Best Scam Idea Ever

I was talking to this dude at work today, and somehow, the subject of trading cards came up. On one end was me with my bullshit football cards and on the other was him and his extremely bullshit Magic: The Gathering cards. (Think Dungeons & Dragons, but without the use of thought or imagination, and yet still somehow way nerdier.) He was trying to make a point about how valuable the cards were, and dropped some bullshit line about some special Magic, Duel Masters, Yu-Gi-Blah, or whatever card being worth a million dollars. I called bullshit on that immediately, since it would be beyond insane for a ten year old or newer card from a card game to be worth more than the T206 Honus Fucking Wagner card. He countered by saying that the reason was that it was one-of-a-kind, to which I simply replied that it doesn't have an actual set value then, since it's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, there have been lots of 1/1 cards made in the last few years, and none have gone for anywhere near that much. Granted, certain people are willing to pay a lot for stuff from collectible card games, but a million is ridiculous for reasons I was too nice to say out loud. What I wanted to say was that those games are designed for twelve year old kids, and twelve year olds tend to not have that kind of cash, due to labor laws, and a fully-grown adult whose life was enough of a ruin to want to spend large amounts of money on a game for twelve year olds would typically be someone who didn't make $18,000 a year, much less seven figures. And this guy I was talking to was a grown-ass man who does in fact spend large amounts of money on a game for twelve year olds and does in fact make less than $18 grand a year. Also, I didn't say that out loud, because I'm in a hella-glass house here. I mean, even if my monthly football card spending is typically around forty bucks, as opposed to the hundreds that guy blows on his own downfall, it's not as if collecting football cards is the highly-intellectual pursuit of virile masters of humanity.

But back to the point about valuable collectible card game type cards, I did stop and think that if stunted man-children like that can afford like two thousand for an Ebay-bought Playstation 3, they can probably scrape up quite a bit for Magic cards, so I did concede the point that someone would spend as much as a few grand on one of those things. Which is pretty retarded if you think about it. I mean, in sports cards, a lot has to go right for the card to be valuable. First and foremost, the player has to do well, which is completely out of the card companies' control. Like if Reggie Bush blows out both knees and is the drizzling shits for the rest of his short career, all those high-dollar cards of his will turn as worthless as all those Ricky Ervins, Penny Hardaway, and Pat Falloon cards your dumb ass spent so much money on in the early nineties. Second, the card itself has to be rare. Okay, that's not too hard; hell that makes it easier. But third, there has to be some other special condition to make people want the card. Maybe it's a swiftly-corrected error card, but that's usually not enough to do the job in the post-Fuckface era. The more likely situation these days is that it has an autograph or one or more pieces of some part of his equipment stuck to the card, or maybe even both. That shit costs money. And if it's one of those crazy cards with stuff like that from four guys, with two of them having played in the 20s and having died in the 70s, that costs HUGE money. All a card game card has to do to be worth big money is to be rare. That's all. A thousand-dollar Yu-Gi-Nagata card takes just as much trouble to make as a forty-cent common in a Donruss baseball set. The hell, man.

But this got me to thinking further, and I concocted the ultimate scam. So if you're reading this and you have connections to whoever makes Magic and Yogi-Bear cards, you should totally give them this idea. Step one: Make a card. And only make one copy, and make it where playing the card means you instantly win the game. Like you get the power up and win the game, and the other guy dies or whatever. Step two: Hype it up huge in all the magazines as the super ultimate one-of-a-kind chase card to end all chase cards, and get people totally pumped up to be the one to find that card. Step three, and this is important: For the love of God, don't put that card in the packs. Just hang on to it. Step four: Wait a while. Step five: Get an Ebay account under an alias that can't be connected to your card company and sell that bitch for like hella-thousands. Step six: Once you've spent your thousands on donuts and whores, repeat steps one through five. It's the secret to unlock nonstop cash money.

I am nothing if not the perfect criminal.

