Friday, March 11, 2011

Oddester Card Yet

In my quest to fill out a Paul Blair player collection, I keep my eye on EBay. If anything I don't have pops up, the first thing I do is see if it is already available at COMC or Sportlots. If it isn't, I make the decision whether I am going to bid or not based on a number of factors including, but not necessarily limited to asking price/current high bid and the perceived rarity of the card. I generally end up only buying rare or odd cards by that mean. I had thought that a baseball/poker card was about as odd as it would get. I was wrong. I present to you the 2008 Tristar Signa Cuts Paul Blair: This card comes with a little tangential back-story. I found this card on EBay in January during my early, less discriminating phase of collecting. I won the auction for less than $4, including shipping. But, a funny thing happened. It never showed up. One week passed. Two weeks passed. Nothing. So I contacted the seller, but I got no response. I waited another week, then opened a case with EBay. The first step was to contact the seller again, which I did. Still no response. So, after 4 weeks, I got my refund. By this time, the seller was accumulating negative feedback for non-delivery. He went from 100% positive feedback to 75% in short period of time. I figured something tragic, or at a minimum, unfortunate happened, and moved on without adding my voice to the chorus of oppressed buyers. I got my money back, and the guy is now basically a non-entity on EBay, so I didn't feel any need to dance on grave of the seller, figuratively speaking (or maybe not.) Then, another funny thing happened. Yesterday, several weeks after I got my refund and forgot about this card, it showed up without explanation. I guess something unfortunate did happen and I applaud the person for trying to make it right. But, I got to tell you that this card is not worth the $3.76 it almost cost me. Let me tell you what this card is. Tristar took a 2001 Fleer Greats of the Game card, got it autographed, cut off the bottom of the card so all you can see is Blair's waist and elbow, pasted the remnant onto another card, and gave it a purple glitter border. I have said that my reaction to the 2011 Topps Diamond Parallels was that it looked like they were trying to capture the eight year old girl demographic by throwing glitter on the cards. But, wow, this card has actual glitter on it. It looks like it was made by an eight year old girl. I am amazed at the awfulness of this card. I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to collect these cards. I suppose there is someone out there who does, but I prefer not to think of it. You can barely see it, but at the bottom, this card is marked 1/1. Mercifully, it is the only such card in existence. I will now slip it into my Blair binder and never let it see the light of day again. You don't need to thank me.

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