A Case Break With A Few Trades

I used to trade regularly on Facebook, but have wained on it a little in recent months.  Instead, I have been trying other avenues both through other social networking sites and actually face to face trading.  Venturing and dabbling in new media is always a little bit scary for all us, but once you get into a good trading loop, it's easy to pick up on the different trends and tendencies of a group of traders whether you are sitting next to them looking at actual cards, or whether you are chatting looking at scans.

For example, I have become much more comfortable with the world of Twitter the past few months and have actually preferred it in many ways to some of the trade pages on Facebook.  One of the most popular activities on Twitter is the case break/box breaks.  There are tons of them.  Sure, there are some on Facebook, but they are much more constant and bigger on Twitter.

I am not a huge box break person.  If I am going to break a box I would rather order a box myself and open the cards myself.  There is something that takes away the fun of opening cards if you are watching someone else do it on a webcam.  However, there are several benefits to the case breaks on Twitter.  First, they are so frequent in some cases that the prices to get your foot in the door of the break are really cheap sometimes.  Second, they are a great conversation starter for trades.

2012 Topps Five Star Andre Ethier Jersey/Auto

Recently, I ran across a case break on Twitter at a discounted rate.  I joined and landed a few hits.  If you have never watched someone do a live case break people usually ew and ah over the hits.  So, I took my hits and flipped them around a few different ways to someone persons in the case break and ended up with a good haul of my own.  I still landed two Five Star Autographs.  The Ethier shown above and the David Freese card pictured below.  

2012 Topps Five Star David Freese

My other two trade pieces were kind of odd choices given that I wrote a post earlier this week knocking cards that were manufactured without a license.  It's true that I'd much rather have a card with a player wearing a logoed uniform and features the players team name rather than just the word Cincinnati.  However, there are time in life when you are limited by what is available.  So, being a fan of really cool autographs I couldn't find these two certified autographs in a MLB licensed product.  

1993 Nabisco Don Drysdale Autograph 

2012 Leaf Pete Rose Autograph

In this case, I added two great Hall of Fame autographs to my collection.  The Rose autographs from Leaf are plentiful, and there are better ones than the one above, but because of Rose's lifetime ban from baseball he has 0 licensed autographs.  Still a player worth owning an autograph of, but limited by what products are available.  Drysdale is limited since he died in 1993 before the certified autograph boom started.  This is, to my knowledge, his lone certified autograph.