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Posted By: Al C.risafulli

I think card collectors in general spend way too much time ragging on what other people choose to collect. What difference does it make?

Why is it bad to collect 8s? I don't think it's bad to collect 8s - they're beautiful.



Why is it bad to collect low-grade? I don't think it is. Low-grade cards are beautiful, too.



There's room in this hobby for everybody, and frankly it's getting tiresome to read the same dumb argument over and over again. This hobby is very much symbiotic between the low and high-grade collector. The demand for one props up the demand for the other.

Jim, you don't pay any attention to prices realized on low-grade cards, so it's safe to say that you haven't seen the dramatic price increases that many buyers of those cards have seen in the last few years, or the immense volume of material that changes hands every single day. However, buyers of low-grade cards probably haven't tracked high-grade sales, either, and those prices have been equally healthy.

The condescending posts I occasionally read from high-grade collectors are no worse than the condescending posts I occasionally read from low-grade collectors, mid-grade collectors, raw collectors or graded collectors. A person's nature has nothing to do with what they collect, it has to do with their character, and whenever you get a group of people together in a public forum, you're bound to have some bad apples.

What bugs me is how frequently this discussion happens, and how quickly the comments get personal. Same discussion over and over, same people on both sides of the fence, same result every time. Don't you folks get weary of it after a while? It's CARDBOARD, for crying out loud. It's ALL remarkable, it's ALL got history, and it's ALL worth collecting if you're passionate about it. The issues that impact one segment of the hobby impact EVERY segment of the hobby, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand all the animosity. If I want tension, I'll go to the office.

-Al