Review: 1990 Fleer

"Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in." - Al Pacino as Michael Corleone

It had been a while. While my interest in pro football remained as high as always, my interest in stupid pieces of thick paper had waned. I only bought a few packs of 1988 Topps, and by 1989, I was out of the hobby altogether, which was my bad for missing one of the most important years the business would ever have. (As well as missing a chance at the '89 Score Barry Sanders) But as I was starting to get too old to spend my money on toys, I had to have something else to throw the stuff away on. But video games were too expensive (Which reminds me, someday on one of the other bloggity things, I need to tell the horror story of my botched acquisition of Super Mario Bros. 3.) and I really had no desire to buy tapes at the time. (Because CDs were mystical strange things at the time, and even a crappy CD player cost at least like $100.) And there I was, with about twenty bucks of allowance to blow every month. What was I going to do with all this money? And in the Cleveland, Mississippi K-Mart, I found the answer:

What manner of witchcraft was this? Football cards? By FLEER!? Don't they know that only Topps can make those? Keep in mind that I had missed the entire festivities of 1989, so the thought of another brand doing football was strange to me, much less the thought of FIVE of them doing it. (For those of you who had better things to buy, Pro Set and Score debuted in 1989, and Action Packed joined the fun in 1990.) So there I was, with like two dollars in my hands, so I dropped about a buck ten and got a couple of packs. How could I not? I mean, it was the Premiere Edition! The first! That means they had to be worth a lot of money someday! Heh...


Now, with the benefit of hindsight and fifteen years of technological advances, it's funny to think just how far cards have come, especially when compared to how sad things were back in the old days. I mean, today a set like 1990 Fleer would seem quaint and charming with its caveman-like printing technologies. But back then, with me never having seen the higher-quality stuff Pro Set had been doing or the crazy bizarre shit Action Packed was about to unleash on the general public, these cards were a revelation. The card backs had more than three colors! And a PICTURE of the player! How crazy is that? And the fronts of the cards... They were smooth! Not like that lumpy crap Topps had always put out. Of course, Donruss, (who took a bizarrely long time to get into the football game) Fleer, and Score had higher quality stuff for years, but this was exciting and new for football. And hell, I don't think Fleer put player pictures on the baseball card backs until 1991 or so. But fast-forwarding to the present day, these were really not all that bad looking. The silver football is kind of busy, and there were some odd color choices, like the green on Washington Redskins cards, but they made it work somehow. It was certainly better than the disaster of the 1991 Fleer design, which I'll probably cover on here soon.


As far as player selection, overall, it wasn't too bad, but there was one huge problem. One of the things card companies had started to do (which, once again, was new and exciting to me since I had missed 1989) was to make cards of players drafted that year, before they had ever suited up in an NFL game. It's funny to think that such a thing was ever a novel concept, when it's damn near what the entire hobby is based on now. But making sure to not make the mistake Topps had made the year before, Fleer put draft picks in their set. Four of them. Yes, just four. But maybe they made up for quantity with quality, right? Well, as far as they knew when they originally made the set, yeah. But with even two years of hindsight? Oh god. Jeff George. Blair Thomas. Percy Snow. Andre Ware. Oh... Oh god.
Granted, they would eventually make up for the blunder with the 1990 Fleer Update, which was a damn-near impossible to find 120 card set with guys like Junior Seau, Rob Moore, and Emmitt Smith included, but it didn't help those of us who spent tens of tens of dollars on the main set. Especially since - like basically everything anyone put out in the early 90s - the 1990 Fleer regular set was overprinted to hell and back, eliminating even the slightest shadow of a hope of any of it ever being worth any money at all. I think the Rich Gannon rookie and a few of the usual suspects like Sanders, Marino, Elway, and Montana top the one-dollar mark, but there's not much past that. Nowadays, the entire set goes for about ten bucks, which is probably a bit generous. Bummer.

