OT but front page worthy Jordan card ebay

[rhettyeakley]

I collect some modern cards with my son and we enjoy opening packs and it is a lot of fun. The modern hobby actually spends a lot of time and effort to include players from yesteryear in their products, which I actually like and think is overall pretty good for the health of the hobby. Because of this my son has become a big Ken Griffey Jr fan just as I was when I was younger.

The modern hobby is a fun one but it is VERY expensive. Most boxes worth bothering with run $80-120 to start and most of the time the cards you get would not recoup even a small portion of that money. You end up with about 80-100 base cards, 10-15 insert cards that rarely sell for more than a few bucks, and maybe a minor hit or two (jersey cards & sticker-on-card autos are NOT popular as the thing now is limited parallel numbered versions of autographed cards... but only of the handful of super collected players). For example I purchased my son a box of 2018 Gypsy Queen at the National (probably my favorite of the modern retro-style sets up until they stopped doing the mini parallels) and we opened the packs when I got home and he was super excited when he got a pretty limited Ozzie Albies RC #ed to 50 B&W image w/Certified Autograph. Pretty exciting... until we went on ebay to see what they were "going for" and saw that even with a pretty decent hit in our box we barely would pay for the box with that card. Again, we had fun and that is why we did it but it illustrates the point to a degree.

I think this last point is my admittedly-personal problem with the modern hobby... way too much semi-worthless stuff and only a few "real" hits to be had in any given product, IF there even are hits in an entire product line. It feels more like going to the local gas station and buying some scratch-off lottery tickets.

An example of this was the last H&S Auction Lot #1198...
https://hugginsandscott.com/cgi-bin/...l?itemid=34308
I can only imagine the amount of money spent to get that many "hits" and the VAST majority of items in modern products, even the hits are problematic to sell or try to get anything out of.

I am not dogging on modern, I enjoy opening packs with my son and will continue to do so as we are both baseball fans BUT it is easy to see why some get sick of getting burned on so many modern products chasing the impossible cards that actually sell for the crazy prices we see at auction.