Have you seen what the baseball card price is of late on the high end items?  Boxes can fetch up $800.00 and then some, and guess what they only have 1 pack of anywhere from three to five cards.  Now granted those boxes can produce a card in the $10,000.00 range, but even those are far and few between, and they make them every year, so are they really something that will hold a value once it passes that “I have got to have it!” stage, and really how many people can afford it?

Sure they still make the $45.00 boxes, and you can walk into any Walmart or Target and get blister boxes of most of today’s products, excluding the high end products, but most of the time, if you are not buying hobby certified products from a dealer you are wasting your time.  The hits or hot cards just are not the same.  Although I will tell you a story of 1 time when I caught lightning in a bottle.  The year was 2001 and everyone was hitting the Toys R Us, Targets, and Walmart hard as the word was spreading of that guy called Pujols.  As you could imagine, the product was drying up fast and talk of the Bowman Chrome was not spicy as it continues to this day.

So I set out to find him in other sets, and I tried the Toys R Us nearest to me at the time and purchased 22 boxes of Topps Reserve, Topps Chrome, Leaf  Stars and Rookies, and Upper Deck Authentic.  My quest for Albert Pujols netted me, (2) of the Leaf Stars and Rookies, (1) Topps Chrome, and (2) Topps Reserves baseballs and (1) of them was the Albert Pujols.  I did however catch the lightning, but not with those before mentioned.  I was able to pull a piece of the 7th No-hitter that Nolan Ryan threw, in the 2001 Leaf product.  It quickly netted me $980.00 on eBay, more than the baseball card price posted by Beckett Publications at the time which was $550.00!  So there are some gems out there in Blister packs, but I can tell you that over my 10 years plus of purchasing them from time to time, the lightning has fizzled to a tiny spark.

I recommend that young collectors that want to start a collection, check the baseball card prices of cards from yesteryear and start there.  You may be surprised how cheap you may find some of these cards on various engines on the web, and do not be afraid to bargain with people over the baseball card price.  I have found that people that need to sell are always looking to deal.  Just a thought, keep on collecting.