Fun.
I began collecting when I was 6 years old, a time where my attention span ran pretty quick from Star Wars to baseball to Superman to Emergency! to what was on the radio to playing with my friends to whatever else just happened to catch it. Some of my first cards followed those interests -- Star Wars, Superman and baseball were among the first subjects I collected in '78/'79, with Wacky Packages following soon after -- but I'd have never kept at it if it wasn't fun.
My friends and I traded them, played games with them, competed over who could get the most. As time went on and my friends began finding other interests, I still enjoyed them. Without my chums, I still did stuff with the cards like sorting through them, organizing them in different manners and working towards getting a set every year. I was a terrible math student until it hit me that the statistics on the back of my cards were math-related. So the 6th grade C student in basic math was an A student in precalculus as a high school senior.
Even today, they're fun. I write about them, and enjoy showing off the ugly ones in my collection. It's not about the money, in fact I don't even have a price guide that's less than 5 years old and don't subscribe to VCP. My daughter has a collection too, based on what she likes...not by what return it might bring her in the future.
When I was a kid, we played with cards. Not a whole lot of them survived our abuse. Then, people began comparing price trends and encouraging collectors to put large numbers away without using them for what the Cardboard Gods intended. When I was a weekend seller between 1989-'92, there were 11 year-old kids who had memorized the values of all the hot cards in the latest Beckett. Hell, when I was 11, there was still a kid in the neighborhood who used a card and a clothespin to make his bicycle sound like it had a motor.
Anything that makes this hobby fun will help keep collectors interested.
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