The wife took the kids to go visit her parents last week. I couldn’t take the time off since we’re already going on vacation next week, so I stayed behind to mind the house. To keep myself entertained, I decided to call up a few of my cousins who are home from college for the summer and hang out. We spent a TON of time playing Pokémon GO, because, you know, what else do you do at 3am when your a 20-something with no family commitments?
Anyways, this post focuses on one particularly late night last week. Tuesday to be specific. My cousins live about 30 minutes away, two towns over. It’s a very nice town, and their historic Downtown area has free wi-fi and a really nice park in the town square. This park just so happens to have six PokeStops around it and a gym at the center. So what does all this Pokémon GO stuff have to do with diecast you may be wondering right about now? Don’t you worry, I’m getting to that.
Earlier that day, my two cousins had taken out their younger brother (also my cousin) to play Pokémon GO. He’s only eleven, so he doesn’t have a cell phone. Instead he was using an iPod touch with wi-fi. This means he’s very limited with how he can play due to the game relying heavily on GPS signals over 3G/4G to determine your location in the game. With the wi-fi only, it reads the signal location on the wi-fi router and that is your stationary spot. You can’t move in-game, making it very difficult to actually do anything. Since he’s in middle school, this game is pretty big deal for him, and we all felt bad that he was getting left out a lot.
That night, while I’m hanging out with the two older cousins, they decide they’re going to go in together and buy him a smart phone so that he can play the game to it’s full extent. TracFone has some relatively inexpensive phones that are free of any contracts, and are on a pay as you go basis. So off we head to the nearby Wal-Mart at 1:00am. They find the phone they like for about $90 and go to find an employee to get it unlocked and purchase it. Meanwhile, I decide to go see if they’ve got anything good in the Hot Wheels department. Walking down the main aisle in front of the toy section, I find these overflowing dump bins:
Believe it or not, the one in the center is actually the new Ford Performance series. It’s had a bunch of recent / slightly older stuff dumped on top of it though. I had to do a lot of digging to find the ones I was looking for. But I did manage to snag the funny car, the foxbody, the ‘99 Mustang, and the Cobra. After rummaging through a bit more and not finding anything else I didn’t have or didn’t want, I move on to the actual aisle. The pegs were more or less the same, except for the Japan Historics. No 510s of course, but I did find two roll-cage variant Skylines! So those will be going int he trade pile for anyone who’s still looking for one. On the Matchbox side of things though, I did find the new Cayman, new Miata, and new Range Rover! I happened to look up at the top of the shelf while my cousin was looking through the pegs (he’s a Honda guy and found the new NSX) and happened to notice these three cases just sitting up there. I quickly Google’d the case number to see what should be inside. It’s the 2016 J case!!!!!
With the help of my two cousins, I pulled down the three cases and cut them open post-haste! First case was all standard stuff. Nothing I didn’t already have. Cracked open case number two. First thing I noticed were two cards on top that weren’t laying flat when the case was closed, so the cards go bent. One was a Charger and one was a BATMOBILE SUPER TREASURE HUNT!!!!!! I was so happy to find the Super, but sad that the card was bent. Since I had already found the Z4M Super, I figured I had missed my chance with the Batmobile. With finding that super, I wasn’t expecting to find anything else in the third case, but I was wrong. ANOTHER BATMOBILE SUPER!!!!!! And this one had a mint card!!!!! ALL HAIL THE DIECAST GODS!!!!!!
Here are the two Supers. The one of the right as you can tell has the damaged card.
The full HAWL. Complete with Supers, roll-cage variant JH Skylines, Ford Performance series, and ZAMACs!
I was considering DLM’ing the Super with damaged card, or even offering it up for trade. But the next day at a different Wal-Mart, I ran into an older collector who was searching for the Batmobile $TH and mentioned he’d be willing to pay $50 for it since that was the average price on ebay. I didn’t have the car with me and didn’t mention to him that I had a spare one. But I can’t say that didn’t temp me to look at prices for them on ebay. HOLY COW!!! Looking at the sold auctions, they were going from $50-$120!!!! I haven’t ever bought a cast to sell as that’s not why I collect. However, I might change that based on the sheer insanity of the prices that these are going for right now. I don’t know if I will actually follow through with, but I’m strangely considering it.
Anyways, that’s the first post of my catch-up posting. I should have a few more later tonight and into tomorrow since I’ve been too busy to really post anything lately. But I have been lurking, so don’t think I’ve forgotten about you LaLD!