Rolling the Sportlots dice

There aren't many sites that are less user-friendly than Sportlots. The design is mid-90's quality, it can be slow to load and frequently resets and you must constantly search among various sellers all of whom charge different prices and have often wildly different shipping rates. But, of course, the cards are cheap. Commons can be had for as little as 18 cents apiece. The only site I know that's cheaper is JustCommons.com, but all they stock is baseball.

There's one major catch, though: You almost never know the condition of the card you buying. While there are pictures posted of some cards, they are relatively few and far between -- and usually only for more expensive cards that you're more likely to buy on COMC anyway. When the seller says a card is near mint or excellent, you have no choice but to trust him or her....So with that said, here's how I did on my most recent roll of the Sportlots dice.  

This was the card that drew me in. I've been slowly working on the 1979-80 Topps set and this was the biggest card -- well, other than The Card -- I still needed. I've been checking eBay and COMC constantly, but everyone seemed to be trying to get $5 plus for it. But Sportlots seller cmkeese had a NM copy listed for just $1.99. So I gambled. And I did....OK. The front is definitely NM, in my opinion. It's slightly off-center, but the corners and the image are both sharp. It's a really nice copy of, in my opinion.

If I had one complaint, it's the back, which has a much worse centering issue. The cartoon is basically cut off....If someone was really grading this card, you'd probably say it was more Excellent than Near Mint. But it's a minor quibble. And I still would have paid $2 for this card had I seen this image. I think.

Having committed to the Dryden, I ended up picking up nine more cards, which got me to the limit for $1.75 shipping. Included were six more from 79-80 Topps, all of which were also (fairly) listed as NM. The Lanny McDonald was a great deal -- just 23 cents, when other sellers were looking for 75 cents ore more. The other five were all between 18 cents and 22 cents. 

The last three were all modern baseball cards. That includes two rookie cards of now-Toronto Blue Jay (and current leading candidate for AL MVP) Josh Donaldson. The last is from 2014 Topps Stadium Club, a set I would like to complete some day. At 18 cents each, these were no-brainers to me. It helps that, in my admittedly limited Sportlots experience, you're taking less of a gamble on the condition of newer cards than with vintage.

I also had a second Sportlots order come in, this one from a seller by the username Barriere. The Cesare Maniago was listed as a NM card and cost $1, while the other three were all classified as Excellent and priced at 70 cents, 55 cents and 25 cents, respectively. I actually think the Smith is closer to NM than the Maniago, which has a little mark in the upper right corner and isn't quite centered as well. The Maniago also has a small blemish on the back. But I was still very happy with all of these, especially since the seller priced the cards that were at the lower end of the Excellent spectrum accordingly. 

With this particular seller, I got 25 cards for $3.50 shipping. So after picking out as many cheap 71-72's that I could find, I jumped over to three fantastic examples from 1973-74 Topps, a set that is quickly becoming one of my favorites....That said, these cards represent Sportlots in a nutshell. All three were categorized as NM, even though there is some clear miscoloring going on, with a blue streak showing through the Maniago and the Keon. (Weirdly, the coloring problem appears worse in the Maniago in the scanned images, but it's actually much worse in the Keon in hand.) That said, the seller charged just 45 cents for the Maniago and 75 cents for the Keon (32 cents for the Unger), which is the cheapest I'm likely to ever find these outside of stumbling across them in a dime box or buying a big bulk order of cards on eBay. 

I also picked up a few more 79-80's from Barriere. Brad Park is the big star here, although I love the shot of Dryden's mask in the Stanley Cup Final card. And the Marc Tardif is one of the cooler pictures in the entire set, I think. All of these were listed (fairly, in my opinion) in NM condition.

The last three cards I added to my basket were from 1988-89 Topps. Again, all were fairly listed as NM condition, although I wasn't too worried since these are recent and abundant enough that it isn't hard to find clean copies. The importance here is that these three cards complete my set! I've now the last three Topps sets of the 1980's (1987-88, 1988-89 and 1989-90) all finished off. Of course, those are the three easiest of the vintage hockey sets to complete (I'm using 1989-and-earlier as my definition of vintage.)