Dropping cash on 2020-21 Tim Hortons, the easiest cards to find in Canada

Every fall for a few years now Tim Hortons has released a set of hockey cards produced by Upper Deck. If you don't know, Tim Hortons is a chain of coffee shops that was originally founded by the late Tim Horton, a Hall of Fame defenseman for the Leafs who died in a car crash after retiring from hockey. Tim never saw his company take off the way it did, and now it's one of the most recognizable brands in Canada.

Truthfully, a lot of Canadians hate Tim Hortons, even if they guzzle Tim's coffee daily. The company has changed hands several times and in the past few years has been notorious for reducing the quality of their goods, as well as having made the news for some high profile stories about the mistreatment of staff and the decline of their once popular "Roll Up the Rim to Win" prize contest.

Nevertheless, despite the popular criticism of the Tim's franchise, their cards remain ever popular in Canada. They are probably the most collected sports cards in the country, simply because they are the most visible. Usually card values are high when the set first releases, and decline over time except when it comes to their ultra rare inserts.

The cards come in packs of three, $1 with a purchase and $2 for each pack after that. There are like ten thousand Tim's coffee shops in this country, however, and none of them seem to follow the rules accurately. Like, some Tim's impose limits on how many packs you can buy. Others let you buy whatever. Some you have to buy a coffee or something else first, others you can just walk in and buy the backs. It's whatever.

McDonald's used to release a set of hockey cards dating back to the early nineties until about ten years ago, but they dropped out. Tim's picked up doing a card set a couple of years after that. There isn't much difference in quality from McDonald's to Tim's, really. Canadian Tire also did a couple of hockey cards releases in the past few years, but stopped. I really enjoyed the Canadian Tire cards and thought the cards were way better than what Tim's releases, even if they were both produced by Upper Deck.

I buy stacks of packs every year just for the fun of a cheap rip. But I never end up trying to build the set, and end up trading away or selling most of what I pulled. Also, I was a bigger hockey fan as a kid, but as an adult I have grown (very) tired of the sport and its unique style of petulant Canadian jingoism. Also, Upper Deck is by far the crappiest of the major card companies. For all the complains about Topps and Panini, Upper Deck is something else entirely. I still enjoy vintage hockey cards, though, and will always love O-Pee-Chee.

I opened maybe fifty packs last fall and here are some of the better hits.

These are four Clear Cut Phenoms cards I pulled. They are acetate cards similar to Ice, a product Upper Deck has put out every year since the nineties. I think these are probably the nicest looking cards in the Tim's product, even if they aren't the most valuable. Ice is usually an expensive product to buy, probably because acetate cards are expensive to produce. I've been absolutely ripped off on packs and boxes of Ice, dropping a large amount of money to get pennies back and no cards for my personal collection. So, these Tim's acetate cards are a nice alternative to Ice.

These are the Red Die Cuts. I believe these are the most common insert cards, if I am not mistaken. Well, technically they are parallels. They look pretty good. They're really only die cut in the way that their corners are shaped like playing cards. I actually really like die cut cards, but I find I enjoy them when the cut is really cool rather than kinda lazy. These cards are on the lazy end. I think examples of cool die cuts are the Hot Gloves baseball inserts from the nineties, and the McDonald's goalie glove inserts from their old hockey releases.

I'm also not super big on the red background, but that's just me. 

They included Tim Horton in this set, as a base card and as a parallel and maybe some inserts. That makes sense because the company is named after him. I wish they included more Hall of Famers in the Tim's release, as I am much more interested in classic players compared to the current crop. But that's also just me, as obviously the guys currently playing are going to have a broader appeal to the mass market compared to a bunch of retired guys.

Do you guys collect Tim's hockey cards? What about you American hockey collectors, do you like getting these shipped down from us here up north?

How does someone go about being a set builder in 2021?

