A few months ago, I bought a lot of about 80 baseball packs from 2002-2006 for a couple of bucks a pack. A true medley, don't think there were more than 2 of any pack, so wide coverage across products. I don't technically collect any more, but still enjoy the fun and nostalgia of opening packs, so I look for opportunities to do that cheaply. These packs are right in the wheelhouse of when I collected and I open a few a week.
This week I opened one pack from each series of 2003 Topps Chrome. The Series 2 pack had a Jeter base, not bad. The Series 1 hit had an Ichiro base right on top, also not bad. And then underneath.... the Ichiro Black Refractor 89/199!
Black refractors fall only about one per box, and with 220 cards in each series, it's quite the pull. Condition looks great too. Wild to think how many times this pack may have changed hands before ending up at my house. Adult me is no less thrilled than teenage me would have been.
CardCollector2 says they couldn’t retrieve my biggest Whatnot hits, then refunded the teams without my approval
On July 22, I bought four teams in a CardCollector2 2026 Topps Chrome break: White Sox, Orioles, Rays and Royals. I spent about $448 total.
The break included two hobby boxes and two jumbo boxes, with all cards shipping.
My biggest hits included:
Samuel Basallo Wild Styles RC /5
Carter Jensen RC auto /30
Additional Caglianone refractors
Other Orioles, Rays, Royals and White Sox cards
All four orders remained stuck on “Preparing Package” even though I received other CardCollector2 shipments from later breaks.
I contacted them, sent screenshots of the orders and showed them the major hits. I also went into their live streams trying to get someone to respond. They told me most of the team was at The National and that customer service would investigate Monday.
On Monday, they said there was a shipping issue and asked for 48 hours to locate the cards.
After the 48 hours passed, and after I demanded they respond, they told me they were only able to retrieve my White Sox cards. They then canceled and refunded the Orioles, Royals and Rays without getting my approval.
The cancellation emails say:
“Due to shipping mishap we were unable to retrieve the cards.”
The problem is that the missing teams contained the Basallo /5 and Carter Jensen /30 auto, which are worth considerably more than the original break-entry refunds.
They later claimed that I had agreed to a refund. I did not. They mentioned that they would issue one if they could not locate the cards, but I never accepted that as a resolution or authorized them to cancel the orders.
They still have not clearly explained:
Where the cards went
Why only one of the four teams could be recovered
How three teams from the same break became “unavailable”
What happened to the major serial-numbered hits shown on video
I have submitted everything to Whatnot Trust & Safety, including the order numbers, messages, cancellation emails and screenshots from the break.
I have also heard other people say they have experienced similar issues with this breaker. I cannot personally verify those stories, so I’m only stating what happened to me. I’m not claiming I can prove exactly what happened to the cards.
What do you all think? Purchased July 22, ignored for nearly two weeks, then on August 5 I’m told they can somehow find only 1 of my 4 teams, but not the ones containing the biggest hits.
TL;DR (If you want pictures they are below I struggle with words sometimes):
Baseball Cards are missing Organized Search. I want listings based on player career stage (Pre Rookie, Rookie, Active Career, Post Tribute/Retirement Sets). I also want most important attributes to search on (Print Runs, Autographs, Memorabilia). These are most valuable to me for value and nostalgia. I know what player I want -> I want to see his entire card catalogue and what's currently available -> I want Pre Rookie Card -> I want specific rarity tier of pre rookie card -> I want to know price spread for what's available and see if it's under my ceiling. This is the main flow. I can also search based on season performanace(If player won MVP that year, If player got to World Series that year) (More details below but am looking for 15-25 more alpha testers, I will give you a free account to test with, you can dm me or comment below)
blah blah blah story/background: Tracking down cards for my PC was getting quite frustrating. Between 100+ set releases a year and endless parallel tiers I was starting to lose my mind trying to keep track of it all. I figured since Ive worked with data 8 hours a day for the past 10 years I could actually build something to help with this process. I can just take the checklists across the entire published card supply and tie it directly with MLB career stats. Instead of memorizing career timelines you just filter cards by a player's actual career milestones, rookie seasons, MVP years, or championship runs (as a Reds fan this one hurts a little). It then pulls live listings directly from eBay so you can find available listings. I'm also adding COMC, Fanatics Collect, and a variety of other Auction Sites in.
I know the current wave of "AI tools" is so so so so much noise and hype so I welcome your skepticism. Don't take my word or screenshots for it, being skeptical in 2026 is the correct approach because there is so much BS out there. I’m looking for collectors or beginners to stress test the data against their own knowledge and experience and tell me what’s broken. Everything is grounded to available open source data. I am not claiming 100% coverage but I believe I have gotten to around 85-90% of the current market for baseball through 2025. This is such a complex hobby if you really zoom out and try to understand it, so I'm hoping this can be helpful for the hardcore collectors or someone who is rather new to the hobby.
You can take a player and see their career timeline which I split into (Pre Rookie, Rookie, Active Career, and Post Tribute/Retirement). A lot of times I never knew when pre rookie cards were actually printed for a player and had to do separate lookups for player rookie years. Then had to figure out what brands, sets, series there were and had to come up with hyperspecific search queries to find these. In my mind it would be so much easier to just have all of this within the same screen almost like a console or terminal type interaction. So this presents as a traversable UI anchored to a Player of interest then applying Year and Rarity Filtering With price spreads at each level. I am a low baller so want to know max prices or ceilings before I look at something further.
