The Growing Blind Bag Craze

I'm going to take the long, meandering road to get to my point on this one. If you don't want to read my preface to this, just jump to the bottom.

When I was growing up, trading cards were a big part of my childhood. From Garbage Pail Kids, to sports cards, to the Marvel series we all remember fondly, I was in on whatever it was. Card packs were fun and affordable. For a kid that lived in a holler and couldn't just go to the corner store for more packs, they were a very special treat. I'd save my snack money for a lot of things, but the biggest bang for my buck was often trading cards. Before the internet, this is where I learned much of the information I needed on important comic characters.

In the "next town over," which was really the next closest town to the holler, there was a store called Kings Sports Cards. This was a huge treat for me because it was the first store I had access to that sold comic back issues, new comics, trading cards, and single cards for completing sets. This was around the time of the 1994 X-Men Fleer Ultra series. I spent so much of my snack money trying to complete that set. I got down to two cards: Havok & Polaris and Wolverine vs. Lord Shingen. Kings never had the single cards and I was never able to pull them from packs. This proved to be a lesson for me. After months of obsessively ripping packs only to find cards I already owned, I'd blown through all of my money and still hadn't completed the set.

Something I had noticed at Kings was that they sometimes sold complete sets. So I thought to myself, why would I spend dozens of my hard-saved dollars ripping packs when I could just buy the set and get exactly what I wanted. I didn't realize it at the time, but my Xennial brain had just conjured a lesson that would benefit my greatly in my adult life. While ripping packs was very fun, the results were more often than not very disappointing. I'm sure the lady that worked at Kings grew very tired of listening to my puberty-laden voice call asking for "X-Men series 2 complete sets," but one evening she confirmed that they had them in stock and they were $16.