As I've reentered the hobby over the past few days, I've been trying to decide what I want to spend my money on. I have income, but with the world the way it is, I feel a lot of people are being foolish with their spending. I don't want to be foolish. I want to stick to a budget, and keeping that in mind I am trying to decide how to get the most bang from my buck out of the hobby.

One of the things I've found with collecting cards over the past couple of decades is that I never really complete a project. I tend to start on something, get into it, decide it's not for me or too expensive or whatever, and sell what I've already acquired and then quit the hobby for a few months.

Often I find the issue is not just money, but also choice. There is just so much to collect! And I am a fan of a wide variety of sports. I grew up on hockey and baseball, but as an adult I enjoy basketball and soccer the most. I also watch football, boxing, and mixed martial arts. I bet I could get into tennis and golf if I wanted to.

I enjoy collecting cards for all these different sports. Here in Canada locally, it is easy to acquire hockey. Baseball is not bad. Everything else is impossible.

Choice normally sounds great, but when you are sticking to a budget, then choice can be crippling. I like all the Toronto based sports teams. I like a lot of their players. People talk about limiting themselves to a team or a player, but that still doesn't whittle my choices down to enough where I have a focus.

I'm kind of an old school guy in a lot of ways. I like set building. I know a lot of people don't like it, and I do have some knocks against it. It's kind of annoying to accumulate large quantities of low value cards that are hard to sell if you decide you no longer want them. But that's only if you sell them, of course.

One of the major appeals of set building is to see a variety of players and teams. I found as a kid, I learned so much about hockey from collecting sets of hockey cards. If I built a Topps baseball set, for example, I would feel more connected to other players and teams in the league besides the Jays. It's more fun that way.

I'm also a big book guy. I just moved into a new apartment, and one of the big things I want is like a wall of books. I love books. I'm a reader, obviously a writer since I have this blog, and I enjoy collecting books. I feel like a set of cards put into a binder is kind of like a book. It's almost like an album about the specific season of a league. Like, you can open it up and read through it and kind of have a snapshot of what the league was like at that point in time.

One of the things I've always wanted was to have a fun of Topps baseball or O-Pee-Chee hockey vintage sets. Like, to see I had a complete Topps base set for every year from 1970 through 1989, or whatever. I could open up the binder with those cards and read it, like I would a book.

I like modern sets, too, though. I think, though, because there are so many modern sets released each year, they don't have the same feeling of being a snapshot in time as vintage sets do. That's not to say I don't like modern sets, it just seems obvious that modern collecting is more geared towards investors first, and player and team collectors second. There are a few releases that are geared towards set collectors (Heritage, O-Pee-Chee hockey, maybe a couple others), but not many.

If you had to start your collection and you wanted to build a set, where would you start? Which set would be your first? It seems more efficient to work on one set at a time, but also kinda less fun. I feel like I want to work on one set from each different sport, so I have a few things going at a time and it doesn't become stale.

How would you go about doing this?

It turns out my collection is worth a lot of money and I hate it

After selling two of my most valuable cards on Ebay over the past few months, I've been reviewing the sale prices of other cards in my collection. I've come to a conclusion: you're all crazy.

I have a small collection of cards. I have a complete run of Wayne Gretzky 1980s O-Pee-Chee cards. I have a personal collection of Joe Carter cards that ranges from the (rapidly increasingly) valuable and junk that no one wants except me. I have a bunch of autographed cards from guys who played for the Jays World Series teams. I have a bunch of memorabilia and autographs of guys who played for the Raptors championship team. I have some random junk I got in wax breaks. That's about it.

I own a PSA 10 Donruss Joe Carter rookie. I bought if for about $80 or so a few years ago. It's now going for up to $800 on Ebay. That's nuts. I love Joe Carter, man. He's my favourite baseball player. I'll never forget his home run in 93. But $800!! And not to forget, I have a second version of that card that is autographed by Joe and authenticated by Beckett as a '10' autograph.

