Great stuff!
Incidentally, do any of you fellows collect the Topps or O-Pee-Chee display boxes?
I have only the 1958 box but I wish I had the others. I'm also missing the 1962, 1965 and 1968 wrappers plus I think one of the 1970 variants.
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I've never tried to collect wrappers/boxes, though I've managed to grab a couple of FBI boxes, which is the closest I've got. I've seen two 1971Bazooka complete boxes as well, and a 1956 Parkhurst (my holy grail, clearly) complete box that was sold on Classic 10-15 years ago now. What's the '58 box look like?
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The 1958 display box looks like this:
My litmus tests for differentiating card collectors from sports memorabilia collectors is that card collectors are set builders who go after checklists, wrappers and display boxes from card sets in addition to all the player cards. Moreover the last thing a card collector wants is for an athlete to deface his beloved card with an autograph! Meanwhile sports memorabilia collectors tend to focus on rookie and star cards.
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Here as well are scans of a card and wrapper from my 1958 Topps CFL card set:
And the same from my 1960 Topps CFL card set:
Both cards carry the words "PRINTED IN U.S.A." Meanwhile the 1958 wrapper carries the words "PRINTED IN CANADA" and they both have the words "(IN CANADA) MADE AND DISTRIBUTED (IN CANADA) BY O-PEE-CHEE CO." What can be concluded is that the card sheets were printed in the States, the wrapper sheets were printed in Canada and that the cutting of the cards and wrappers from the sheets and the wrapping of the resultant cards with a thin slab of Bazooka gum made in the O-Pee-Chee plant constituted the "making" of the card packs in Canada.
Now I hadn't seen any Bazooka gum on convenience store shelves in the Toronto to London area in more than twenty years. But earlier this week I saw a little box of nineteen briquettes of Bazooka gum in a specialty candy store:
Well it had the same flavour I remembered although perhaps not quite as strong and certainly a bit less sweet. So I read the fine print on the box. The Bazooka gum was made in far off Tunisia!
This made me sad. The bulk of all the gum I ate in the form of little briquettes, Bozo and other gum balls, and the slabs in card packs during my school years (right through university) was produced at the O-Pee-Chee plant on Adelaide Street in London just two miles as the crow flies from where I lived. Now even when I can find Bazooka it's produced overseas in Africa. Can't we make anything here in North America these days?
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Andrew Harris 2017-2021 Complete Upper Deck CFL Base Autograph Run
Well, at least somebody 3-Peated. Ha.
Congrats to The Legend.
I have a feeling that Andrew will call it a career before Upper Deck manages to make a card of him wearing a Toronto uniform.
The first cards I ever bought and collected as a kid were the 1959 CFL cards in the summer before second grade and I have very pleasant and distinct memories of where I bought and then stood to admire some of these cards. I was just west of Hartry's Grocery store on Elmwood Avenue in London while I was opening a couple of packs of cards that contained By Bailey and Sonny Homer. They were the first British Columbia Lions I'd managed to get so that memory has stayed with me to this very day. Similarly I remember being on Askin Street just east of Wharncliffe Road opening a pack of the 1960 CFL cards that I'd just bought at a green grocer's on Wharncliffe Road and getting a Russ Jackson card.
Conversely I remember discovering the new 1962 CFL cards at the downtown Metropolitan(Met) store on Dundas Street and excitedly buying three or four packs. I was then bitterly disappointed to discover that the packs contained panels of two black-and-white half size cards. Bummer.
But I was eating box after box of Post Sugar Crisp as well that summer trying to complete a set of the 1962 Post Cereal CFL cards. This was an effort doomed to failure since you couldn't get all the cards in the set unless you were willing to sample Post's entire line of cereals. Undaunted I was back to eating Sugar Crisp and Crispy Critters the following summer to get the 1963 edition of Post CFL cards.
I remember the excitement I felt in August of 1963 when I saw that the Krun-Chee Potato Chips at the News Depot on Dundas Street in downtown London (a regular haunt of mine on Saturdays) had CFL coins free inside! I wondered how long they'd been out since Krun-Chee Potato Chips weren't sold in too many London area stores. A few days later I was happy to discover (and a bit confused as well) that the Humpty Dumpty Potato Chips (also uncommon at the time) at Ken's Variety just a few blocks away from my house on Wharncliffe Road also contained these coins. I also remember pulling another one of these coins out of a bag of chips (I can't remember which brand) a week or so later on a family train trip to Toronto to visit relatives and take in the Canadian National Exhibition.
