What is the one thing that has changed most since you started collecting?
 

I saw this question on another forum and wanted to get Net54 take on this topic. What is the one thing that has changed the most since you started collecting?

I have collected cards for over 35 years so I thought long and hard about this topic. For me, its information, specifically card pricing tools. I remember the old days of book value and these new tools have helped both collectors and dealers get a more accurate idea of value.

What say you?

I think my brother and I were the last two kids to play with their cards. We knocked down the leaner, flipped, covered etc. on top of that we invented games based on statistics and wrote notes on the cards. That stopped around 1985 for us when I saw an issue of Baseball Card Magazine and found out that a Wade Boggs rookie was worth $13. We had dozens of them, we were rich! Until we read about something called "condition"

Information for sure is at the top of my list...to be different i'll say "availability" or access to cards has changed the most. Back in the late 80's/early 90's you'd only see the cards that were right in front of you. No internet...no auction infrastructure like we have now. The first time I saw a tolstoi backed t206 I paid up big time because I had already had a Drum back and I thought tolstoi were impossible to find!!!!

I think the scope of collecting has expanded.

First it used to all about Baseball and specifically cards. Now it seems all sports have been on an update with NBA the hottest and then NFL, and even Soccer and hockey has really picked up.

Second. Fringe collections are becoming more main stream. Postcards became Cards, different items like Pictures becoming hotter commodities and now Pins seams to be on the upswing. Even Pokemon Cards, Hugi Go Cards etc are becoming mainstream collectables.

Third. Vintage is steady but Modern is really exploding but it has major swings in prices and focus while the market figures it out

Fourth. Alot of new money is coming in the collectible realm,

The prices paid for T206 cards. I never could have imagined that THE most common pre 1930’s set in existence would sell for multiple times the same player’s cards in sets exponentially rarer. I get why people like it but I have always valued true rarity over everything else.

I get the back rarities and understand the price on those more than a Common back T206 card.

Obviously the prices have changed. Used to be a 1984 Topps Don Mattingly was worth as much as a T206 Hall of Famer in similar condition.

Two other things that really stand out are how much easier it is to find almost any card you're looking for now (thanks to the scope of the internet) and how much the hobby cares about centering. It never occurred to me until the 21st century that being off-center would impact the price of a card; and if it had, I would have presumed that very off-center cards would sell for a bit of a premium (as they do for T206s).

People buying because they are afraid prices will "go up".

The whole Gambling Aspect tied to selling

Breaks...Raffles.. from Cases Down.. Half Cases, Boxes, Packs, Modern and Vintage, Teams, Players..and Facebook Raffles on graded and raw cards sometimes as much as hundreds of dollars a chance.


Sellers have many many more ways and platforms for moving cards now as compared to 20 plus years ago.

It's interesting to watch.

Got my first T206 in 1973

Biggest change is the move away from collecting to investing in cards.

The demographics have also changed. Used to be the main collectors were prepubescent kids and middle-aged guys. Now I think it's largely young men collecting modern cards and elderly men collecting vintage cards.

How I find cards. Some of the 1966 and 1967 high numbers took months and many trips to shops and shows to find. Now they are super easy to find.

I was collecting before autograph cards started to be inserted into packs (early 80s), but I can't believe we're at the point where having 5-10+ different colored borders with a number stamped on them is often worth more than an autographed card.

Make something a red border and stamp 1/5 on it, that's generally more valuable by a huge amount than an autographed card (unless it's also got a rare border and a stamp).

I'm not a "rainbow chaser" but I don't got a problem with them. I am a bit shocked at how much people will spend on a 1/5 - 1/10 - etc that's just a border color change and a stamped number.

The biggest change for me and my collecting happened many years ago, when I was about 10 years old in the mid-1970's. The advent of the Rookie Card craze. When I was a young kid, nobody cared about rookie cards. In fact, we were disappointed when we pulled them as we would have much rather pulled the stars - Reggie, Ryan, Seaver, Bench, Pete Rose, etc.

I would have to echo "information" and up to date pricing knowledge. With the growth of sites like Ebay, what I used to think was rare suddenly showed up in quantity. Plus, the sites that quote the latest sales data (not asking price) gives you a realistic idea of what you should be paying for items in various grades.

Ebay. My local card shop used to have everything I needed. Once I went away to college and lived in a town where there was no card shop I was forced to turn to ebay in 2004. Wow. What a world. I didn't collect a lot in college because I had no place to put them. But I sure wish I did! 2004 had amazing deals on cards that you just can't find today.

The decline in trading cards with your pals. When I was a kid, the only ways to get cards you wanted was to trade with your gang or, if your meagre allowance permitted, buy another pack and hope for the best.

Sets v. Singles

I have a theory as to why. The earlier generation of baseball card collectors were mostly the older baby-boomers and they were taught by their parents (WWII vets and Depression kids) to finish things and that the satisfaction was in the work of completing the task. For generations the finishing of a set was the key. When I grew up in the 1980's I remember having this conversation with my father about why one card was worth more (84 Topps Mattingly) when it was just as common as the other cards. He could not get it no matter how much we talked it over. He was born in 1934 and it did not make sense and never would.

Almost nobody completes sets anymore and I think the trend will continue to get worse as older collectors pass away.

100%% Agree Set Builders are a thing of the past especially when it comes to the younger generations who seems to only be interested in making profits off cards, vintage or modern. I get asked over and over again are you selling any of your Mantles, Ruth's or Jackies...

