The National : Part 1

 I'm back from my trip to the National!  You may be thinking, "Wasn't that 2 weeks ago?  I've already consumed all the National content I need.  This is old news!"  You're not wrong, but we tacked on a trip to visit the family afterwards and I have only now reached home.

Now comes the time where I finally dig through my finds, my trade bait, and everything else.  I'll categorize, sort and collate them.  I'll update my checklists, and feel that wonderful sense of satisfaction  when I add the 3 new George Kittle cards (yay!) along with 100 or so new cards made since I last update and somehow my overall percentage drops (gah!)  That's why its fun to find cards of older less popular players because there is nowhere but up to go for that %.

Anyway, it was a good show this year.  I met my brother there on Thursday and stayed through Sunday morning.  It was nice to hang with him (first time since the pandemic!)  and thousands of our closest friends.

There are so many things about The National that you won't see anywhere else, and tons of people have blogged about their experiences there.  Here are just a few of my observations, in no particular order.

1. Any expensive/rare card you've dreamt of is probably there.  Cards from the 1800's.  Michael Jordan rookies.  Everything Mantle.  Its fun to just look around and see this history that has been maintained.  I may not get excited about the grading market, but I do appreciate that we can capture a moment with a card.

2. Card collecting can be expensive!  I mean, not earth shattering news, but you really do get the full experience being there. At one table, I see two Michael Jordan cards (yes autos and such) but with serial numbers 25 and above listed for $145 grand!  Dear readers, I've been told that a beach house will need to be purchased for my wife before I get anywhere near those.

3. Now if I had those two cards, I'd center them in a glass case and have people marvel at them and hope somebody cracks out the wallet for one of them.  Yet at the National, they sit in a full case with tons of other cards I could never dream to own.  The amount of "on paper" value at these tables is crazy.

4. The market is volatile. Dealers left so many cards unpriced, and when asked for what they wanted on something they would literally check eBay for latest sales.  

5. If you want a Trout Topps Update RC, you can definitely find one.  I happen to have the Walmart Blue version of it, and was looking at each of the tables to find one there and gauge some value on it. (Found one, unpriced of course)  Almost every single table that had modern cards had the Trout RC.

6. There were not many dime boxes.  There was a couple of places with 5 cent boxes, but mostly we were talking 50 cent boxes with a few 25 cent boxes.  I pounded those hard and did well

7. The wrapper redemptions this year from Topps and Panini were different.  Topps offered a pack on their latest releases, and most packs were hitless.  Panini offered backs on one baseball, one football, one basketball, one soccer and one UFC.  The football box wasn't even 2021, but Chronicles from 2020.  However, the pack contained two cards numbered to 50 or less so they became pretty hot.  That Chronicles box went from $100 Wednesday to $150 by Saturday.  Dave and Adams were buying fat silver packs (ones with a jersey hit) for $60 and $40 for all other silver packs.  

8. Most everyone had a case with them with their high value graded cards.  I had a backpack with containers of quarter cards.

9. I was glad to see kids there, but also saw a kid not much older than 12 negotiate a card from $4000 to $3500 and plop the cash down from his roll and wondered so much about how different things are from when I grew up.  I was a child of the junk wax era, so none of this made sense.  Its hard to talk about this without sounding like the old man telling you how things were better in my day, when in fact we got that same speech when we were kids.  "Back in my day we used to put our cards in the spoke of our tires, and keep them all in a shoebox, not those fancy containers you have now."  The kids just collect different today then when I collected, just like it was different for the previous generation.

So that's my general thoughts.  I'm starting to get through my cards and hopefully will be starting to post what I got in the next few posts.  I'm unsure if I'll go to Atlantic City next year, but after this year I'm hoping yes!