Andriy Shevchenko and Luis Figo Marks of Excellence Autos

 I've discussed at length already about my infatuation with on card soccer autographs and where I think the long-term value will be in collecting them. To recap quickly, they are essentially scarce in the soccer market since it's harder to coordinate in person signings with athletes overseas and logistically more of a pain to ship cards back and forth in these scenarios. It's much easier for Topps and Panini to ship the player a sheet of stockers that they sign and then place signed stickers onto cards. In the other major sports, sticker autos take a bit of a hit in the value game whereas in soccer they take less of a hit due to the acknowledgement that sticker autos have to be more prevalent due to the aforementioned logistics involved. However, that means that the rare cards that do actually have hard signed autographs on them, like the Marks of Excellence subset that Topps has been inserting into various soccer products, have a very high premium placed on them. I also just really like the aesthetics of the cards themselves. They look to me like little pieces of art.

I mentioned in my last post that I have been on a bit of a heater with my luck in breaks recently. Part of that luck was hitting not one, but TWO Marks of Excellence autographs in a five-day span. To put this in perspective, the MOE set is found only once in every 16 cases of product. There are eight hobby boxes per case. Doing the math, that means only one in every 128 hobby boxes have a Marks autograph in it. I hit on these odds two times.

The first was when I took AC Milan in a break for $30. I was hoping somehow to hit the Andriy Shevchenko Marks of Excellence, and somehow, I did. It was the /50 version.

The Luis Figo /10 was actually an eBay purchase that I found and thought was a good buy since it went cheaper than I thought it was worth. I will post about the other Marks of Excellence I got from a break when I get it in mail later this week.