I recently bought a 6000 card Japanese collection where only 1 picture was available from someone that seemed to have no knowledge about pokemon. I surprised myself bidding way above my initial thoughts just for the fun of gambling on it…
$1500 on a blind lot from a completely new seller seems a bit crazy to me. I hope you are able to find some nice cards that are still in decent condition, but I wouldn’t risk spending that much on a lot like this.
I don’t really do bulk lots, but I probably wouldn’t have paid more than a few pennies per card maybe $0.03-0.05 unless there’s strong evidence there’s something good in the lot.
For $1500, I hope there’s at least 100 holos in there. Let us know what you got!
The fact that most of the cards are rubber banded together would make me too nervous to purchase them, but maybe there will be some nice finds in the box. Good luck and let us know how it goes!
In all my collection buying I never bid for more than what I could determine value wise from photos and I never once got burned. It would be extremely easy for anyone with a clue to spike a listing and dupe people into paying way more than what there actually was in the lot just from a few well placed cards.
It could be a possibility seller removed all valuable cards and just send 6000 bulk. Would you be keen to take that risk? Scam… no It could of easily gone for the value of bulk cards it’s a gamble. Seller left it up to the buyers imagination, I wouldn’t have bought it for a fraction of the sales price there is no point in me taking unnecessary risk… there is always money to be made.
how to value the price per card in this kind of blinded purchase ? Bulk Pricing & Price what you can see
The clear box I’d assume is probably the bread and butter & everything else banded up is junk.
I’ve done stuff like this quite a few times but usually you’d want to be able to add up a significant % of value through the photos. I’ve never done this on this level before.
It seems like it’ll be quite a lot of work.
I used to buy bulk lots which I knew contained Pichu cards I needed. This sadly doesn’t really happen any more as my collection is approaching completion.
One thing I will say is that I always profited when doing this - even if that profit sometimes took over 12 months to materialise. My best purchase was a £300 box back in 2018 which ended up containing some gems which weren’t pictured - one of the cards alone was a blue back Topsun Charizard which graded a 10 that I sold on for 6.5x what the box had cost me at the start of 2019. In total I still have around 300 cards from the box and I’ve so far made around £7,000 from it - I actually sent off some more cards to be graded from it just 2 weeks ago.
The only thing I will add though is that I never spent as much money on a box like this as you have here and I always did it when I knew I’d be getting something out of it for myself (a Pichu I needed) - even if the box was a flop, I’d still be able to add to my personal collection and be happy about that.
1500$ is a lot for a mystery lot, but there are a few factors that I would say give it a better vibe than normal.
It is a new seller with low feedback, they likely just put up the listing and did not know what they were doing.
It actually looks like the cards a kid would keep, hopefully without searching the collection first for the gems.
That said a childhood collection is not in the best of condition most of the times and will have a lot of bulk mixed in. Nobody knows how this lot is until it arrives, it gives off a better vibe than normal, but I would not pay that much money for something I cant see.
I did this not long ago!
Bought a folder full of cards thinking they were doing to be all commons etc!
Turned out there were a few very decent cards hidden in there!
Like it’s been said in here… high risk, high reward!
Thanks all for your thought/experience
I do agree with most of you saying it is objectively a bad purchase but subjectively I’m pretty hyped with it. As a vintage cards collector I rarely have this randomness element.
It’s a Japanese auction. A lot of the high end promos /no rarities still float around in collections like that. For all we know, that was in fact found in a basement or being sold by someone’s sister that inherited it. Overall business practices in japan are fairly honest from what I’ve seen.
I think it’s actually a decent buy. Like you said. It literally takes one card to make it back. With 6k cards, it’s very easy for someone to miss an expensive card. So even if they cherry picked, you’d still wind up with some good ones. I’m also going to make my personal observation. This was a new seller. In my opinion. That could be a great thing. I’d be more worried if they had 50 transactions that were Pokémon or yugioh related.
It would not surprise me one bit if there are 50 Japanese commons that are no rarity that are in lightly played condition. Instant win, at that point.
It could be garbage. But it could also be a huge home run. I would really love an update when this comes in.
I got burnt on this, 99% crap… this will be my first and last time doing this
Thankfully I bought another large collection in the same time that ended up being very interesting value wise so I’m kinda break-even…
