What products in the past have gotten you hooked?

I really enjoy opening wax (like many of you here, I think) but it's been a real doldrum in the baseball department. I don't know what it is, but no products in baseball this year really got me craving for more.

It made me start to think about what certain products in the past did for me, and what specific characteristics of those products made me come back repeatedly, inducing "drug-seeking" behavior.

What products in the past really got you addicted upon release, and what were the traits of that product that drove you to seek more? This may be helpful information for the card companies to create concepts that will help them sell out their product and keep us all happy.

Off the top of my head-

1987 Fleer - aesthetically beautiful and simple design and a great rookie class
1989 Upper Deck - incredible photography, "rare" errors and variations, and Griffey, of course
1993 Finest - Damn, those refractors were beautiful and valuable
1996 Select Certified - Those mirrors were beautiful, the rarest of its kind at the time, and valuable
1999 sp signature - I kept buying this stuff until I couldn't find anything anymore - on-card autographs, nice design, great player selection, plus I actually put the set together I was soooo hooked (and I NEVER put sets together)
2005 Bowman draft - holy cow, a prospectors dream product and the gold standard of the heyday of prospecting, the only set back was the sotf cases, but the chrome auto runs were simply addicting squared.
2006 Bowman draft - the quest for the Longo super.

That's about it. I can't think of anything baseball of recent memory that has gotten me loony. Anyone else care to shed some opininions of the SPECIFIC TRAITS of the product that had you coming back for more?

1997 Finest: I bought or received as gifts Finest boxes from '97 to 2000. From 2002 until the present I have a large portion of the Oswalt rainbows including superfractors from '05-'07.

1999 Bowman Chrome Series 2: One of my first choices when contemplating a nostalgic break.

1995 Flair: The design and card stock are high quality.

1998 Gold Label: The same as Flair.

i had the best time cracking these

bowman sterling with wbc redemption? 09 me thinks. epic times

08-09 ultimate collection in all sports. pulled some sick cards from basketball, hockey, football and baseball. basketball was my favorite and ive opened tons from ultimate in all 4 sports back the

upper deck usa with the japanese auto of yuki saito was it? pretty sure i did 4 cases.

2008 bowman jumbos. heyward price moose laporta bumgarner first chrome autos. most bc case i e probably ever cracked

dave

2007 EEE, opened way way too much

2001 topps gold label is what got me back into collecting. The David Justice jersey card was the first game used card I ever owned. I still pick up those game used cards on occasion.

2008 UD Masterpieces was another that I bought a lot of.

One of my favorites was 2005 UD Origins. How could you beat two numbered cards, two memorabilia cards, an auto, and a 5x7 tin sign for like $35 a tin. now theyre pretty expensive.

Sadly I don't have the money to truly be hooked on any one product. But off the top of my head a couple recent products that I did buy more of, or would try to hunt down in retail were.......

07 Allen & Ginter - This was the first time I broke A&G. After that box I bought another and would buy any retail boxes I could find. I loved the variety in the box and that it wasn't all about the "hits", any pack could potentially hold something cool, valuable or collectible.
It was a refreshing change from many products where I would rip through packs of base to get those 3-4 hits.

Moments & Milestones - I know many have now come to despise this set, but the first year it came out I found it very fun to break and it provided great value. Again I loved that every card potentially had value. Each broke I broke really gave me hours of collecting - sorting, checking serial #'s, being able to list virtually everything for auction as singles or lots, trading with people trying to complete sets. Hit my first 1/1 (for whatever that's worth lol) and some cool PC cards. When you can't afford a lot of boxes, having a box that delivers value both monitory and entertainment/collecting wise is great.

I'm writing quite a bit, so I'll be quick on a couple more.
09 Ultimate Collection - Kept joining the breaks here whenever I could. I was chasing the big hit, and it was a product where the average hit didn't make you cringe.
2010 Bowman - Able to get a couple boxes, then it was mainly scouring for retail when hobby proce got insane. This one is probably self-explanatory lol.

I came back into the hobby in 2005 and these were the products I couldn't get enough of:

2006 Finest
2007 Masterpieces
2009 Finest

1998 Gold Label - Was trying to complete a semi master set and still pick up a few I need here and there to fill out orders on COMC when I have funds remaining.

1998 Team Best - The auto set contained a Kerry Wood autograph!

2002 Donruss The Rookies - Made an absolute killing on Alex Rios autographs. Then some guy named Cliff Lee got popular too! Cha....CHING!

2005 Bowman Draft - Case breaks were easy to turn a profit if you avoided the dreaded SOTF. I would bust a case, sell some to buy another case, sell some more to buy another case... It was easy money!

If anyone needs singles from these sets, I'm your buddy!

Tom

I forgot about 2001 Legendary cuts - the first cut auto per case product. Each cut auto was novel at the time before they got proliferated, a classy design, and cut autos of actually really tough autographs, not just another run of cut autos for the sake of being cut autos (hint, hint, card manufacturers - just because it is a cut auto doesn't mean it is desirable).

Cap Anson cut auto - desirable.

Dan Brouthers cut auto - desirable.