Honestly, I don't want to sell any of my stuff. I didn't want to sell my Gretzky rookie or my Gretzky auto. I wanted to keep them until I'm dead. But prices have gotten so out of hand that the money is simply forcing the issue.

I've started listing my collection on Ebay. I hate selling cards. It's so much work. Taking the photos, doing the Ebay listing, fielding offers, accepting an offer, packaging the cards, realizing I don't have packaging, going to Staples, coming back home, packaging the cards, going to the post office, dealing with customers who want their cards immediately even though I live in a locked down city in Canada during a global pandemic. And then going it, again and again and again for each card.

And Ebay buyers are insane. If you don't purchase tracking for your card, there is like a fifty-fifty chance you will get ripped off because all a buyer has to do is say he never received your card and Paypal just sides with him. You need tracking. The only thing is that tracking to the US is like $30 here in Canada. It's nuts.

Usually, for cards with little value I turn to COMC, but that service has become a total disaster. I remember back in the late nineties dot com bubble there was a company that launched a web site where you could mail in your music CDs and they would list them on the site and sold them to other buyers and deposited your money in an account. Same deal as COMC. I remember reading about this in a business class and how this company went bankrupt, and why it was a terrible idea to deal with all that inventory and why Ebay succeeded because it didn't actually have to handle people's inventory.

That was nearly a quarter century ago, and COMC is doing the same business model in 2021. It was fine when sports cards were a niche, but now it feels that literally everyone is involved and treating it like its the stock market. None of these people were around for the early nineties bust period, and they will go bust at some point.

I think their business model doesn't work. I hate that, because I love their service so much. All I want to do is just wrap up my cards in a pretty bow and mail it to COMC and let them take care of the rest. Instead, they suck, so I have to deal with Ebay, which also sucks, but at least I get the money more quickly.

I can't remember where I saw this, but I also remember watching a show about sports cards somewhere. It featured an elderly man who sold his tobacco card collection that he had since he was a kid. The collection was priceless, as he had kept the cards in wonderful condition since his youth. Yet, even though he was getting paid an enormous amount for the cards, he was upset. He didn't want to part with the cards, but he felt compelled to because its, well, money. He would rather the cards never went up in value and he could simply enjoy his funny little hobby without worrying about resale value.

I get it now. I totally get it. If I sell all of my cards, or most of them anyway, it is hard to justify hopping back into the hobby because everything is overpriced. I'm basically cashing out, with the hopes of coming back in a few years when things aren't insane. I don't even want to. I really want to collect cards. But we are in a serious global pandemic that is worse than anything we've seen since the Second World War. It's foolish not to take the money, because I don't know what tomorrow will bring. Money pays the rent; Joe Carter doesn't.

I may quit collecting altogether. But when I mean altogether, I mean sports cards. I'll find another collecting hobby.

Do you collect anything else besides sports cards? Are you collecting other things besides cards now that the hobby has become so expensive?

Do you feel like quitting the hobby?

I stepped away from the hobby for six months and I thought card prices might be cheaper now. Oh Boy.

I haven't posted on this blog since June. I stepped away for few weeks last summer because it felt like prices in the hobby were becoming outrageous. I remember being a kid and collecting kids when the hobby's bubble burst in the early nineties. I didn't want to spend a ton of money on stuff that would end up being junk in a few months time. I figured I would just wait until prices crashed and then I could reenter the hobby and enjoy it more cheaply. I figured this pricing bubble couldn't last to 2021.

The other issue for me was that I was really annoyed with COMC. Being in Canada, being cards on Ebay is expensive because most sellers are in the US and shipping from the US to Canada is ridiculous. Usually I filter Ebay listing to only include Canadian sellers, but there is a lot less available that way. It ends up being easier to buy cards on COMC slowly over time and build up a large package, and mail it to myself. However, COMC's customer service got so far behind the demand for their cards that their site became impossible to use. You could buy and sell cards on the site almost like stocks, but you could not ship to yourself, or ship cards in, without an enormous amount of turnaround time.

