[Archive]

Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Hey there, RC,

Lots of folks seem to be collecting graded cards. I don't. Many of these folks seem to know what they're doing, so they may well be doing what you should consider.

I prefer collecting unslabbed cards. For a while I'd just not ever bid on a slabbed card. Eventually I bought one, because it was going for less than I recalled ungraded ones... When I got the card, I broke him out of the slab. I've done it many times more, since then.

Slabbed cards resell better. Much better. They don't pick up dirt, grime, spilled coffee... the cards are safer. Some folks like how they display. And there's the set registry stuff.

Unslabbed cards are easier to move around. I can spread them out by series, sort them by team, by portrait. True, you can do that with slabbed cards, but not as easily. If you handle and examine the unslabbed cards it is easier to develop a degree of expertise in determining which cards are authentic, and which are bogus. Unslabbed, the cards store much easier. The cards fit in 9 or 15 space pages for a ring binder. Mine migrated from that to a small business card box, and they're stacked by team, not alphabetically. That is not an easy way to have them when you first deal with the white boarder set, but that seems to be how the cards were sorted years ago, and it is easier to follow the evolution of the set. I have over 500 T206s in the space that many collectors have 8 or 10 slabs.

I'd suggest getting a few cards both ways, and then figure out which style is best for you.

Here are the Chicago Cubs T206s.... difficult to do this with slabs.

Frank.