If you collect cards, you know the routine. You open eBay, type in a player or a set, and start scrolling: past the way-overpriced Buy It Now listings, past the auctions with no bids, past the lots and the reprints, hoping you don't miss the one card that's actually worth your time tonight.
I got tired of that, so I built something to do the digging for me. It's called UnderComps, and it's free at undercomps.com.
What it does
UnderComps pulls live eBay auctions for baseball, football and basketball cards and keeps only the ones worth watching:
- The current bid is $200 or more
- Someone has already bid, so it isn't sitting untouched
- It ends in the next 24 hours, which means most of it is ending tonight
It refreshes every 30 minutes for most of the day, and every 10 minutes from 6 PM to midnight Central, when most auctions close. Every card has a live countdown, and once an auction is under an hour it turns amber and starts counting down by the second.
What used to be three hours of painful searching is now about half an hour of easy clicking and scrolling. It's cool card after cool card after cool card.
The Top 30
The homepage is the Top 30: the 10 hottest auctions in each sport right now. It isn't just the highest price or the most bids. Every auction is ranked on both, equally, so a monster card with two bids doesn't crowd out the auctions everyone is actually fighting over.
The night I recorded my walkthrough, the baseball Top 10 alone had a game-worn laundry tag from Clayton Kershaw's 3,000-strikeout game, a Mickey Mantle with white letters, and a 1982 Topps Traded Cal Ripken Jr. in a PSA 10.
Browse by sport and era
Pick a sport and the auctions are split into eras, so you can go straight to what you collect:
- Pre-1952: tobacco, candy and gum cards before Topps
- 1952–1979: vintage
- 1980–1991: the junk wax years, where condition is everything
- 1992–2002: the insert and refractor era
- 2003–2014, 2015–2022, and 2023 to today, because so many auctions are from recent years
Some of my favorite finds have come from these pages, like a 2003 SPx combo with a Cal Ripken Jr. patch and a Lou Gehrig game-worn pants swatch, numbered to 90, and a Ken Griffey Jr. autograph in a White Sox uniform. Griffey has barely any White Sox cards, so that one stopped me in my tracks.
Filters that save time
On every sport page you can narrow things down:
- Graded or raw
- Price range: $200–$500, $500–$1,000, $1,000–$5,000, or $5,000+
- Rookies only
- Search by player, team or set
- Sort by ending soonest, highest bid or most bids
The free daily email
If you don't want to check the site every day, put your email in the signup box. Around 3 PM Central, before the evening rush, you'll get the night's hottest auctions in your inbox. It's free, and you can unsubscribe anytime.
How the site is funded
UnderComps is part of the eBay Partner Network. If you click through and buy something on eBay, I may earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it never changes which auctions show up. That's what keeps the site free.
What's next
I'll be using this blog to dig deeper into cards I find interesting: grading and pop reports, comps, and the auctions that look like steals. I'll also post finds on social media that don't make it into a full write-up.
Check out tonight's Top 30, and let me know what you think.