I was also using COMC as a mailbox service for my Ebay purchases, since accumulating multiple purchases from Ebay and packaging as a single shipment is cheaper for cross border shipping. COMC, however, actually lost one of my cards shipped from an Ebay seller, even though the tracking showed it arrived at COMC. It took them absolutely ages to list the card on the site. I became so frustrated with their service, and lack of response via email, that I did a port sale on my cards and cashed out.

The most frustrating part was that I really like COMC. It's so disappointing when a business you want to support and enjoy using gives such terrible service. I understand they were overwhelmed, but they simply stopped answering phone calls and responding to emails. It would have been so easy for them to outsource customer service to a third-party agency, or to simply hire more people trained to answer phones and emails. They chose the less expensive route of simply not responding to customers, and their reputation has suffered.

Anyway, I don't want to harp on COMC (they seem to be in an even worse position with their customer service now compared to last summer, if that's even possible). My point is that I figured card prices would decline by the time 2021 rolled around. I figured wrong. I was back checking out card pricing the other week. I can't believe how expensive things have become. I'm in Toronto, and we are in the longest lockdown in North America. The entire province of Ontario was just locked down last week, which means non-essential retail goods are unavailable for purchase in-person. Besides groceries and drugs, everything is online. There is literally nowhere to buy boxes that are cheaper. Blasters are even going for twice their value. Blasters! I mean, blaster boxes are usually just packs of base cards aimed at children. That's why Walmart sells them in the toys section. Sometimes you do get something of value out of them, but it's crazy how expensive they have become.

My interest in the hobby was resuscitated when I sold a couple of valuable cards a few weeks ago. I had listed both my Gretzky OPC PSA 1 rookie and my Gretzky Black Diamond hard signed autograph numbered to /10 on Ebay about a year ago. I listed both of them for an outrageous price, about three times what I paid for them. I figured no one in their right mind would buy them for that price. I didn't really want to sell either card, but it didn't hurt to list them for free on Ebay just to see what the value was. If some crazy person came along and bought them for three times what I did, then I guess it would be worth parting. But I figured that would never happen.

I actually forgot I had the cards listed. After I stopped blogging last summer and lost interest in the hobby, the cards sat on Ebay for months. At Christmas, however, the Gretzky rookie sold for its BIN. I couldn't believe it! I kinda loved the card, as much as a grown man can love a hockey card, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to sell it even for triple what I had paid. But I figured this is an asset bubble and I may as well take advantage. I still have this feeling that card prices will crash at some point in the future and I can always buy the card back at a cheaper price later on. Besides, I still had the Gretzky autograph.

Not so fast! A couple of weeks ago, someone hit the BIN on the autograph. I sold that card for triple what I had paid, too. So, after shipping it out, I started reading hobby blogs and forums and checking out prices. Pricing is even worse now than when I stepped away last summer. Even low end stuff is so expensive I don't think I can participate at all, besides selling what I already own.

I have a blaster box of 2020 Topps Archive. It's unopened, and I received it as a Christmas gift. I simply put it away, intending to open it when I had a slow afternoon one day, and I forgot about it until I sold that Gretzky autograph. I decided to look up how much an unopened blaster of 2020 Archives is going for on Ebay. It's like $35 or so (which in Canadian money is like $50). This is worth more than anything I will pull from the box if I opened it.

So, should I open it? Should I just list it on Ebay and sell it? I love opening cards, but I'm not building that set or anything. Chances are the cards I get will be worthless, and won't be a sensible addition to my collection. On the other hand, it's simply fun to open packs and it was a gift for me to enjoy. Yet, if I did sell it, I could use the money and buy a card or two that I would enjoy and would fit into my collection. I'm also to the point where I want to collect unopened product now instead of the actual cards.

What a dilemma.