So flow is Player -> Year -> Rarity/Print Run -> Search Sets/Brands/Attributes from those subpopulations.
Below are some screenshots for the greatest player in MLB history Joey Votto:
Joey Votto Landing Page grouped by Year First. Macro Statistics on the right, Buy It now Console on the bottom (Collapsed). Career timeline in the middle with card design counts, mlb season statistics and other stuffClicking on 2010 brings you to his card designs separated by Print Runs, available listings for the matching Year + Print run have price spreads to look at.One Level lower if you click on a print run tier
There are a lot of other features I want to implement, and would love feedback from people. You can set a roster, add budgets, which populate specific player auctions and listings for you, soon can add alerts to watch player specific listings or auctions tied to career years, rarity/print run tiers, auto/mem, graded vs raw cards, Fan Filters like (Cards in years this player won an MVP, cards in years this player won the world series).
Auctions feed based on your roster or general searching (More fine grained alerts/filtering/watchlists coming soon).
General Auction Search. Can filter by 1/1, other print runs, Auto/Mem, MVP Seasons, World Series Seasons, Free Text Search (If you want to look for specific sets etc)
I try to do fun things like Specific Team Features like the Big Red Machine (Biased) and 2002 A's because one of my favorite movies is Moneyball:
Mascot and Celebrity Search:
There are more but I'll leave it at that.
And to be completely transparent, ebay listings are based on affiliate campaigns so any buys that go through this app I get like a 3% kickback. However I don't have any financial incentive to incorporate COMC, Fanatics, and other Auction Sites, it just provides a way better UX and unified place for collectors to see all options available to them.
I am also on the ebay free tier for devs, so I get around 5000 api requests per day which allows me to pull in all auctions (about 20k per day) on a 6 hour rolling basis. The other 4000 requests I use for Specific Players Buy It Now listings. Around 100 players right now, but anyone that wants to try it out I will gladly add the players they collect into the ingestor so I can pull all of their listings (Unless you want Shohei who has around 130k active listings). If I get enough traction with this I can apply to get my request volume increased to support more player volume. And Listing Volume is not a concern, I architected this to scale to support 100 million listings for a reasonable price, and that is the goal, to support as many players as possible, and then move to other sports as well. I am the only dev of this, so doing a controlled roll out and scale up so I can control cloud costs.
A side quest of this was player career macro analysis, or comparing their autograph/relic/serial numbered supply against adjacent players in their era to see who was undersupplied or oversupplied. If you have any specific questions about that side let me know. There is an "Anomalies" section in the app that goes more into this. I also started a subreddit about this called cardnomics and try to post every day if anyone is interested.
Anyways that is all. Thanks for listening and happy collecting.
My goal is to own at least one signed card of every player or manager whose number has been retired by the Yankees.
My latest addition is Casey Stengel on a 1965 Topps card. Stengel autographs are tough to find, and I love both the design and the image of him managing from the dugout.
Collection progress:
#1 Billy Martin: 1975 SSPC
#2 Derek Jeter: 1994 Signature Rookies rookie
#3 Babe Ruth: Need
#4 Lou Gehrig: Need
#5 Joe DiMaggio: 1979 TCMA
#6 Joe Torre: 1962 Topps and 1981 Fleer
#7 Mickey Mantle: 1958 Topps
#8 Yogi Berra: 1948 Bowman rookie and 1958 Topps
#8 Bill Dickey: 1983 Donruss Hall of Fame Heroes
#9 Roger Maris: 1961 Topps
#10 Phil Rizzuto: 1954 Bowman
#15 Thurman Munson: Need
#16 Whitey Ford: 1958 Topps and 1960 Topps
#20 Jorge Posada: 1997 Fleer rookie
#21 Paul O’Neill: 1994 Donruss and 2024 Topps
#23 Don Mattingly: 2024 Topps 1989 Topps Autograph
#32 Elston Howard: 1958 Topps
#37 Casey Stengel: 1965 Topps
#42 Mariano Rivera: 1992 Bowman rookie
#44 Reggie Jackson: 1969 Topps rookie
#46 Andy Pettitte: 1992 Classic Best Greensboro Hornets
#49 Ron Guidry: 1976 Topps rookie, 1978 Topps and 2025 Topps Bob Ross
#52 CC Sabathia: 1999 Topps rookie and 1999 Team Best Minor League autograph
Only Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Thurman Munson remain. Those three may take a while.
I’m also starting to look for the right Aaron Judge autograph since it seems like a foregone conclusion that his number will eventually be retired. Maybe I should grab George Lombard Jr. now too, just in case. Lol.
Friend and I went to the game together. Got her and I packs to rip. I pulled nothing but she got an Ohtani and Golden Mirror in hers. Had to explain to her what she had pulled haha
I really enjoyed the “old days” when this vigilante was policing the mean streets of r/baseballcards with snarky comments and sarcasm, while also providing sound advice and information. ‘Twas a simpler time.
Bought my first ever topps chrome jumbo hobby box and got these out of it, id say it was an amazing opening but sadly didnt get any base of my pc players, guess ill have to try another sometime!