Speaking of value bummers, then there was the Fleer All Pro insert set. A set like this, being one that wasn't always a one-per-pack deal, (I think rack packs had one, though.) was something that really had never been done before, at least where football was concerned. Getting an All Pro in your pack was a big deal, and I and everyone else I knew who collected cards (Which was basically my brother and this dude Michael) valued those suckers like gold. Also, Beckett never listed them in the price guides, which added a strange sense of mystery to it all. So imagine our dismay when someone got one of those thick-ass yearly price guides that listed everything, and we found out that the goddamn things were basically worthless. Well, actually, they've increased in value over the years, but they're currently valued at 1.2 times the value of the guy's standard-issue card, which still means that the most valuable ones (Barry Sanders and Joe Montana) are worth like a dollar fifty, and half the set are still about a nickel apiece. Fuuuuuck.

The 1990 Fleer set probably sucks in the eyes of most collectors now, and they're probably right, for the most part. But with this being the one set I was determined to complete in 1990, (and I fell WAY short, although I think my brother got everything but a few All Pros) and with it being such a significant part of my spare time that year, this is probably my favorite set of 1990. That's basically how I remember that year: Sitting around, flipping through a yellow notebook of 1990 Fleer cards with spaces here and there for stuff I hadn't found yet, while someone around me was probably playing "Gamma World" (Think "Dungeons & Dragons," except with post-apocalyptic mutants instead of stuff from The Hobbit.) and listening to Seasons in the Abyss.
Good times. Sort of.

CARDBOARD DOWNFALL: THE INTRODUCTION

I believe that everybody's got a downfall, but not everybody finds theirs. Maybe they miss the school bus on the day they would have started hanging out with the kid who got them hooked on crack. Maybe they see an ad in the paper that they normally would have missed that somehow leads them on a path that doesn't involve being eaten by a bear. Who knows. But it ain't like that for me. I know what my downfall is; I've faced it, I've embraced it, I've spent thousands of dollars on it, and eagerly await the day when it sucks me into whatever dark abyss is waiting for me.

It all began as an innocent thing. Twenty years ago - 1987, if you suck at math - me and the rest of my family were on the way to go hang out with my uncle and do whatever it was that I can't remember doing when we went to hang out with my uncle. On the way, though, we took a detour to the Dodge's Store in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm not sure if you have those where you live, what with you being anonymous internet types for the most part, so if you were wondering, that's like a gas station, but with better fried chicken and a variation on a hot dog called a "Didger Dog" that my mom once told me I shouldn't eat, because one had made the uncle I mentioned earlier sick as hell one time. But gasoline, chicken, and hot dogs of questionable digestibility weren't all they had there. And on that day, the seven (or maybe six, I dunno, but I believe it was during the summer, which could mean seven) year old version of me headed down the candy aisle to look at tooth-rottening bullshit to pick out which item I was going to try and beg my dad to buy me, and it was there that I saw it. My downfall:

Fifteen cards. Fifty cents. Twenty years.

The crazy thing is that I can actually still remember some of the cards that came in that first pack of 1987 Topps. ("The Real One," in case you didn't know.) Hell, I even still have a few of them somewhere. But I can clearly remember Keith Millard, Gary Hogeboom, the special glossy "1,000 Yard Club" card of Al Toon, and what would eventually be an eleven-dollar Jerry Rice. The Rice should have been what got me, but it wasn't. It was The Fridge. William Perry, to the uncultured. I was only a year removed from doing the Super Bowl Shuffle, and the goofy, snaggle-toothed grin on card #55 was the siren's song that lured me in and eventually made the Fleer company a ton of money they didn't deserve, which is a story I'll get to later. But from that point on, aside from pauses in 1989 and a period between 1998 and 2005, I would both cherish and regret the day Refrigerator Perry took advantage of a small boy.

In the days, weeks, and months to come, until I get bored with this thing, I'll try to tell you the tale of my losing battle with addiction. I'll tell you of the highs and lows of my $10-a-week habit, of the joys of finding that hot new rookie card, the heartbreak of creases, and why Ricky Ervins can kiss my ass.

I got nothing better to do.