90's Insert Sets...The Good Ol' Days...

predatorkj said:

The oddest thing in the world to me (and it still ranks pretty high up there to this day) was being able to go to K-Mart back when I was still in High School in the late 90's and buy packs of cards and actually be able to at the least, quadruple your money.I only purchased about 40 packs total(I went on a mini binge)over a month or so of all sorts of brands and I was pulling stuff left and right that booked for crazy amounts.At that time I had spent about $60-$75.This was when packs were still pretty cheap and even base cards were still selling well.I still collected Magic The Gathering (yeah I used to play it) at the time so I took all my cards in(which wasn't a whole lot) and was able to get about $250-$300 worth of magic cards(the worth depends on whether you went by Scrye or Inquest).All for less than $100.

Whats even weirder is the Magic cards were and still are worth way more than anything I had and I was actually able to recoup just about every baseball card I had that was valuable at the time for way cheaper over the last few years.I guess things have changed though because packs aren't $1.59 anymore and even the ones that are cheap yeild pretty much nothing in return.But if you go to a store and spend less than $2 and open up the pack to find a $60 card staring back at your face...its incredible.I miss Pacific.

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uniquebaseballcards said:

The quadrupling your money thing was definitely true and it helped to fuel the GU, grading, auto and (especially) prospecting crazes that followed it. Looking at 1997-1998 price guides is a real eye-opener and almost all of these prices have gone down about 90% since then.

I don't know about quadrupling, I guess in a sense...there were definitely some good products... I remember buying say 7-10 packs for $20. I would pull some insert of Griffey and trade it in for 10 more packs (something else)....hit something and trade that in...I would walk out of there with a few minor inserts and about $80 dollars worth of "packs" which in reality, after trading away the good cards, were a bunch of commons. Yes I quadrupled my pack purchase $80 for $20, but I usually had less than $20 of cards to show for it.

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gwynn5453l4u said:

uniquebaseballcards said:

The quadrupling your money thing was definitely true and it helped to fuel the GU, grading, auto and (especially) prospecting crazes that followed it. Looking at 1997-1998 price guides is a real eye-opener and almost all of these prices have gone down about 90% since then.

I don't know about quadrupling, I guess in a sense...there were definitely some good products... I remember buying say 7-10 packs for $20. I would pull some insert of Griffey and trade it in for 10 more packs (something else)....hit something and trade that in...I would walk out of there with a few minor inserts and about $80 dollars worth of "packs" which in reality, after trading away the good cards, were a bunch of commons. Yes I quadrupled my pack purchase $80 for $20, but I usually had less than $20 of cards to show for it.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...