Steve Carlton cut auto - not so desirable.

It's pretty simple. I wish baseball card companies would think about what they are doing and not just produce uninspired garbage day in and day out. WE DON"T NEED ANY MORE BOB LEMON AND EARL AVERILL CUT AUTOS!!!!!

Please LISTEN- you have lost this customer because of this.

Topps Archives. How can you argue with on card autos on reprints of players RCs?

Also really liked 2004 Topps Chrome and 1988 and 91 Topps

When I got back into the hobby in 1991, it was pretty much everything. I was in college, home for the summer, but I had a job with IBM making $7.50/hr or something, which was just about the best part-time job you could get at the time. So every other day I would get off work and stop by the comic/card shop and rip a few packs of Leaf, Ultra, and if I was feeling really spendy, Stadium Club, which was $5/pack at the time. Over lunch, there was a deli I'd go to almost every day and I'd grab a handful of Topps packs. The 7-11 had UD, and the gas station had UD Jumbos. 1991 was great year to get back into cards. Talk about cardboard crack, building Leaf, Ultra, Topps, and UD from packs, and piecing together Stadium Club from dealer bulk lots and partial sets and buying singles ($7 for a Ryne Sandberg?). I'm amazed I was able to eat my senior year. I had stopped collecting in 1983. In 1989 I noticed packs of UD at 7-11 but scoffed at the idea of 99 cents for a pack of baseball cards when they had regular Topps right next to it for 45 or 50 cents.

But I think it was the 1991 Topps base design that hooked me. And when I saw the gloss-dripping utter gorgeousness of Stadium Club I didn't know what to think. I bought a Beckett, found out about all these other new brands, and they were all beautiful (except Ultra, which wasn't beautiful, it was classy), they all had their own sense of themselves (the way Topps backs faced one way, Leaf the other), and the idea of pulling these new-fangled "insert" cards was something else again. I remember pulling a Jordan card from one of my first packs of UD and being curious about it. When I realized it was worth $20 according to Beckett I sort of flipped out. I dug my old collection out of the attic, and I was hooked.

Since then, 2001 Topps Heritage was the only product I can remember when I really wanted to seek it out and rip every pack I could find. There's something about the real cardboard, the feel of the packs, the sense that any pack might contain a rare chrome or super-rare autograph, or some other scarce insert (which I never got), the gum, even the feel of the wax paper packs. Holding a pack of Heritage, it felt way more substantial than a 4-card pack of Chrome. 2004 Heritage was also good. I opened many blasters of that. 2006 A&G again had me combing Targets for blaster boxes, but around here each store would only get 2 blasters a week for a month or so, and it was less of a compulsion since the odds on the good hits were so long. Since then, I've weaned myself off the box-buying pipe, although I am really jonesing for 2012 Heritage with my 2nd favorite design of the 60s.

2005 Bowman Draft (pulled a Zimmerman Gold Ref auto out of my first case)
2005 and 2009 Prime Cuts baseball (speaks for itself, pulled a Clemente patch and Yaz 1/1 auto patch)
2005 Topps Chrome (chased those red x-fractors, one of the best looking autographed subsets Topps ever made in my opinion...well, minus the stickers anyways)
2005 Absolute Memorabilia (After i hit a Ruth jumbo jersey /95, it was rip city for close to 4 months...think the final talley on how many cases i broke was 7, which is quite a bit considering the price..I also wish i would've sat on a few cases)


Nice thread

1993 Donruss Triple Play
1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack

I kid you not

JoshHamilton said:

1993 Donruss Triple Play
1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack

I kid you not

Click to expand...

What characteristics of these products got you hooked? the blazing colors?

brouthercard said:

JoshHamilton said:

1993 Donruss Triple Play
1994 Upper Deck Fun Pack

I kid you not

Click to expand...

What characteristics of these products got you hooked? the blazing colors?

Click to expand...

Triple Play- it might have actually been the 1992 set. The red-fade-to-yellow borders. My dad rewarded me with a pack every day after swim practice. 

UD Fun Pack- it lived up to its name. The fold-outs, the glow-in-the-dark cards, the heat-sensitive cards, plus Michael Jordan...I remember mowing lawns every day to buy boxes when I was 13. Even the base cards were cool. 

2005 diamond king really got me hooked.

08 Heritage and 07 Masterpieces are the products that cemented me back in the hobby. I picked up random packs/blasters of base Topps and Upper Deck, along with stuff like Spectrum and Goudey, but I loved everything related to these two releases.

Back in 1998 or 1999 at a LCS,
Opened 1 box of Sonruss Elite for $75 and pulled #/9 Peyton Manning parallel and a Barry Sanders Autograph and sold both at a show (the same day) for about $750. Right after selling, I drove back to the store and bought another box and pulled another Barry Sanders Autograph card and another customer that was in the store asked me if I would sell it to him (with the owners permission) and sold that one for $500....
That's what got me hooked in the card business!

2005 UD Update - Pulled a lot of nice autos. Though I sold a some too early(Cruz, Fielder).

2005 Prime Patches - Sold most, including an Ozzie dual prime 1/1. Still have the one below.