Please, bring us more of these stories.
Besides that, my largest collection failure is probably spending about 150dollars on water damaged wotc holo’s mainly from jungle and fossil.
Still wondering how it didn’t ring a bell to me; I won all those auctions so easily. Should’ve took the time to actually read the descriptions.
Lesson learnt.
Brutal. You reminded me.
When I was a kid I got invited to the Colts training camp for a couple sessions. Small crowd, invite only. This was the glory years. Saturday, Harrison, Manning, Wayne, Edgerrin James, Freeney, Dungy. And I got my regulation football signed by 100% of them. Fresh signatures. Crisp.
My brother and I threw it away when the air left the football. Didn’t have a clue it was worth anything.
I was heavily invested into Derrick Rose. Had his exquisite RPA, UD Black, chrome, etc. It all came crashing down after his return when he wasn’t the same player. Lost a little bit of money.
I bought 200 bitcoins when they were $5 each, then sold them when they spiked up to $100.
I’m not sure making $19,000 can be considered a big failure. It’s easy to look at hindsight and think ‘what if’ about any number of things - still, you made $19,000 lol
I’ve been pretty fortunate in terms of my collecting, haven’t had any significant losses or failures. The worst was probably two years ago, I’d bought an old MTG collection for $9k. It was all from the dark and earlier, had power, duals, legends, arabian, antiquities etc.
Anyway the collection had 8 pack fresh karakas from legends which at the time buy listed at $90 because they were a $200 card. I already had a few of them so this put me at about 12 total, anyway I took too long selling them because I was lazy and they were reprinted in eternal masters when I still had around 9 of them. Went from $200ea to $80ea … I ‘lost’ about a grand in value but in reality because of what I paid for them my true loss was only out about $100-$140 total on those.
It sucked but considering I made about $8000 off that collection once I’d sold everything it wasn’t really a big deal. So yeah, lost about $1000 in value but only out of pocket about $100-$140 … that’s probably my biggest failure. Always buy reserved list kids!
It helped me buy my first house. But there’s still that bitterness, coulda been a millionaire.
OMG…and this reminds me of a bad one. I had two footballs from a 1969 team dinner of the Chicago Bears, with 15-20 autos each. 3 autos that appeared on both balls were Brian Piccolo, Gale Sayers, and George Halas.
I sold those balls away for an amount I don’t even remember and I don’t know what they’d be worth today. I really don’t want to know.
I let my mum convince me in my early teens to throw out all my wotc-dp cards so she would let me get new cards. I’d be collecting english instead of Japanese now if I didn’t do that. I eventually got rid of my remaining collection a few years later during our move. Wish I hadn’t done that. I had a 1st place Victory cup that I won in my very first tournament after moving into Masters devision and my all time favorite deck I used to compete with.
Well, I guess most already know my failure by now… Buying a card for ~950 USD, and 1.5 months later it’s worth ‘just’ 200-300 USD. And I’ve also bought two other cards for 1,550 USD which are worth only 150-250 USD each halve a year later… Ah well, I’ll hold on to the duplicated of the 1,550; and hopefully it’s worth at least that amount in ten years. 
Greetz,
Quuador
What were the cards?
Its got to be something newer. 2014 +
2x Event Organizer stamped XY175 Pikachu (and one I graded PSA-10 myself) and Pokémon with YOU Wagon promo (story included in a similar thread as this one).
EDIT: scollTo functionality of link post seems to be broken 
(at least on my end right now). Anyone else has this issue? @smpratte
Greetz,
Quuador
All of your links take me directly to the intended post. 
Hmm weird. Tried closing and re-opening my browser, but I still have the same issue. But glad to know it’s only an issue on my side. Will see if it’s still not working later on.
Thanks for the quick immediate response, Scott!
Greetz,
Quuador
Not Pokémon related, but…
I’ve been into collecting Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) games for over a decade. This is a real minor side hobby with maybe buying 2-3 games a year. But back in 2005 before the retro game hype I struck gold and bought 4 distributor cases for something like 15€ each.
They were not top of the line titles, Cliffhanger and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
When I had some financial hardships in 2011-2013 I parted with many items in my collection. Including the sealed cases. Ripped 2 open to sell the games piece by piece for 2-4€ each and sold the sealed cases for 50€ ea. Made some profit, was able to pay my bills.
Last summer I saw the same games floating on eBay for 20€ each and the cases going for 500-1000€
Now I have two empty cases (not really empty, filled controllers etc.) in my storage closest reminding me weekly about my mistake and that I really owned something very special at that time.
Not really haven’t had any failures yet 
If I have to name some semi-failures then I’d name not pushing through on an eBay listing of a pretty interesting collection for I believe $250 and it had some prerelease WOTC cards including the Prerelease Clefable, I couldn’t see its quality, but what if it was actually a good quality? It was in toploader, so it’s something, but not everything of course.
And I opened 36 loose Call of Legends over the last weeks, of which the flaps were damaged, and I’m still unsure whether it caused whitening on the cards or not… I’ll never know, they did have a lot of whitening though. In general the amount of factory issues has kind of put me of buying packs for a while now, but I think I’ll still break-even on that one.
The jump-to-post feature hasn’t been working for me for the past week or so, either. Most recent Chrome version.
Selling English Charizard Gold Star years ago for like $70… I was an idiot and a poor student who needed money D: but it doesn’t hurt too bad anymore as I bought myself a Japanese unlimited one. But seeing for how much the English card is going and thinking that the copy I had would have been PSA 8 worthy at least hurts a bit. (back in the day I didn’t even know about grading though)
And it’s not like it annoys me because I’d get more money from it now than I got back then, it annoys me I let it go… I could have graded it when I got into grading and have it in my collection now… Boo-hoo…
2009: I almost pulled the trigger on paying $5k for a complete PSA 10 1st edition holo set that Ed had posted on eBay… but I settled on paying Gary $1k for a PSA 9 set instead. (The regret has nothing to do with Gary 
)
Early 2017: I had a big decision to make… Complete the PSA 10 1st edition Neo Revelations / Destiny Shining set or not? I had been sitting on the Charizard and the Mewtwo for about a decade but hadn’t yet gotten around to getting the others. I really didn’t need the money, but I decided to sell the Charizard and the Mewtwo because… I don’t even know. I think I was of the mindset that I’ll just sell off the only two cards I have now and if the prices don’t go up dramatically maybe I’ll buy a complete set at some point in the future. I sold the Charizard for the $900 and the Mewtwo for $650… but recently the Charizard sold for over $2500 and the Mewtwo sold for well over $1000… So yeah, bad decision.
But mostly… not much. I’ve been really fortunate with the investments I’ve made in Pokemon cards.
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