My LCS is a great place to shop, lots of selection and the prices aren't off the wall crazy like some I've heard about. One of the best things is he keeps a nice supply of older boxes and sells them at just over his cost. Last year one of the boxes caught my eye, 2008 Upper Deck Goudey. I had bought several packs of this when it first came out and liked the design so I bought a box and tried to see what I could get. Hit wise it's not overly great, you get one jersey and one on-card autograph per box. If you're lucky that autograph is a Sports Royalty version or one of several SP's. You could also pull original 1933 Goudey buybacks, these fall one per case. After I got my first box opened and sorted I decided to try and put the set together. The base set was no problem as I had most of it in one box. However, the last 130 cards were short-prints and you only got 8 or so per box. So almost every time I went into the shop I bought a new box. I probably bought a case worth of Goudey trying to pull the SP's to complete my set. Along the way I pulled several of the Sports Royalty autographs including my favorites Kerri Strug and Kerri Walsh. For regular autographs I pulled a Don Mattingly and a Brooks Robinson. I got a couple of the Yankee Stadium Legacy jersey cards and I managed to get one 1933 Goudey buyback of Lew Fonseca.
I finally got to the point where I had only five or six cards to go and I decided to quit buying boxes as I was getting too many doubles of the SP's. I had pulled three of the hardest cards: Tiger Woods, Sidney Crosby and Jack Nicklaus and started looking for singles online. This last month I finally got down to two cards I needed, Kerri Strug and Terry Bradshaw. After some searching I found both on E-bay. The Strug was an auction that I ended up winning for $.99 and the Bradshaw I actually found on a buy it now/BO. I offered the seller $3.00 and waited. The offer was accepted and I never heard from the guy again. I had to open a case and get my money refunded. So I started looking elsewhere for the card. In came Check Out My Cards and the one seller on there that had my Bradshaw. I again made an offer and less than a week later I got the last card I needed for my fully complete 2008 Upper Deck Goudey card set built by hand. Now I know some of you will look at the first scan and say it's not a complete page, well, you're right. It starts with card 200 as I don't have the regular base set in pages yet. I put that part of the set together months ago and it's stored in a box that I need to pull out.
If there is anyone out there that is trying to put this set together and needs some of the Sp's please hit me up. I have a stack and will gladly work something out with you.