The mind is a funny thing. I love my mind and take pride in my level of competence and ability to learn quickly.
However, the mind is also a disappointing thing, and an unreliable thing. I’ve quickly learned that I can’t rely on the short-term memory side of my brain.
That’s why I prepared for the NSCC by uploading my checklists to my phone for quick and easy reference. I also made some paper checklists on a notebook for easier reference of certain sets. Yet, with all this at my disposal, I still decided to only trust my brain in some instances and ended up purchasing quite a few cards that I already had.
The good news is that it’s a pretty small percentage of the overall haul.
Let’s start by looking at some cards I already obtained through generous trades.
A 1984 Topps Gwynn? There’s no way I had that. Well, I did, thanks to a really old trade with Hiflew. And, it’s the only card out of this group that I posted. Still, there are certainly worse cards to have dupes of.
Here’s one from a more recent trade with reader Nick M. The trade hasn’t been posted yet (hopefully soon), so I’m going to use that as an excuse for not remembering I had the rest of these.
This card also came from Nick in that same trade package. I got it in my head that maybe I had some of the regular X cards, but to have level 2 of the insert card? Nah. That’s too fancy for me.
Here’s one I got from The Angels, In Order in 2011. It’s been in my binder a long time, but again, never reached the blog. That’s a shame, because it’s a great card. Well, it finally made it! What an honor.
Here’s one from The Diamond King. I actually knew I had it, but my checklist said all the Thomas inserts from 1993 Leaf were either not part of my collection or could use an upgrade. So, I bought ones I could find and wound up with this guy.
This card came from reader Jeremy, the man responsible for my Overload series. When a guy sends you over 1,000 cards, there will likely be a few that I don’t remember seeing. So, now I have this duplicate – along with many other duplicates from that lot.
Now we come to the cards I had from older boxes and packs I opened at some point. I honestly didn’t remember that I had a Thomas rookie, or if I did, I assumed it was going to be kind of beat up. This one was in good condition. Turns out, so was the other one I had. Again, not a bad dupe to have, but I don’t need two.
When I looked through bins, I would create two piles. Ones I knew I needed and ones I wanted to check. I remembered getting a Road Warriors card in my box, but I thought it was Tony Gwynn, so into the “need” pile it went.
This card is numbered /2499. I now have two of them, because I forgot I bought it from COMC. My brain said, “oh, it’s numbered. I must need it.”
I bought it twice and neither was in great condition on further inspection
These last few are really painful. It’s not that I had them and just forgot, or didn’t bother to check. No, I already bought these cards at the National.
I’m almost positive I bought this twice from the same booth. That’s how terrible my memory can be.
In this case, the the duplicate is actually peeled. So, does it count? I could add a line to my wantlists for peeled and unpeeled….
I’ll forgive myself a little more on this one. I saw /250 on the back and made a quick judgment call to pull the trigger. Still, it’s disappointing I couldn’t remember buying it from someone else already.
It was really easy for my mind to look at a foil stamped number on the back and put it in the “don’t check” pile. This one is /1250. With a bland card like this, I also may have fallen victim to thinking that I saw it in a bin or two, but maybe passed it by.
I probably checked my want lists twice with this – one for each purchase. I’m so confused by the Leaf Certified Cuts stuff, that even a card as low numbered as 599 could already be mine. The problem is I didn’t update my lists each night.
Lastly, we have this Bowman refractor. It’s usually easy for me to visualize the non-Cub/non-Brave stuff I have, and I know I don’t have many refractors overall. Apparently I went through that thought process twice.
So, the moral of the story is that nobody’s perfect, but I really messed up. Still, we can still turn this into a positive, because that means that everything you see here is also now trade bait.
Hooray?
I feel your pain. I’ve done the same thing. It is hard to remember now, But…I’m pretty sure at a card show in the 1990s I bought the same card from two dealers back to back. Or it’s possible I bought two copies of the same card from the same dealer in the same transaction. I know it was something along those lines.
[…] last National post was all about cards I had, but bought again because I’m a dumb piece of dumb that’s […]
[…] couple years ago, I outlined how terrible my memory is by showing cards I bought at the NSCC that I already owned (or that accidentally bought twice at the show). Well, it happened again. […]