The Stadium Club Roller Coaster

Right before I left for vacation a month or so ago, I splurged and picked up a hobby box of Topps Stadium Club.  I was fortunate enough to pull this Kris Bryant Black Foil parallel in my box:

These parallels fall at just two-per-box, and with Bryant as hot as he is in the hobby I knew it was a decent card to land.  I'm really only interested in building the base set, as well as collecting any Red Sox parallels or inserts.  Initially I thought I'd hang onto this one, but I also realized that it was probably worth more in the first days of the product's release than it would be even a month or two later.

Ultimately, I threw it up on eBay the day before I left, 24-hour auction starting at 99 cents with no reserve.  The card drew a lot of interest, and more than 20 bids.  In the end it sold for over $50!  Throw in the Matt Holliday Foilboard parallel, which I sold as well, and I ended up with around $60 in my Paypal account thanks to this box.

I'm very pleased with that return, because here we are not even a month later and the Black Foil Bryant card is now selling for under $20 on eBay.  I'll share the spoils of what I used those funds on in a later post, but for now let's just say I was riding high on the Stadium Club roller coaster.

Then I plunged...

In a moment of weakness, I picked up a blaster when I got back from vacation.  You get 40 total cards in these things.  Mine yielded 2 gold parallels and 38 base cards.  At this point, I still needed 190 out of the 300 base cards in the set after the dust had settled from my hobby box.  Well, how many of the 38 base cards in the blaster do you think I needed?  How about zero?  Yup, skunked.  Awesome collation Topps!

I made the best of it and have already sent some of the dupes out to other bloggers, and I have a couple more trades in the works as well, so ultimately I was able to deal some of the dupes away for cards I do need for my set.  Not a total loss, but pretty darn deflating at the time of ripping the packs open.

A couple of weeks later I was visiting my local card shop, the same one I'd picked up my hobby box from.  Figuring the boxes of Stadium Club he had on the shelf probably all came from the same case, I thought I'd take a crack at a couple loose packs with a slightly reduced chance at doubles.  I grabbed two packs for $10.

The first pack yielded what is perhaps my personal favorite card in the set, this completely awesome Dennis Eckersley.  Without actually doing a formal search, and just going off the top of my head, this may be my favorite card of 2015 at this point.  Love it.

The other pack yielded a pretty nice hit, which certainly helped to reverse the sting of that blaster full of doubles:

The signature may leave a little to be desired, but this is a nice, on-card autograph of a potential future star.  It's actually a Black Foil Autograph, serial numbered to /50 on the back.  At the time of this post these look to be going in the $30-$40 range on eBay.

Part of me is tempted to throw this one up for sale to keep the train rolling.  Unlike the Bryant that I led off the post with though, which was just an un-numbered parallel with inflated value because the set was brand new, I'm intrigued by this card.  If Soler ends up being a solid player it would be cool to have a relatively rare autographed rookie card.  If not, oh well. 

Either way, I'm riding high on the Stadium Club roller coaster again!