Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Lions and Bears are here, but no Tiger? OH MY!

So, looking at my calendar, we are coming up on 2 weeks since Exquisite has been released, and we have yet to see a Tiger Woods auto pulled. This is pretty crazy considering how much of the product has been probably been opened so far, and how many of the cards are supposed to be in the set.

Per Upper Deck's site, Tiger is supposed to have 14 cards in this set - 10 normal "patch" autos, 3 gold, and 1 platinum. With 14 cards, you would expect at least one to have made it onto youtube or onto eBay. Hell, even a story would have surfaced somewhere from someone right?

Just for kicks, lets take a look at the Rare Materials cards /10, a card with 4 less in the print run than all of the Tigers. Per my snooping on ebay and the forums, all of the players in the set have had at least 1 card pulled that has been posted for sale or as part of a break. Im not saying this proves anything, its just a comparison.

Lets say for instance, that Gregg's original count of 5 Tigers was correct and that the web is mistaken. If each of the 5 tigers was put into a different case, you would expect that 5/2500 cases would have a Tiger in it. You would expect that 1/500 cases would be your odds. Then, if you consider that 500-700 cases are probably opened in the first few weeks and as far as we know, no Tiger has been pulled, it would leave 5/2000 which lowers the odds even more to 1/350-400 cases. Add into it that almost every other card out of 10, and most the cards out of 5 have had at least one pulled, people are beginning to rumble as to where these cards are. We are already at the odds for one to be pulled, and moving further past every day.

As of right now, I am giving UD the benefit of the doubt, only because we saw one of the cards pictured during the course of the previews for the product. If it comes out that the cards are stashed away somewhere, and were mistakenly not included in the pack out, you can imagine what the backlash will be from the collector base. I hope that things are good, and that eventually someone will pull one of them so that we can see what they are going to sell for. At this point, with the bubbling needs of the Exquisite lovers out there, I would put the value at 4 or 5K minimum for the first, and a bit lower for the rest.

NOTE: Per Gregg, there are 5 Tigers in the cases, and he personally witnessed them being packed out into the product. That makes me feel a lot better, lets hope one surfaces soon, I am eager to see them.

6 comments:

  1. you have to wonder how much of exquisite never sees the light of day. It is quite possible that such a rare card is both still in packs and in collections somewhere.

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  2. Probability is tricky though. Just because something is likely to happen doesn't mean it necessarily will. It's entirely possible that the 5 Tigers will end up in the last five cases opened, even though that's not very likely. It's also plausible that a couple have been pulled by people who decided they wanted to keep the card and aren't into showing off their pulls online. Is there a resource out there for tracking these big pulls or do you just have to dig through the forums and scrounge eBay listings?

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  3. There are a few people I know who track them, and also my own tracking and ebay auctions. As far as anyone can tell, they arent yet pulled. Usually, when something like this is pulled, it pops up somewhere. People who buy exquisite are almost always on eBay, and almost always connected to someone who is on a board.

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  4. I wouldn't be surpised if UD held them back, released the first batch of cases to drum up hype and then have them start hitting on the second wave. Similar to the Joey Harrington 2002 SPA Auto RC.

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  5. Do these cases come in batches?

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  6. I have two words for you - "DIAMOND MEMBER"

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