My collecting highlight for 2012 was not a big hit, but the end of a long quest. Many years ago I had bought a pack of Nashville Predators cards (my favorite NHL team) off eBay that was an arena giveaway involving all three major manufacturers during the 1999-2000 season. My pack included two Pacific and two Topps cards, plus a header card. Yet the header card also had a logo on it, and later in looking through the Beckett annual price guide, I saw there was in fact supposed to also be two Upper Deck cards in the team set. So for about a decade I searched eBay every week, looking for someone selling those two missing cards, with no luck.

Then this past year, I took a vacation to Nashville and saw a Predators game in person, among other highlights of the trip. I also hunted down a local card shop there, figuring that would be the best place to find Predators cards. As it turned out, it was a pretty small shop and not well organized, so I didn’t find much, but in looking through a $1 bin I did find an unopened pack with those two Upper Deck arena giveaways I had been searching for so long. So I only spent $2 at that shop, but it was the best $2 I spent all year, even though the cards probably aren’t even worth that much. But ending a 10-year long search? Well worth the trip!