I rescued this from a $.20 or 7/$1 box, which is a nice way of getting people like me to buy 7 cards, since you're getting two cards for 'free' (love that mental accounting). This may have been the best such box I've ever seen at a show. Loved the opportunity to pick up a bunch of basketball cards on the cheap. This card is part of the 2005-2006 SPx set, which consisted of a bunch of solid auto/jersey rookies. I don't know how well this set held up over time (Chris Paul's cards have slipped), but it still has some guys with some room for growth, i.e., Andrew Bogut, whose cards are mysteriously worthless. To 'augment' the set's value, Upper Deck threw in a large numbered insert set to take up some space that would be occupied by base cards, which isn't a terrible idea in principle. However, these cards aren't really all that collectible: it's still costly to build the set, even if you go to a place like checkoutmycards.com, because you're buying cards at probably 25% of book, when the reality is that these should be a quarter each. The death of the card shop has actually served to increase the price of cards like these, where shipping just eats into your margins heavily. Because these cards are not part of the regular set, the only collectors who would want these are master set collectors (probably only ten or so such collectors surface for each set) and player collectors (but at /999, they can find one). Everyone else is at least ambivalent to these.
And that's a shame, because this would probably be a nice set to put together. Great eye appeal, only 999 made, and good player selection make this a worthy set to put together, at least in my view.
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