As long time readers know I am working on the blue parallel set from the 2013 Bowman Chrome issue. The base set has 440 cards and then Bowman always comes up with a draft pick set towards the end of the calendar year. I had been focusing on the main set with minimal interest in the draft pick set until I finished the other one. Well a few factors came into play on acquiring this card and I went across the big pond to get my hands on it.
The main reason that I wasn't looking to acquire this card yet was that it still has a $120 book value attached to it. Due to being numbered to 99 only while the base set blue Puig is numbered to 250 obviously is the main contributor to the higher price. I placed a bid here and there on this card through the year but always came up short with some auctions closing over $110. I used my eBay funds elsewhere. Well I sent in the base blue Puig that I had in my collection to get graded and it came back with a "disappointing" mint 9.0 grade. That was my fault as I didn't check the back for centering. All of that can be seen HERE .
I decided to go back onto eBay and see what the current market was on the draft pick blue Puig and the prices had come down since he has cooled off a tad in the past few weeks. I really want to have a gem mint blue of Puig and tried to narrow down my search to a good candidate for that. I found this one which looked pretty clean and the seller was nice enough to include a picture of the back of the card for people like me that forget to look at that. Looked good and I decided to go after it. The one thing that really popped out for me and made me believe that I had a good chance of picking this up at a very reasonable price was where the card is originating from, Japan. For some reason a lot of international auctions seem to scare off a lot of people. Less competition is fine by me.
On the last day of the auction the high bid stood at a little over $25. A lot less than I expected for this card. At the end of the day I came out on top with a winning bid at way more than 60% off of book and no money out of pocket ( again, thank you book sales ).
Surprisingly the card arrived in less than 10 days and other than a very slight "issue" on the back side lower right corner it looks to me like it might grade out to a gem mint 9.5. Centering is good ( even on the back ), surface is clean, edges sharp and if the corners get a 9.0 I think the others will off set it. We shall see but till then thank you to Japan for supplying me with a nice limited card of Puig.
52 / 99
Knocking on wood for this lower right corner
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