Junk Wax Nostalgic
Like many boys who grew up in the 90s, I collected trading cards. I suppose in the days before smart phones a pack of trading cards was like a somewhat curated paper version of TikTok you got a few minutes worth of dopamine swiping through. Add in limited edition cards as inserts and it’s a bit of gambling thrown in for good fun.
I finally went and grabbed the card boxes from my parent’s attic and went through them. Given they came from the 90s they’re mostly “Junk Wax” era cards, which refers to a combination of inflating card production to satisfy collectors and multiple brands entering the market causing runs of base level cards to be… less than worthless. For example I found a complete unopened 1990 Donruss set in the box. You can currently find a box of 15 (!) of them on eBay for $100, with 0 bids because honestly that’s probably high, even though that works out to $6 a set or about .008 cents a card.
Or to show instead of tell, here’s a card of Jeff Granger marked as 1 of 66,000.
Forget about how absurdly over-printed these cards were, they also just printed a lot of crap.
OK, so a lot of these are destined for no place but the dumpster. I guess if a few hundred million of us do the same thing, the remaining ones might escalate to being worth a whole cent instead of a 1/100th of one.
While not exactly Margaret Thatcher bad, I found this Chuck Knoblauch card and remembered that I had sent in a fairly nice card to be signed, and he returned a Post Cereal one with a crease in it. And then admitted to using HGH so, whatever.
OK, was there anything good in the collection? Some were fun:
Wade Boggs (RIP) must have loved baseball cards because he had some great ones. Especially in contrast to his teammate Roger Clemens who looked, on every single card I found, like he had just been arrested for drunk driving. Those Upper Deck “Then and Now” hologram cards were cool. The Topps kids run had some surprisingly fun artwork, and I hope whoever came up with the idea of making fake credit cards for that Studio Gold set went on to a fantastic career, ideally not in baseball cards.
There were some other odds and ends that were fun to find. Willy “The Dupe” Dipkin is a Simpsons spoof of the Bill Ripkin “fuck face” card. Crusade is worth some money because it’s a banned card now. If you’re not a Magic the Gathering play, I give you the quiz of figuring out why. The signed Reggie Jefferson card was from a 1996 Leaf Signature series pack, which was known for being $10 a pack and having 1 signed card in each pack. I wish I had bought more, but that was an absurd price at the time and I was getting out of collecting by then anyway. The gold Pedro and Mo Vaughn are just personal favorites, the incredibly poorly cut Manny Ramirez rookie card was a fun find. The Jason Isringhausen card was another one I sent off to get signed that actually came back with the same card I sent.
At the end of the day was it a little disappointing to see that most of these cards are worthless? Sure. I should have gone full nerd and spent all that money on Magic the Gathering cards. I pulled and sold a few hundred dollars worth of cards from that collection.
There was one card I had, however, that I always looked up when I flipped through the price guides at the magazine stands in the drug store. It’s still valuable! I mean, about as valuable today as it was in 1993, but if anyone wants to trade it for a week of brownies at lunch or a Revised Shivan Dragon, let me know.