I Bought the 2024 Epoch Regular Set for 2/3 of a Penny

 

Last Sunday I bought the 2024 Epoch regular set for .68 of a cent.

This was the result of a little game I decided to play on Yahoo Auctions.  The cottage industry of case breakers looking for autographs or other chase cards in Japan has created a massive surplus of regular cards that they routinely dump on the market.  

Until 2021 I used to buy each year's Calbee sets series by series from them (in 2022 I introduced Calbee cards to my kids and went back to building sets the old fashioned way: one bag of chips at a time) and I also sometimes buy leftover unopened packs that don't have hit cards from them.  I had never really looked for sets other than Calbees though and it occurred to me that this was an oversight on my part that might be worth remedying. 

So I set myself a mission: Find the best sets for the most insane prices I could get from these guys.

I ended up buying a few for peanuts from different sellers.  The first arrived in the mail last night: a regular set of 2024 Epoch regular cards that I got for 1 Yen!

That is pretty insane, less than 1 cent at current exchange rates.  What makes it more remarkable is that it wasn't an auction with a 1 Yen start bid that I just happened to luck out on - this was a Buy it Now price!  The guy was basically just giving them away.

Unlike Ebay, sellers on Yahoo Auctions can't inflate shipping costs to offset low prices so I paid the actual shipping cost of 230 Yen (about $1.50 US).

In other words the cost of shipping was 230 times more than the cost of the cards themselves, an odd ratio.

The seller promptly packed them up nicely and got them in the mail and within 2 days the package was on my sofa getting ripped open.

As you can note from the photos there are a few gold and silver parrallels mixed in there, which is kind of neat.  

Dave did a really good review of this set on his blog last year so I won't say much about it other than that I like the design of the cards and the player selection (one of the things that made me want to get it) but agree with him about being disappointed with the smaller set size (which is getting worse year by year with most card makers here). 

I realized as I went through them that this isn't quite a complete set, it is about a dozen short (this isn't a complaint, the seller never described it as a full set).  For 1 yen though how could I resist?