Sluggo and I headed out today to check out some, not really local to us, card shops. We drove out to Schererville to the Baseball Card Exchange (yes, that one), then went up the road to Dyer and checked out MFSC and then finally hit Dragons Lair: Cards and Comics in Portage before heading home.
Let's put it this way, we bought a bunch of stuff at Baseball Card Exchange and nothing at the other two. More Fun Sports Cards wasn't really organized very well and had no prices which to us, is a big deal. I don't want to ask every time I'm interested in a card. They had some stuff I was interested in but I didn't purchase (a couple of White Sox bobbleheads that I assume were probably stadium giveaways.) When we walked in, there were 4 or 5 guys standing around, chit chatting and eating pizza so right off the back, it seemed like a hang out, which I get, but it was very crowded right at the door.
Dragons Lair, come to find out, wasn't sports cards at all but more gaming which just isn't our thing. I found their Facebook page afterwards which would have told me that, guess I should have investigated a little further but my brother, who lives in the area, told us about it. If we were into that, it looked like a cool place. Organized with some gaming tables so I could see getting a bunch of like minded people there and having a good time. The nice thing is it's next to Schoop's so we at least got a good meal with it.
We'll go back to Baseball Card Exchange. The name sounded familiar to Sluggo but it didn't connect until we got there. After driving an hour and a half, we both had to use the restroom and asked if we could even though there was a sign that said no public restroom on the door. We promised we were customers and told them about the drive so he was cool and let us use it. When we went back to the restroom, we walked into the back room that was a warehouse full of shelves, full of boxes of cards. I'm talking a ton of cards. When we left, we looked up their website and sure enough, it's the company that authenticates vintage packs/boxes.
Back to the store. Very clean, organized, lots of different stuff. If I was willing to drop a bunch of money (I'm cheap), I would have dropped some cash on some autographed balls. They had a ton of HOF autographed balls. They had a lot of glass cases with all kinds of cards and some boxes of other stuff you can buy in lots and what we spent the most time on, was a 5 or 6 smaller boxes of autos & relics. Also a huge assortment of unopened packs and boxes.
The bulk of our purchase were these 2 boxes.
There was some great stuff in these boxes. I'm sure a company like BBCE didn't want to take the time to mess with these kinds of cards but it made for great inventory for our eventual store. I mean, look how packed these boxes are. By the way, we paid less than what's marked on the box because he cut a deal with us between these boxes and the singles we bought, for the store and ourselves, we spent a good chunk of cash.
I forgot to take a pic of the other box but it was 2 rows, just as packed as this one. We pulled out some hot players just to show off a little bit of what we pulled. First, from the boxed listed at $40.
All that and a huge amount of other great cards and that's just from the small box. The bigger box had some great stuff as well.
All that and hundreds more. I didn't show a lot of basketball but I guarantee there were some great cards from the NBA as well.
There were all kinds of SP's and Variations in those boxes. Definitely worth the money for us and not that we didn't already have a ton of inventory, but these boxes were too hard to pass up and I didn't even show the singles we picked up.
Looks like Sluggo's got lottery money to play with :)
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