People, Please Learn From Me.

If you're like me you subscribe to a zillion baseball card blogs and read through them on google reader.  I look at every post, but some I spend more time on than others due to time constraints.  Please feel free to quickly pass over this post as well, but before you do, please make a note on buying baseball cards:

"Be patient, the costs will come down."

I became acutely aware of this maxim from my time on eTopps, and should have kept this in mind with cardboard.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule.   But in general I'd say it holds true.  Case in point, the master set of 2012 Bowman I bought a few weeks ago.

You can count me as a fan of Bowman.  I like getting cards of prospects, especially ones that I will get to see come through and play against the Naturals here in NW Arkansas.  I thought this year's Bowman design was nice, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time building the set through blasters and trades.   Complete sets of 2012 Bowman were being sold for around $60 on eBay, and I thought that would be the way to go.   I don't know what my hurry was, but I jumped in on the bidding for a set and wound up winning one for $55.  This included the 220 card base set, 110 card prospect set and 110 card Chrome prospect set.   I thought it seemed like a reasonable price.

That was about three weeks ago.  Fast forward to this week and I see this same set is available as a "Buy it Now" for $25 shipped.  Worse, the past few auctions I've tracked have seen this set sell for under $20 shipped.  Basically, I could have had 3 for the price I paid.    I hope I can remember this lesson (I'll apply it to Topps Archives and see if I'm right).