I was clearing out stuff and somehow I have a have a box of X-Men trading cards and shoebox of Marvel comic books. Beast is the first card and there are 5 holographs cards. Six cards are missing out of the set.

Are these worth hanging onto? I like graphic novels and such but don't really keep up with 'em. I quit buying when comics when they hit the 50 cent mark. ^^

The card market all around is dead. You could get a couple of bucks off them but frankly, it's 90's comic material and that can easily be used as fire wood for as much as you'll get from it in profits.

Raises hand as one of the stupid fools that bought tons of comics and cards in the 90-92 range. I have perhaps 50 sealed boxes of various comic cards, all worthless I'm sure.

But I refuse to give them up. In 30 years I'll open them up and see if my nephew or (possible future) kids want them.

Funny thing is I don't know how I got them. I was throwing stuff out and there they were. Maybe I'll put the comics and all for $10 on craigslist. A sort of 'Just take before his mother eats him, kid' sale' .

I've sold completed sets for about $4. The hologram set will fetch maybe $8 to $10. Good luck.

We giving them to a friend's kid. He'll love 'em. ^^ His dad once told him about Hulk vs Spiderman and he was like, "No way!"

I'd give them out to kids wearing superhero costumes on Halloween, along with the usual candy.

I've always wanted to wander into a comic store with a box full of early 90s comics -- X-Men #1, X-Force #1, a couple of Todd McFarlane Spider-Mans, a bunch of random Marvel and DCs like Silver Sable or Team Titans, and a handfull of X-Men and Marvel Universe cards -- and ask them what they'll give for them...

...Just to see the look on their faces.

I've still got a binder full of hologram, prism, and misc. chase cards that I started back in 1992. I was going to put the whole thing on eBay and see if it got any bids. I did notice that a few of the prism cards from the Death of Superman set were getting a few bucks, so it's worth a shot I guess.

I think I might still have a few sets hidden away of the early Marvel Universe cards, Dc Cosmic cards, and these X-men cards. I might try to give them away someday or just toss them, if I feel the need to do some spring cleaning.

I still have some Garbage Pail Kids as well, but I am keeping those to pass on to my children and/or grandchildren.

While most sets from the 90s are not worth much, those from the mid to late 90s fetch a premium. I believe it was my set of the last Marvel Masterpieces, with all chase cards, that sold for several hundred dollars on eBay earlier this year.

That's me as well, I also have a binder full of chase cards. I was sort of good at locating chase cards in sealed packs back then, so I got quite a few of them (but sold off many more via newsgroup listings, before ebay). I also have a binder or two of card sets that I kept because I liked them then, now, don't care either way.

Just lucky? Or did you have a system?

I have a lot of chase cards simply because I was dumb enough to buy these damn cards in bulk. It seemed like such a good idea at the time (and holograms were so pretty).

Not luck!

Back in those days, the chase cards were usually stiffer than the normal cards, or were more slippery than the normal cards, so you could poke the pack of cards in a clandestine fashion, or see if cards in the middle slipped more than usual. These days, the cards are much thicker, so it's tougher to find them (plus I haven't bought a pack of cards in over a decade, especially since they cost $3-$4 a pack these days).

I remember Impel actually just added the chase cards on top of the regular cards to the first series of Marvel Univierse cards in about 92. You just had to sidestack packs and see which were thicker. Bingo. Chase cards.

I sort of remember rumors about dealers running card packs through metal detectors to pick out the packs with hologram cards in them.

Don't know whether or not it was true, or if it would even work, but I could definitely see card/comic dealers doing that.

slightly off topic but along the same lines...a couple of local sports cards dealers were "busted" for going through the boxes as soon as they came in and digging for the stick/jersey cards, usually just by feeling them up to find packs with thicker cards, grab them from the box and cheerfully tell customers that there's still some good stuff left, for only $3-6 bucks a pack...sheesh. one of them even went so far as to reseal the box and sub a couple of packs - a parent of a kid who bought a box complained when his kid got nothing after saving his allowance for weeks...long story short, word got around and he was out of business in six months.

Marvel had obvious systems. For example, Marvel series....3, I think. The one with the Spider-Man vs. Venom hologram, 4 to a case. Granted, this only worked on a retail level if they wanted to really cheat their customers, but you would start opening one of the 4 stacks of your case of 20 boxes. Once you found the box hologram, the boxes on the same level with it in the other 3 stacks would also have the hologram.

Another set (DC's first one, I think), used an opaque wrapper, and always packaged the hologram on top. This allowed you to just press the semi-transparent wrapper against the pack and see if there was a hologram present.

I have a deep-seated fear and hatred for 90's comic cards, because I used to work for a comic shop at that time and my job was to open several cases of all new releases to make sets.

You wouldn't believe the lengths dealers would go to in order to find limited edition cards in the early days.

One of the football sets (Score, I think) had an ultra-limited hologram insert of the Lombardi trophy in the late 80's (I think it was one of the first major inserts, not even advertised). Instead of taking the place of another card, it was an extra card in the pack... but it was so thin, stacking packs wouldn't work. Many dealers would either weigh packs on sensitive scales, or they'd use devices that could measure pack thickness better than the human eye could.

Thankfully most companies have caught on to all the scams. The only major one that hasn't is Inkworks, as you can still quickly find one of their pieceworks cards by simple bending the pack and checking its resistance. Most companies now have a thick "dummy card" in the pack so that all packs bend the same.