The real problem I had at the time though was that I was also buying DC superhero comics and my buddy Tony and I had earlier that summer embarked on a mission of collecting all bubble gum cards. (Quantity not condition was our focus.) I couldn't finance all those collecting activities at the same time so I didn't get too far with the 160 coin CFL set.
As a result, these 1963 CFL coins carry a big dollop of nostalgia for me. This set is tough and rather expensive to complete these days but I'd managed the feat in about the year 2000. But because I like these coins so much, about ten years ago I decided to break my set into two - English only backs and bilingual backs - just so I could continue collecting them. A very noble Canadian collecting venture if I do say so myself!
I've launched a more determined bid to complete both sets in the past few months. Here are scans of a couple of lots I've scored from a fellow near Edmonton:
These are the ones I still need:
1963 CFL Coins English backs
11 12 13 20 32 33 39 51 53 71 73 76 77 78 79 80 94 96 97 98 100 119 131 133
1963 CFL Coins Bilingual backs
2 3 14 15 16 17 18 19 28 35 54 55 59 60 64 70 72 82 87 93 101 102 106 107 108 109 112 113 114 115 116 119 120 124 128 130 132 135 136 137 138 140 141 143 146 147 151 152 153 155 156 160
Time to repost some of the posts in which all the pictures were lost at the time of the not-so great re-launch of this forum three years ago:
When it comes to trading cards I'm a completist, a set builder of the sharpest, whitest, brightest cards I can find. I'm tough on corners and toning but I'm easy on centering. I'll accept cards that are well off center so long as they are not miscut.
I collect them raw and unslabbed for three reasons. The first is that I've always collected cards raw ever since I was a little kid. Secondly, they're too bulky to store or even handle when slabbed. Thirdly, my grading priorities are not the same as those of the grading companies. I'm very tough on toning which they seem to ignore, but I'm easy on centering while they penalize off-center cards heavily.
My collection of non-sports cards ranges from the late 1940's to the mid 1970's - but the sets I most treasure are typically from the 1957-1965 period which coincides with those cards I remember accumulating as a kid.
The first cards to which I was exposed were the 1956 Hit Stars:
My older sister had brought a few home. She was looking for Yul Brynner, a search doomed to frustration since there was no Yul Brynner card in the set.
I also remember admiring Topps Flags of the World, TV Westerns and Zorro cards in the schoolyard.
The first cards I ever owned though were four 1958-59 Topps Hockey cards which I gathered off the street one January or February day in 1959. The first three were Detroit Red Wings, but the last was a Chicago Blackhawk. When I saw that big Indian head on the red uniform, I knew that was my favourite team - even though I might have had trouble reading the team name at the time!
I admired the 1959 baseball cards in the schoolyard, but the first cards I ever bought were the 1959 CFL cards like this one I have today:
These first few cards to which I was exposed left a lifelong imprint upon me. I ended up collecting the CFL, hockey and baseball cards most years thereafter until I graduated from grade eight in 1965.
I was well aware of the various non-sport sets such as Flags of the World, TV Westerns, Zorro, You'll Die Laughing and Funny Valentines that O-Pee-Chee was marketing in my corner of London, Ontario at the time (the Flags were probably remainders from 1956 that OPC had decided to redistribute), but the first non-sport cards I collected in a big way were the 1961 Leaf Spook Stories:
The 1962 Topps Civil War News cards came next:
The summer of 1963 was when I went big time, however. One of my buddies Anthony proposed that we pool our efforts and collections and just collect any card we could get our hands on. This was initially to his benefit because the 1963 baseball cards I had lying around dwarfed his meager stock. Nonetheless, over the ensuing two years Anthony and I amassed close to 4500 different cards. Needless to say, sheer numbers as opposed to condition was our defining priority.
Strangely enough though, we succeeded in gathering up most of the sports cards issued in our neck of the woods back to the 1960-61 hockey cards. But any cards older than these were very tough to find and we only had a very few examples from even sets as large as the 1960 baseball. In fact, coming across any pre-1961 cards in the schoolyard was such an uncommon occurrence that it seemed to be an almost magical event. And even today I feel the same sense of wonder, the same sense of magic, perusing the pre-1961 cards that I have even if they number in the hundreds and fill a binder!
