The pleasant surprise of finding short print sports cards in a blaster box

I just opened a blaster box of Topps Baseball Series 1 that I bought from Walmart and it was a bust.
We’ve been there, right?
I did get a Noah Syndergaard Jackie Robinson patch card, which is pretty sweet. But relic cards in general don’t bring much back in financial return.
Then as I was organizing my cards into the different subsets, I forgot there might be short prints in one of the packs.
Sure enough there was – an Alex Bregman rookie card SP #341 currently valued at about $150 on eBay.
They are usually a variation of a card featuring the same player but in far less quantities.
Short print cards, as the name suggests, were produced on a shorter print run sometimes due to printing errors back in the day or due to the number of cards printed per sheet not dividing evenly into the number of cards in the total set. These days, they’re often short printed on purpose (ie. the last few cards in a set) creating a rarer subset.
The law of supply and demand dictates the fewer the cards available, the higher the price.
In my case, getting a variation super short printed card of a hot rookie player validated my impulse to buy a blaster box. I guess every once in awhile you luck out.
CK
EDITOR’S NOTE: They can look like regular cards so always make sure to check if the baseball set you’re collecting has issued short printed cards.