[BobC]

Interesting question and thread. However, the OP didn't specify which part of the card collecting hobby he was asking about. I think you can break the hobby up, depending upon the era you're collecting, and get different answers.

There's vintage/pre-war cards, which the people on this forum are primarily into. As many have already said, the shows have died out, card shops are gone, and everything seems to have been replaced by the internet. There will always be collectors for the big names/rare cards and as the economy goes, so will the vintage market ebb and flow. The internet has made vintage collecting much more feasible as a collector can now access items from literally around the world, where before they may have been limited to what showed up at the local card shows and at occasional auctions. The increased access has probably added more collectors to the vintage ranks as finding former elusive items is now a lot easier and can be done from one's home instead of having to go from store-to-store or show-to-show looking for that missing card. Values may be stagnant on most pre-war items for a while but, due to age and the innate human nature of many to be fascinated and want to collect historical/antique items, the pre-war cards will have a somewhat stable market for the forseeable future, with moderate growth overall, in my opinion.

Post-war cards, mostly 50's to the early 80's, is ruled by Topps. This is the era a lot of current collectors grew up in (ie:baby boomers). As expected, as the baby boomers hit the middle/late adult years, they had money and a desire to recapture things from their youth, which included things like baseball cards and comic books. Thus the 80's/90's explosion in the card market was borne, first by the initial wave of collectors looking to find cards from their youth, secondly by the entrepeneurs who recognized the first wave and figured they could make money off of them, and finally, by a third wave of somewhat naive people who saw what happened with the first two waves and thus viewed card collecting as a great investment vehicle/way to turn a quick profit like all the dot.com investors who saw the prosperity of the 90's spilling over into everything else. Well, the baby boomers all have the cards they want, PSA and the registry game could only continue that run so far. Then with the advent of the internet, the search and hunt for such cards was eliminated. If I want a 1968 Topps set I can go on Ebay right now and probably have it within a few minutes. What collecting fun/passion does that generate.....answer is, none. So even the true collectors weren;t as interested in the "hunt" anymore. These cards are still collected but, not in the way they once were. In the future they'll again begin to gain value as they become older and take on more of an antique/historic nature. Problem is, so many of these cards were made/kept that prices will remain fairly low for all but the superstars as supply will surely outstrip demand. In other words, none of us will live long enough to see these cards gaining big value.

The 80's, 90's and 00's card market was borne from greed of the people looking to capitalize on the card market, from the card companies, that vastly overproduced and saturated the market, to the investors/dealers all looking to make a buck. Oh the collectors were still there, just stuck in the middle of all the people looking for those 1000% profits they hoped to get from hoarding all the Jose Canseco rookies they could back in the day. And we all know how that turned out don't we? So then the card companies turned to putting in inserts and numbered cards, followed by autographed cards and finally adding bits of game used material to the cards, all in an attempt to keep the collector's interest and increase their sales and profits. They just kept going and going and overproduced everything to where it is was so watered down that cards couldn't keep their value. Who wanted last year's Derek Jeter autographed card, the collector had to have this year's version, and the card companies made sure to supply as many as the market would bear. Again, one day these cards may have increasing value but, you may have to wait for Buck Rodger's time before that happens.


Finally you get to the current/modern cards of today. There are almost no card shops or shows anymore. The sports themselves have taken a hand in policing the overproduction by card companies in the past by now limiting to whom they grant licensing to. Yet the surviving companies. like Topps and Panini, still thrive by gearing their products more and more to the breakers. These breakers go through Ebay and ultimately their own online venues and break open boxes and cases of newly released products live online for the people who bid/buy a team/division/random spot from them, pay through an online source like paypal, and then instead of opening the pack themselves, watch the breakers open it for them, live and online. The breakers then send the participant whatever cards they won. I work with a guy who just got into breaking with a friend of his this past Spring. They started out doing a night a week and can now easily be doing this three/four nights a week. Just this morning he showed me an order he placed with a distributor for $69,000, yes, $69K, of new product he says they'll go through and sell by breaking in just two or three weeks. And this is part-time a few nights a week for them and they do it out of his friends apartment (ie: no overhead). All you have to do is look at the latest offering from Panini in basketball, called Panini Flawless. The entire production was something like two boxes to a case, and a limited production of only about 450 cases. Now each box, which actually isn't a box but, a full-sized metal briefcase (yes briefcase that alone sells for about $50 I'm told), only holds 10 cards. So 10 cards x 2 boxes per case x 450 cases means the entire production run is only about 9000 cards. But wait, every card is a super insert hit, either with an auto, a jersey/patch, both, or they have an actual diamond or other precious gem embedded on the card. And every card is serial numbered with nothing higher than 20 in existence. Oh, and each box/briefcase was guaranteed to contain at least a Kobe/Kyrie Irving or Kevin Durant card in it. When this came out, my friend bought a couple cases at $2,350 a case. That is right, $2,350 a case (20 cards total). That was about a week and a half ago. On the dealer net out there my friend said he's seen a case now up to $4K+ and I believe he mentioned someone actually had a case on Ebay for around $5,200. My friend tells me that customers of his buy chances to get a card from products like these and hope for the huge hits. Apparently there have been single cards from this Flawless set that have been sold, not just listed but sold, on Ebay in the past week for $30,000. That is where the hobby is currently going. It is in the hands of the breakers who want high-end, huge cards that fuel collectors who are really just looking at this as another form of legalized gambling, hoping to get that huge card they can then turn around and flip on Ebay. And there are apparently plenty of current collectors who will pay big bucks for those manufactured rarities.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I won a 1922 Herpolsheimer's - John McGraw card in a PSA 5 holder off Ebay for a little over $200. Per the SCD catalog, there is only one single card of each player known to exist in that set. So I got a HOFer, almost 100 year's old, a true 1-of-1 card for that price, while someone else will pay $30K for a 1-of-1 Kyrie Irving card produced today. And then that same card company will issue another product next week with another 1-of-1 Kyrie Irving card in it, and then the week after that, and the week after that, and so on.....ad nauseum! There's the true state of the current collector hobby, as fostered and nurtured by the card companies still in business.


Bob C