You Can Buy Cards on the Internet Now

For some reason, I've always had an aversion to buying single cards. Sure, I love going through the nickel and dime boxes at card shows, but when it comes down to coldly selecting that I was already searching for and paying an allotted amount of money for them (i.e. market value), something about the whole process leaves me cold. Part of the reason I buy cards, I guess, is for a little mystery and intrigue. And then the buyer's remorse sets in.

I recently had my first experience with COMC.com. There were bargains to be had, and even some oddballs I didn't know anything about. I've actually known about the site for about as long as this blog has been around (nearly 5 years!) as they're from the northwest and occasionally send a rep down to the local card show. I built up a little invoice of just a bit more than it costs to purchase a blaster, including two cards not pictured here that I gave to Erin. Overall, I was really impressed with the variety of cards available and the communication (those invoices are something else) from the website itself. The prices weren't bad, either! This isn't something I can afford to do a lot, because once I got going on purchases it was really hard to stop. In the end, I ended up with a lot of things I probably would have either never tracked down on my own through trades and whatnot, plus some memorabilia cards that I could have paid a lot more for elsewhere.

This card is from the still elusive 2008 Topps 50th Anniversary rookie cup set that I've been trying to collect forever. I should have bought two of them, in hindsight, because this is going to go straight in my Ozzie binder instead of my set binder. It remains on the want list.

I snagged a couple of oddballs that I knew nothing about, from some sort of Pepsi 2007 Topps set. I am only showing the back of the card because the front looks the same as any other 2007 Topps Jim Edmonds card.

I don't know if these were a regional issue or something that you could find a version of for every card in the set. They look the same as the "red back" parallels (red names and card numbers) except for the addition of the "P" to the card number. Kind of boring, really, but still very necessary.

Again, you only get the back of this card because a scanned image of the front would look like any ol' 1986 Topps Ozzie Smith All-Star card. This is a Tiffany version, of which supposedly only 5000 were printed. I consider this a steal at $1, as many of the other Tiffany cards they had were more expensive. I was lucky enough to get a stash of Tiffany cards in an eBay auction from the 1990 set, but I am still lacking the Ozzie Smith cards from that set. I guess I should start adding these to the want lists even though they're tough to find.

Here's another oddity I didn't really know about until recently. Apparently there's a Donruss "Learning Series" that consists of cards that were distributed to classrooms bearing the same overall design as an extremely plentiful design. You could probably fill the Grand Canyon with all of the 1990 Donruss cards that were printed, so it makes me wonder how many of these went home with kids, got mixed up with the nominally worthless 1990 baseball card stuff and were just destroyed. Now, if only I could track down some cards from that pesky 1990 Fleer Canadian set.

I've always loved these old Kellogg's cards, but have owned very few of them in my time.

I think these are the only two years that Ozzie Smith Kellogg's cards were made. They are both mine now. Mine!

Moving things ahead a few decades, here's one of those rare short printed variations from a recent Topps set. I have very, very few of these, which is frustrating to me. There are quite a few that I would like to own. I actually just pulled a Richie Ashburn 2010 Topps SP card from a pack, so I might have to see if there's anyone out there who wants to swap annoyingly short printed legends.

Also available for a nice price was this Ozzie Smith bat card from the 2011 Topps set. Ozzie wasn't known for his bat exactly, except for a few amazing and dramatic moments, but I love bat cards just the same.

Finally, I freed a couple of abominations from the clutches of the COMC warehouse. Upper Deck decided to create not one but two cards of Jim Edmonds (that I know of) that would be certain to please almost nobody at all. Presumably, you got an old swatch of a Jimmy jersey from his Cardinals days plastered on a card with Cubs logos all over it.

Here's the other one. To really hammer in their point, they did it again in 2009 on their retrospective set. Edmonds was only halfway done with his tour of the NL Central, unfortunately, so I'm curious to see what else is out there after he was traded away from St. Louis.