I Found Some Allen & Ginter...

...but I'm not going to post any of the cards from it. While I was in class today the instructor mentioned a comic book shop while giving directions to another student. I asked about the comic book shop and he told me approximately where it was. I had also planned on going to a Maverick's Cards and Comics location nearby, so now I had two locations to check out. I went to Maverick's first. They had some pretty cool stuff in there, including quite a few LEGO kits and a pretty fair number of action figures, toys, statues and whatnot. On the way out I saw that they had boxes of 2016 Allen & Ginter for sale, but the price was a bit higher than I wanted to pay. I needed to get out of the shop and run the numbers a bit before committing.

So I went to the place the instructor had mentioned, Bell, Book and Comic. It was a pretty decent comic shop, as far as I could tell. They had a guest artist there signing a shop-exclusive comic book variant, so that made an already-cramped location even tighter. There were a few things that caught my eye, but nothing I absolutely had to have.

I went back and forth for a while and finally decided to just get a box of Allen & Ginter from Maverick's. After tax it was about 32% more than the delivered price on the cheapest boxes on eBay and about 14% more than the delivered price on boxes from the big-name online retailers, but I wanted my A&G fix NOW, and I ponied up the extra to get it done.

I won't say much about the box I got, as it's probably the only box of A&G I will get this year and that means I have to save it to score for Gint-a-Cuffs. Unless there is some miracle, I do not think I will have a chance at winning Gint-a-Cuffs this year. If my recollection is correct, you need over 200 points most years to win, and I am guessing that my box will finish well under the 200 mark, maybe in the 135-150 range. I did pull one hit that seems to be doing well on eBay right now, and I am hoping that I can flip it quickly and at least recoup the cost of the box. I wasn't very impressed with the rest of the box. Maybe I am just jaded after my three years back in the hobby. I guess at the moment busting packs feels a little empty to me. I could pick up probably all the singles I want from this set for the price I paid for the box, and the box didn't really yield anything PC-worthy. I was lucky to pull a decent hit, but if I hadn't pulled that card I would have felt really bad about this purchase instead of merely ambivalent.

Here is a card I got on eBay for much less than a case hit should sell for. It's another Members Only parallel from 2014 Topps Stadium Club. Pedro Alvarez isn't all that popular these days, which is something that seems to happen when a low-average power bat becomes just a low-average bat. I am just happy to add another of these Members Only parallels to my collection. They rarely show up these days, and I pounce on them when I can.