One of the side effects of the current trading card boom during the pandemic is the unavailability of supplies. I purchased a case of standard toploaders in March that took a couple of months to arrive. The backorder wait times are even longer on a lot of things right now. I saw that Dave & Adam’s had 35 and 55 PT magnetics, so I threw a couple into my cart. I wanted to open something that wasn’t ridiculously priced that would also trigger free shipping and decided to grab a box of 2020 Upper Deck Goodwin Champions.
This is a set that I haven’t had a lot of luck with. It’s Upper Deck’s version of Allen & Ginter and it allows them to do yearly cards of athletes that they have under contract, but do not have a license for that sport such as Michael Jordan and LeBron James. This set hasn’t really caught on with collectors like Allen & Ginter has. The base set contains each person twice, once in a vertical orientation and once in a horizontal orientation. Why? This set also has ridiculous insert cards such as lenticular cards and manufactured patches of dogs. Sure, you’re most likely going to get three relic cards from a box of Allen & Ginter, but I’ll take that over most of the inserts that I’ve gotten out of Goodwin Champions in the past. I guess this shows how badly I wanted something to open.
The box arrives and I start ripping open packs. I got a lenticular card of softball player Stevie Wisz and a “memorabilia” card of Wander Franco. I’m not sure what the swatch is from, but it is certainly not a baseball jersey. After those two hits, I then pulled this...
I have to admit, I didn’t know that much about this card when I pulled it. I knew that autographs can be tough to come by in the product, so I may have pulled something pretty good. After a little research, I found out that this was an autograph of the #9 pick in this year’s NBA draft. Since this was also limited to 50 with an inscription, I started to feel even better about this pull. I went to eBay for comps and…$350? Wow. I had no clue that this card would be anywhere near that valuable.
So, I listed the card and got “generous” offers of $50 and $125 and a request for what my bottom price was. Decline, decline, whatever the auction ends at. Based on the previous sale of $350, if I had put a Buy It Now on this, it most likely would have been $400. It was a good thing that I didn’t.
47 bids later from 10 different bidders, this card jumped over $200 in the last 2 hours of bidding and ended at $510. Holy crap. That is just insane to me. What’s even crazier is that I pulled this card out of a box that I picked up as an impulse purchase from a release that I wasn’t that thrilled about. I will now never utter another bad word about Goodwin Champions.
There are some interesting cards in the base set. You’ve got Ken Jennings of Jeopardy fame, Alex Morgan and Megan Rapone from the National Women’s Soccer Team, and Scarface and Big Boi from the rap world. I’ve picked up a lot of singles in the past especially all the variations of Rob Paulsen from last year’s set. Narf! Is there really a lot of interest in a card with a swatch of a voice actor’s shirt though?
I’ll probably be more likely to pick up boxes of Goodwin Champions in the future, but I doubt that I’ll ever have this luck again. Does this card sell for less without the current hobby bubble? Probably not. I’m not complaining though. This will allow me to add some nice cards to my collection.
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