Among the cards we managed to acquire was a wild but very curious one called "Hairy Fiend" which we got in a generic pack while trick or treating on Halloween. We'd never encountered any of this set before and without the wrapper didn't even know it was from a set called Mars Attacks. Nonetheless, it became our favourite card.
When I went off to boarding school in grade nine, I just turned my half interest in the cards we'd accumulated over to Anthony who was a grade behind me. Bad mistake. Within six months or so he too lost interest in the cards which were approaching 6500 in number at the time and gave them to Billy, the snot-nosed kid across the street. Anthony's thinking was that Billy would carry the torch so to speak and continue to build on the collection. To Anthony's horror and dismay though, Billy went and scrambled the cards in front of his eyes! That's right, he tossed the contents of the whole box up into the air just to watch every other little kid on the street scramble to get as many as he could! Anthony still grouses about that to this very day some 56 years later now.
I also collected the premium coins that were issued in jelly desserts and potato chips up until I graduated from grade school. The plastic Shirriff/Salada hockey coins, the Shirriff plastic baseball coins, the Jell-O/Hostess Aircraft Wheels , the Krun-Chee Fightin' Warships and the 1963 Humpty Dumpty/Krun-Chee CFL coins were the ones that drew my most avid interest - and dimes.
But you know the memory of these cards never left me. I'd often think back to my collecting days and wish I still had my CFL and other cards even when I was in my late teens but I thought that there was no way I could ever reassemble what I'd had as a kid. I thought they were all lost forever and could only live on in my dreams. Then came an article in the Canadian Magazine Saturday supplement to the newspaper. It featured Angelo Savelli of Hamilton, who was described as the world's biggest card collector with every card ever produced (much exaggerated of course). Angelo had evidently started buying sports cards in 1948 and never stopped. The article filled me with an incredible longing for the cards I'd once had, cards that I thought were now lost in the mists of time. Nostalgia/curiousity prompted me to buy a few packs of the 1971 CFL, 1971-72 NHL and 1972 CFL cards over the next year. (I actually felt a bit sheepish and embarrassed buying little kids' cards at the time!)
Flash forward a few years to 1979. I had finished university and had been working in Toronto for a couple of years. I discovered that the big city had four comic shops. Two of them carried old gum cards as well! The first sets I bought at the comic shops were Man from UNCLE, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the first two Funny Valentine sets. Shortly thereafter I discovered that the main comic shop in Hamilton also carried cards. When the proprietor pulled out NM (or so I thought at the time) sets of the 1959, 1960, 1963 and 1964 CFL cards, I could not reach for my wallet quickly enough! Prizes beyond belief! As was the Civil War News set he had and the You'll Die Laughing set I picked up a few weeks later at a comic show.
When I bought the first edition of Dr. Benjamin's Non-Sport Price Guide in the mid-1980's, I realized that the "Hairy Fiend" card we'd had twenty years before belonged to the notorious Mars Attacks set.
I've steadily added to my card collections since that time. I now have a fabulous collection of non-sports, CFL and hockey cards and I've even made inroads into baseball cards from the 1954-1965 period as well. I've also amassed one of the better collections around of those premium coins to which I referred earlier e.g. Shirriff hockey and baseball, Humpty Dumpty CFL, Fightin' Warships, Space, Rocky & Bullwinkle, etc.
I file my cards these days in binders by subject category. Here are a few of these binders:
CFL
Hockey
Baseball
Jack Davis
Monsters/Horror
Science Fiction
Superheroes - DC
Superheroes - Marvel & Other
War & Military Stuff
Coins
I used to feel an incredible sense of longing whenever I saw the type of old variety store at which I used to buy my cards and comics as a kid. No more though. My collection now of most cards is so far beyond what I dreamed of having as a kid that I've shed that sense of loss.
I also eventually met Angelo Savelli in the mid-1980's at a small card show in Toronto where he had set up to sell cards and he's now a friend of mine. But it was at the big annual Toronto Sportcard and Memorabilia Expo in 2002 or so where I saved one of his binders full of expensive hockey cards from the 1930's and 1940's from a thief. I noticed that a tall young fellow at the other end of Angie's table had scooped up what appeared to be one of Angie's binders and walked off briskly down the aisle. Angie himself was on the other side of the table and was in no position to give chase (besides I'm a lot fleeter of foot than Angie is nowadays) so I set off after the fellow myself. I caught him before he got to the door of the hall and said "Excuse me, but is that your binder?" Much to my surprise, the fellow just said no and shoved the binder into my hands. While I stood there gawking for a second or two, he swiftly made his exit through the door. Oh well. I'm not in the business of apprehending thieves anyway, but I'd managed the most important detail which was getting Angie's binder back for him.
