Million Card Giveaway = $18.82 In The Hole, For Now

Plenty of lead time has never been something that got in the way of good procrastination for me.

With less than two weeks before Topps shuts down its Million Card Giveaway program and site, the order was placed today for portions of my amassed collection.

In nine to 13 business days it'll be time to see if the Master Plan will work.

The Master Plan, conceived during last year's Topps Series 2 case break, involves what we could be considered a vintage catch-and-release process: Take the best conditioned cards from 50s, early 60s and the infamous black-bordered 1971 mega-set and send them back out into the hobby world as graded cardboard.

OK, fine, it's basically flipping. No one is disputing that around here. With very little to risk by trying to hoard early issue cards that would never touch these hands under any circumstance, there seemed like an opportunity to make something out of nothing.

Well, not entirely nothing. Sure, it cost money to buy packs that yielded code cards, to grade and it did set me back $18.82 to have Topps ship the 31 cards determined to be the best candidates for grading. By the way, $19 to ship? I've sent more cards to foreign countries at cheaper USPS rates.

Master Plan expectations are mellow. There's not going to be any 9 or 10 grades, but with low or no BGS populations - the only free pop reports out there - for some our guys, even a mid-grade might be a worthy venture.

Or, the whole thing might explain why there's not a lot of vintage adventures in this collector's history.

Campana's Corner is written by Dan Campana, a media consultant, former newspaper reporter and longtime collector living in the Chicago suburbs with a sports-minded 6-year-old and an understanding wife.