.......This Guy!!!
Just had to share my good news from today. Anyone else ever hit the jackpot with something gaming related or otherwise? (my dad once won $10,000 on a lottery ticket.)
My favorite MTG set is Arabian Nights. I like the cards, I like the art, and I love how the early developers took real world myth/legend & worked it into the game.
I've long been saddened that WoTC never did any more such sets like this as I think there's ALOT of untapped potential just waiting to be dumped into the game.
Anyways, eventually they made the Portal: Three Kingdoms set. Awesome! Too bad it wasn't tourny legal being Portal.....
And it was extremely hard to get in my area. So all I got when it was new was but a few packs.
A year later? I'm strolling through the dealers room at GenCon & I come across one vendor with a small pyramid! (you know, like the stacks of Pepsi you see at the supermarket) made of sealed 3K boxes. $20/box.
I bought every box he had. He gave me an even better price.
My play set took opening about 4 boxes.
The rest? I put into storage in my basement. I figured that they'd eventually climb a bit in value. Afterall, Fallen Empires & Chronicles did.... Or I'd trade them off, or run some unique booster drafts, whatever.
About a year later? Life had changed & I wasn't really playing MTG anymore.
Fast forward by several years;
Once again I'm strolling through the GenCon dealers hall. I see a sealed P:3k box up on the top shelf at one of the booths with no $tag. Wich reminds me "Hey, I've got an assload of that stuff in my basement. Wonder what it's going for now-a-days?"
So I asked.
The vendor replies "That? That's pretty expensive" & digs for his current Scrye guide.
I about fell over when he showed me the scrye. A sealed box was well over a grand!
I had a pallet full of sealed boxes under a tarp in my basement!!
A week later I put nearly $30k into my bank account. It went along way towards my '68 Vette.
I hate you both.
Um.. hrmm... uh... Well, I once found a copy of the issue of The Avengers where they find the body of Jean Grey after she's become the Phoenix in a 50 cent bin at a comic store.... < tries to look cool >
I hate you both.
Um.. hrmm... uh... Well, I once found a copy of the issue of The Avengers where they find the body of Jean Grey after she's become the Phoenix in a 50 cent bin at a comic store.... < tries to look cool >
I would be really excited by that! The three I mentioned above aren't worth all that much money without being in the boxes (which I should've mentioned) but I was so stoked to find them. I had never even seen the Holmes rules before--of course I knew of them. I can't for my life figure out why someone would've gotten rid of that stuff except that it was prolly someone's mom doing some spring cleaning and sold it all in a lot.
- I found a complete BD&D set - right down to the original-condition dice - at a flea market for ¢25.
- Another time I found a copy of the BD&D rulebook free in a pile of magazines at a sports bar.
- Best one: I contacted TSR about the missing rules for a game I bought at a yard sale. They sent the rules and along with it included a free little D&D mini-module called The Jade Hare which, a few years later, I sold on eBay for about $250.
Non gaming-related:
- My wife and I went on a bus trip to the casino in Niagara Falls. We weren't big into gambling but a lot of family were going so we tagged along for the fun of it. We each gave ourselves $40 to play the slots and figured once that was gone we'd just stroll around town till it was time to leave. About half an hour in we're pretty close to broken when the wife hits a jackpot and wins something like $400. We took our original $40 each back out, left the casino, and blew the money doing all sorts of fun tourist stuff around town, had a very nice dinner, and enjoyed a really great day together.
Gaming:
When I got back into Maic the second time, I wanted a Library of Alexandria. And I found one. For $10. It was mispriced and I actually got it for 10 bucks. Kinda cool. The value at the time was 10x that, of course.
Non-Gaming:
My dad and I look for Native American artifacts - arrowheads and the like (totally legal the way we do it - no digging, no trespassing, etc). I've found some cool stuff doing that. I also found an awesome shed antler after a buddy and I were done rabbit hunting. It's cool cuz it was near where I hunt deer, I'd seen him earlier that year and, oh yeah, finding ones like that are not super common. My dad and brother look every year and have found maybe two that were nicer in well over a decade of searching. I wasn't even tryin', heh. It's also the first shed we found on that property though we've been hunting there for 20+ years. We've found skulls an' stuff, but never a shed. Overall I ain't all that lucky. 
Gambling: I went to Vegas a few years ago and won more money at the poker tables than the trip cost me. While the primary reason is my great skill at poker, I definately hit the jackpot with some really bad players. I won almost $1000 in a couple of hours (playing their lowest stakes) because one player was just so horrible, but thankfully didn't care about throwing his money away. Its great to go on vacation, have a great time, waste money, and come back netting cash. Man, I really should have gone to Vegas more before getting married.