Since Angie sold almost all his cards other than the hockey and CFL around the turn of the century and I've accumulated so many cards myself in the last forty+ years, I no longer envy Angie for his cards. How the circle turns!
But you know I still don't have a NM "Hairy Fiend" card.
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2021 SP Game Used CFL is released tomorrow (December 14). Just in time to be only a year late rather than 2. Prices are absolutely insane and I believe SPGU Hockey also comes out this week (may even be on the same day?); just before Christmas. Maybe they're hoping parents will spoil their kids...?
I'll try and get as many EE cards as I can, but considering how much singles will go for, I don't like my chances.
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Truthfully I don't/can't sympathize if one team collectors. That to me is being a team groupie as opposed to being a card collector. I'm the latter.
I wonder if the mods will remove this post of mine as well as so many of the others. Posting on this board can be an exercise in frustration as some/many posters seem to have learned that they can get posts with which they disagree removed by the simple expedient of flagging them for the mods.
2021 Upper Deck CFL Game Used SP
OK these cards are out, the first listings have begun to show up on ebay, let's take a look at the pricing and try to break down the early insanity...
Dustin Nielson opens a box live. $200ca per box?
So a /25 Greg Ellingson fabrics/patch card is the top score here. Let's just call this a patch card because, new name aside, that's what it is. A $50-$60 card for the first month upon release? Throw it up on ebay three months after release as a 99cent, 7-day auction and watch it sell for $11.69.
Out of the gate, I paid $65 for Ellingson's 2021 /25 patch card on ebay. The very next one that sold on there went for $7 & change US in either a 4 or 7 day auction.
5 random ebay listings.
"Limited" to 115 copies. In CFL card land, that might as well be 1000. I see a $15 auto card here.
The Harris auto card in the regular 2021 set is a tough, short-printed pull at 1:400 packs. I would speculate that the production #s of these two cards are very similar. A $60 card? I paid $40 and the last one that sold on ebay went for $30. For the #d/25 Gold Version of this card, $75-$100 would be realistic.
So if you pull a /99 jersey auto, the closest comparison would be un-numbered 2020-2021 jersey autos, if you pull a /25 patch auto version, the comparison would be 2020-2021 auto patches, except those are limited to 10, these are out of 25. Player considered, I'm seeing a $50-$60 card at absolute best. I paid $67 for Kamar Jordan's 2021 auto-patch #d/10. That's less than half the production of these.
These nameplate cards are completely hideous, but let's ignore that and focus on the limited to 7 part. Closest comparison with stuff they've already done is 2020-2021 auto patches numbered out of 10. Depending on team and player, those run between $60-$200. Because this is a Roughrider (one of two teams who's cards carry a premium because they have considerably more collectors than the other 7 teams), I'm seeing a $80-$100 card.
Limited to just 3. Closest comparison is going to be 2018-2021 Jumbo Patches limited to 2.
For now, I wouldn't touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole. If you're a league collector, at these prices, you're fooling yourself if you think you're going to make off with a big stack of high-end, #d/25 or less cards and spend less than $15,000 to $20,000 on the product. The prices are sure to tank in the future, the UD CFL collecting community is small and can't support this product at this price.
I agree with your advice. New product typically declines in price as collectors move on to the next "new" offering. Old-fashioned set builders seem to be a thing of the past quite simply because the card companies have made assembling a "master" set an impossibility.
I mainly have ticats cards but do have some cards of former ticats on other teams plus a card of another player im a fan of
No doubt collectors could likely afford the few that are around $34 but yeah $100/ $200 or so for one card is ridiculous
$100 for a UD CFL card #d/25 is borderline ridiculous.
The 2016 UD CFL "Script" Autograph set is numbered out of /25 & has a few cards that have at times, gone over $100.
$200 and up is rare air reserved for cards numbered out of 2 or 1.
Specific players and specific teams.
$400 to $700 for star/HOF-caliber players' 1/1 Logo Patches does happen. Been there, done that...and posted them all in this thread (three of them north of $700).
Meanwhile, here's the latest from ebay's entertainment division...
I just paid $60 for his 2021 Auto-patch numbered out of 10 this past week.
