What eBay Hath Wrought 12: Numbered out of 199, er, 198

I got a couple more lots of Gold parallels from 2013 Topps Archives. bringing me up to 48/200 on the set, or 24% of the checklist. There was a guy on eBay selling 170 of them for around $630, but I can't find the listing anymore. I am thinking I can put the set together for quite a bit cheaper than the $3.70/card he was asking, but I know that Mike Trout card will present an issue for me. I think his lot did include the Trout, which depending on your perspective, could have made the lot a good deal. The Bryce Harper card is pretty spendy, too. I've seen the Trout trading for $20-30 on eBay (although I saw one in the Completed Auction listing that for some reason made it under the radar at around $3 plus shipping) and the Harper seems to go for around $20. 

The Ike Davis is a double, which I will hopefully be able to use to recoup some of the cost of building the set once I've got enough cards put together to send to COMC.

The reason for the title of my post, though, is that one of the lots was shipped in a bubble mailer and one of those little team set bags, with no cardboard or toploaders or anything to protect the cards, so the populations of Prince Fielder, Hanley Ramirez, and R.A. Dickey Gold parallels have all been reduced by one due to crushed corners. In the scan the damage to the Prince Fielder seems especially evident, although in reality the Dickey cards has the most damage to it. They were the back and front cards in the stack respectively, and took most of the job of protecting the other cards. Han-Ram's card is not so damaged that I will keep it out of my set binder, but I would feel uncomfortable sending it out to someone else without a disclaimer. I've opened a dispute with the seller on eBay, so I will hopefully at least be getting a partial refund to help me replace the damaged cards. I've received about a billion toploaders and bits of cardboard through my trades and eBay traffic, so it seems that anyone who deals in cards would have access to a similar pile of packing material. It seems like cheapness or laziness ruled the day here.

In spite of the carnage I was still able to fill quite a few holes in the set and get that much closer to finishing it out. One of my favorite sub-collections within this collection are cards whose serial numbers match the card's set number. I don't seek them out particularly or pay a premium for them, but it's fun when they fall into my hands. So far I have 4 of them (Chase Headley, Josh Reddick, Coco Crisp, and Willie Stargell). None came to me in this most recent bunch of cards, but I am always on the lookout for cards with matching card numbers or the first and last number of the run, or even ones numbered 198/199, which I enjoy getting for some reason almost as much as I like 199/199.

As a side note, since the writing of this post, the seller of the damaged cards has offered a full refund, and I responded by requesting just 3/7 of the auction cost, as the other four cards remained intact through the shipping process.