Damn You Private Stock and Your Backwards Hobby/Retail Rules!!!!!!!!!

You hear that? It's rant time! Yay!

But seriously, I'm a little mad at Pacific (specifically the Private Stock brand) right now. The reason? Why on earth would you release two completely different sub-sets for Hobby and Retail release?!?!? Yeah yeah, I know Pacific is WAY out of the game right now, and my little crusade here will likely fall on deaf ears, or actually, no ears at all, but it's still nice to vent some times.

Before we go any further, I'd like to point out at this juncture that I'm not a money-hungry, pack feeling, only care about high BV collector. However, the BV of a card does play a factor in my everyday collecting habits. You see, as a collector of all thing Leafs and Steve Sullivan, ALOT of the stuff I chase books in the 5-10$ range. So, since I do more trading than buying/selling, if I were to pull a 50$ RC, this card can get me anywhere between 5-10 cards from my wants. And to me collecting is all about quantity, not quality. I want my collection to grow in numbers, heck, I'd be just as happy with 20 2$ BAP Autos of Darby Hendrickson and Aki Berg as I would with one 40$ Doug Gilmour GU. And besides, anything in Blue and White is quality baby!

Now where was I? Oh yeah, my beef with Private Stock. This little ditty starts out with one of my usual trips to the Dollar Store. . .

I decided to buy myself 10 packs of 2002-03 Private Stock Titanium. As I got into my car to open them up, I was thrilled to pull A) a Jay Bouwmeester RC! and B) a Jason Spezza Blue RC! among the no-namers and inserts. Once I got home I checked my Beckett and noticed BAM! The Bouwmeester books at 40$ and the Spezza books at 225$!!!!! Then I read a little further down the column. You see, these values where for the HOBBY versions #'d to 99, and what I had was a RETAIL Bouwmeester /1475 and a BLUE Spezza /450. Both of these were valued at .15X Hobby. Bummer. So now my Bouwmeester books at 6$ and the Spezza at about 35$, which of course, is still a great pull from a 2$ pack.

But I shouldn't have been too surprised by this. You see, I've been fooled by Private Stock before. On a prior Dollar Store binge, I pulled a Zetterberg (150$) and Nash (250$). In the middle of my happy dance, which by the way is pretty impressive if you ask me, but you're not, so I digress, I noticed the serial # was off. these weren't the /99 Hobby versions but the /1550 Retail.

Now I get that Retail is meant to attract newcomers to the hobby, so the pulls are less than stellar. And I know that I should've bought Hobby packs if I wanted big pulls. BUT, I am a broke college student (hence the Dollar Store shopping).

In the end, I guess its tomfoolery like this that companies like Pacific aren't in the hockey card biz anymore (that or, the way they saturated the market with product). So like I said, this was kind of a pointless rant. But like I also said, sometimes, it's just nice to vent.