Only a few months ago, his 2021 Jumbo Patch numbered out of two fetched a meager $55 in ebay auction.
If there's anyone out there that would do $200, I'd be surprised.
Love me some Stanback though...
It's been fairly well established at this point that a 2-color Brandon Banks Ti-Cat patch numbered out of 25 is a $70 to $90 card.
Two box break.
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Yeah the cards are nice but unless its a 1/1 or 1/2 the prices are ridiculous. Glad only cfl cards i will need in the near future will be the 2022 cfl all star cards once there released since i will need Aaron Crawford and Lorenzo mauldin 2022 cfl all star cards .
None of those different 2021 chase cards pictured above by hoth look attractive to me. The 2021 Jersey and Patch cards (issued previously?) do look good to me though:
Through one week, I'm surprised by how much has been opened and listed for individual sale so far. Substantially more than either the 2020 UD or 2021 UD products at the start.
They could not have dropped this set at a worse time as far as I'm concerned.
The regular 2021 set has been out for 5 months now.
In 5 months, I've spent as much on 2021 UD as I spent on 2020 UD in two full years of collecting.
If I were to get into the SP, the soonest I could start would be March.
More likely, I'm going to skip this product with the possible exception of Bombers 1/1 patches & the Collaros #d/2 patch should any of these specific cards be put up for sale.
As well, after this 2021 SP release, I've lost interest in collecting cards #d/25 anymore. There's now too many such cards out there to bother, you'll never get anywhere with them unless you're sticking to one team only.
Moving forward, cards #d out of 10 or less is all I'll be collecting from Upper Deck. The #d/25 market is now impossibly flooded because of this set.
Here's an interesting error card I noticed in the SP set.
This would've and should've been Micah Johnson's first-ever jersey/patch card.
The problem is they stuck the wrong player's name & position on it.
You get Micah's picture but Jovon Johnson's name and position. Jovon retired after the 2018 season, yet his name is the one that appears on the checklist for this set, approaching 5 years after his retirement.
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Upper Deck CFL cards are the reason that I stopped collecting CFL cards. The league wide base set is now just an afterthought and no collectors are even interested in them anymore. It's all short prints, jersey cards, patch cards, autograph cards and they just keep adding more and more different variations to chase year after year, which totally ruined the hobby for me. Other than the odd card, who will want any of these SP cards purchased this year (at high prices) five years from now?
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Upper Deck is what drove me out of collecting NFL cards in 1998-1999 after 10 years.
In 1998 they debuted the SP Authentic line, which was the first super-SUPER premium set in NFL cards.
The Peyton Manning and Randy Moss rookie cards in that set were limited to 2000 copies each and a month or two into those guys' careers, those rookie cards were listed at $200 in Beckett's monthy guide. At the time, the most valuable rookie card from the previous 20 years of NFL card releases was Joe Montana's 1981 Topps which also listed at $200. I ended up getting both of those cards for $200. Twenty-four years later, I could expect to get $600-$800US for the Manning as it is, un-graded (and about double that amount if graded. It is a probable PSA 8). With Moss, I probably couldn't get much more than the $200 back without having it graded.
The following year, 1999, it got even worse. The top rookies were Ricky Williams, Edgerrin James, Dante Culpepper, Akili Smith & Cade McNown. The top set was Upper Deck's SPX. The cards were still numbered to 2000 but now autographed too.
When the first Beckett listing of 1999 SPX cards came out, these players cards were $400 each. Twenty-three years later, Edgerrin James is a Hall Of Famer, Williams had a decent career and the three QBs didn't amount to much. Today the James card can be had for under $200US in a PSA 9 holder.
I haven't watched an NFL game in 7 years.
1998 UD SP Authentic - the final year that an "average Joe" could afford to collect the top NFL rookie cards in the top NFL set of the season. Pictured : three Hall Of Famers and one of the biggest busts in NFL Draft history.
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It's never been about "values" or the money to me. I pay no attention to what my cards are 'worth" these days.
Cards lost most of their charm to me when they stopped being kids' stuff that was sold with bubble gum. When card manufacturers began to overwhelm the market with products and then gimmicks in the early 1990's, I realized that I couldn't have everything and decided to revert to precisely what I did as a kid - that being buy/collect only what looks "neat". So I now use a rifle shot approach when it comes to new card releases. If I like a design, I'll keep collecting the same set for years/decades even though I know I'll never get them all.
