Biggest changes in the past 5 years?

[sesop]

Good for you for dumping that newfangled new stuff for some vintage cards. Of course, this raises another question, which is- what's the state of modern cards (by "modern," I'm referring to anything post WW2. From what I gather, the 50s are still popular although prices seem to have fallen a bit since I've been away. I know this isn't the right forum for this in particular, but figured it couldn't hurt to see if any of you vintage guys have insight on the modern and present-day issues. Does anyone collect baseball cards in 2012 from 2012? Is it fair to assume that if the average Joe who wants to get into vintage, tends to get into early T and E cards first and foremost, or does anyone make a bee line to, say, a 1957 Topps set or 1948 Bowman? Finally, what does all of this mean for the 100 Pete Incaviglia 1987 Topps rookie cards I have somewhere at my mother's house?

[coaster]

Originally Posted by sesop

Good for you for dumping that newfangled new stuff for some vintage cards. Of course, this raises another question, which is- what's the state of modern cards (by "modern," I'm referring to anything post WW2. From what I gather, the 50s are still popular although prices seem to have fallen a bit since I've been away. I know this isn't the right forum for this in particular, but figured it couldn't hurt to see if any of you vintage guys have insight on the modern and present-day issues. Does anyone collect baseball cards in 2012 from 2012? Is it fair to assume that if the average Joe who wants to get into vintage, tends to get into early T and E cards first and foremost, or does anyone make a bee line to, say, a 1957 Topps set or 1948 Bowman? Finally, what does all of this mean for the 100 Pete Incaviglia 1987 Topps rookie cards I have somewhere at my mother's house?

Thanks for the welcome, guys!

From what I've seen at shows, the '40s-'60s stuff seems to be doing quite well. I've seen more vendors of these the past couple years than I recall seeing 10 or 20 years ago, and they almost always have a lot of activity at their booths and a lot of money changing hands. What was nice was that there were a good number of younger (<25) collectors picking up these things.

My boss is a big collector of Tops, and always buys a number of new boxes upon release with his son. There's the usual assortment of artifact cards (bits of jerseys or slivers of bats) that are worth some money, and some of those can be kind of neat, especially if you get part of the name or number on the jersey. Other than that though, the only thing of interest I've seen lately is the Skip Shumaker rally squirrel card:


This was only in one series; the rest were normal Shumaker cards.