This past Saturday the local card store, Jerry's Rookie Shop, held their 20th Anniversary party. I am not usually one to attend events where there might be a lot of people, but there were quite a few prizes on offer and I've been trying to get out more anyway.
For the first couple of hours there were trivia contests and pack wars for t-shirts and hats, as well as time for everyone to make purchases in order to earn raffle tickets for the big prizes that were given away at the end. I bought two boxes of cards, one of 2013 Press Pass Racing and one of 2013 Bowman Chrome. There were people in there dropping hundreds and probably even thousands of dollars, so I wasn't sure how good my chances were of winning a prize.
To give the prizes out, Jerry lined up ten or so boxes across the counter, then drew raffle tickets. Each person who got their number called out received a playing card. Then Jerry's wife shuffled a matching set of playing cards and laid them face down on the prizes. Jerry flipped them over one by one and whoever had the matching card won that prize.
In the first round it got down to the last couple of tickets and I figured I would be missing out on a prize for that round, but then they called my number. After the randomization, I got a box of Bowman Chrome. There was quite a bit of different stuff on offer, but I was pretty happy with what I got. There was a nice Knowshon Moreno autographed mini-helmet that would have been nice to have for my cubicle, but it went to a Seattle Seahawks fan. The round had a kind of humorous ending, as a fairly young kid won a box of Benchwarmer Daizy Dukez cards, which feature provocative female models. Another adult traded him a box of football cards for it, so the kid and his mom were happy about that. It was interesting to see that there were quite a few kids at the party buying cards and participating, not just as tagalongs with their parents.
In the second round of prizes I beat the odds and my number came up again, so I came away with a box of 2013 Topps Archives Baseball. I felt a tiny twinge of guilt for coming away with two prizes when I am not exactly a regular customer there, but that guilt was buried under a healthy amount of glee at having a big pile of packs to unwrap. I will probably try to post some box breaks for everything I got at the party sometime soon.
In all I had a pretty good time. It was pretty crowded inside the shop and at times things kind of dragged on a little while everyone waited for the big prizes, but that's to be expected. I really ought to support the shop a bit more than I do, but it can be difficult to justify traveling out of the way and paying the higher prices they charge versus the internet guys and eBay.
Nice haul!
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