Ever receive a package and regretted a purchase?

Today I received a small package from a Sportlots auction seller that made me pause and think.  I actually spend a good portion of my personal monthly allowance on auction wins on Sportlots and generally get a pretty nice deal.  I have scored vintage HOFers for a quarter or two and built some partial sets of cards from the early 70s.  When I looked at the cards and looked at the invoice I didn't feel as great about my purchase as I normally do.

First, let's take a look at the cards then I will analyze the why behind me questioning the purchase and how it came about.

 First up is a Cooperstown card from 1993 Pinnacle.  This is the year Bonds joined the Giants and actually wasn't on my master checklist.  I am always happy to identify a card that I have missed, I really need to work on a project to cross reference my list with others that Beckett to see if I can make them more complete.

 I will place these two side by side.  The one on the left is from UD Encore and is entitled Pure Excitement while the one on the right is from the base UD set and is an insert title View to a Thrill.  Boo on Upper Deck's part, the design itself isn't all that bad but to repeat the same design with the same pictures is just plain lazy.

 Let's shift gears to this nice Aurora card, it is the Pennant Fever insert and I really like this design.  I need to put some focus on Pacific releases (maybe a 2014 goal???) as they did a nice job with quite a few different sets.

 A Topps Tek Barry, this is design #61.  I have very few Tek cards and am happy to add one.  This card is partially see through and I would love to score a few more. I am not sure exactly where but I recall following someone who was trying to put the entire set including all the designs together.  That is a crazy project to take on.

Finally an Upper Deck Victory card, I believe it is a short printed card from the base set.  The rectangle surrounding Barry's big head is nice and shiny but didn't come out great in the scan.  I scanned the back to show the shiny and also the write up to remind everyone that Barry wasn't a total bust in the playoffs.

So there are the cards, obviously a decent lot of Bonds cards.  All of them fit well into my collection and none are duplicates.  So why the partial regret?  Here is the invoice that came with it illustrating what I paid:

6 insert and base cards of Barry Lamar Bonds for just under $20.  That is equal to the price of a blaster, but that is hit and miss anyway.  It is also just 50 cents less that 2 HOFers I got from a different seller from the late 1950s.  It is 25 cents less than 30 cards from the early 70s I got including 4 1970 Topps high numbers this beauty of Tom Terrific:

So how did I end up in this predicament?  At work I like to call a review of some prior events that didn't go so great a postmortem, so here is my postmortem.  Over the past several months, this same seller has sold probably a couple hundred Barry Bonds cards on Sportlots.  I have picked up quite a few new and interesting Bonds cards from him and always get excited as many of them typically sell for a high price and I can usually get them at well under eBay prices.  I think he is getting down to the lower value cards so that is one issue.

Additionally there are 2 other collectors of Giants cards who seem to battle me over the Giants auctions on Sportlots.  One guy isn't super active and usually puts up a minimum bid and maybe one more but if I really want the card, I can typically get it still for under a buck. The other guy and I go toe to toe frequently and end up bidding up the cards. In this case, I let my ego of wanting to win the cards get the best of me and bid 2 or 3 times more than I should have on the middle 4 cards listed on the invoice.  Unless it is a super rare card, I like to keep my bids around the dollar mark.

I decided to try and make myself feel better by using my Beckett.com account I thought I would see what the Book Value was of the 6 cards.  Don't really care too much about it but I was grasping at straws.  The total BV of the 6 is $26.75, that sure didn't make me feel better.  The Seaver alone books for $30.

The moral of the story, don't get caught in bidding wars on random cards that aren't must haves in your collection.