Biggest Change
 

I've been collecting for 60+ years and I agree with Prewar Cards statement. We built sets when I was young and those high numbers in the 60's were tough. I sold most of my sets to buy my first house. ( I kept my Post Cereal and Jello cards) As I started to get back into collecting I concentrated on Detroit sports teams. The thing I dislike is trying to build a set NOW. I tried a 2012 Heritage set, Too many cards, too many SP. I tried a 2012 Gypsy Queen set.....Same result. The fact that the availability of cards is great as compared to when I was a kid is a positive. It's just that there are SO MANY cards it's difficult to decide what to pursue.

The biggest change in many ways has been the money.

Hindsight is 20/20, but man I should have bought differently.

Collecting trends have changed back and forth, I think at some point set collecting will come back. If only because it will be impressive having a complete 600 or 700+ card set when commons in nice condition are $20 each.

Or, it will go the opposite way, and commons will become essentially worthless.

To me the PSA Registry and Pop Report have had the biggest and longest lasting impact on the hobby and business...total game changer. It put commons on the map and brought more money into the hobby.

Grading of Cards, numbered cards and ebay. As a kid , I could only get cards from the local party store until they ran out and then you waited for next year.

The 2 things I have to say that have changed the most are:

1) When I started collecting in the mid 70s, Topps was the only card in business and they issued 1 set per year. No inserts, no parallel brands, etc.

2) The internet greatly changed the marketplace. I'd venture to say that I would have never SEEN 70% of the cards in my collection, much less have a chance to own them.

Exponential increases in both Supply (digital mechanisms to bring cards to market) and Demand (increased awareness from digital news and marketing, and proliferation from pandemic). Thus skyrocketed prices.

So true. And then later, I found myself collecting nothing but rookie cards. Boy how times change.

How the "valuation" of cards has completely changed...

511. Evolutionary Cardwinism
The incremental change in valuation from, say, a Hank Aaron card being worth, “My friend’ll give me three Mets for it! Dyn-o-mite!!!” when you were a kid, to putting it under a blacklight to root out any unseen flaws, using calipers to measure centering, and so on, to formulate a specific monetary dollar value for it today.

The internet, Slabs & Card Registries!
 

The creation of grading card companies and their slabs and their associated card registries changed everything...but not for the better. The internet and eBay especially has made access to cards and memorabilia easier to find.

Patrick

The number of buttheads that are trying to screw the collecting public. 100X increase in population of these dirt bags.

Ok - a couple of things:

INTERNET - You can find anything you want on the internet - doesn't mean that T206 Wags is real.

TPGs - Without them, some collections may be worth 100X less than they are today.

I have been collecting on and off since the early 1980s. So much has changed. Yet in so many ways things are the same.

The two largest changes I have seen is (1) card grading and authentication / TPGs, and (2) the internet, which has fundamentally changed how we buy cards, exchange information, interact with other hobbyists, etc. Without the internet, I would know at least 50 less people, many of of whom I consider legitimate friends.

At the same time, much has stayed the same. Cards have value, rookies are most desirable, and people still collect, trade, and sell cards. I also remember when there was Topps, Donruss, and Fleer and where 1984 Donruss was preferred, but 1985 Topps was preferred, and 1987 Fleer was preferred (1986 just sucked all around). Then there was Sortflicks, and Bowman, and Upperdeck - just like today with so many (too many) options. In 1983, we bought boxes looking for Gwynn, Boggs, and Sandbergs, and we threw away all the commons, and then in 1985 We would buy boxes looking for the Gooden, Clemens, Puckett, McGuire, etc. The only difference is we did not call these “hits”. At card shows, the modern totally outweighed the old old stuff in volume, by miles, as it does today.

It’s the same hobby, just different

#1 change is Third Party Graders (TPGs).

For me it is by far the part I made bold. A card that in the 80s that took months to track down you can now have your choice of 100s of that card in seconds. The other stuff is amazing but to me it doesn't even come close to the availability of cards now to back then.

With the available funds, anyone can find and purchase anything they want. Not that easy back in the good 'Ol days..

Grading
It has taken alot of the fun and innocence of the hobby away for me

I'm in with the crowd that says it's the explosion of accessibility and information. Without even knowing that something exists, how would I even know to look for the things I think are the most interesting? (I'll leave it to the practicing economists to talk about how information is integral to an increasingly efficient market.)

3PGs are nothing next to this. I like the encasement aspect, and it is somewhat nice to have a bit more level field as far as condition assessments when exchanging. Still, buy the card, not the holder.

I can relate to most all of the comments above, but I'd say #1 for me is the advent of the TPGs, specifically the non-linear price differences for high (8, 9, 10) grade cards. Paying 10X (or more) for one card over another because of some small issue that cannot be seen with the naked eye has priced me out of owning high grade vintage cards. It has made that end of the market very competitive.

TPG “poor1” now covers a very large gamut of grades ,
In the early 80s a lot of vintage cards were accepted as vg-ex based on eye appeal but now fall into the poor category

Access. When I started as a kid in the mid seventies there was no infrastructure to the hobby. You pounded the pavement at antique stores and junk stores to find cards and when you did find a honey hole you guarded the information like a state secret. I had one place sold cards twelve for a buck. I used to get twelve cards and flip them at school for $0.25 and up per card then reinvest my proceeds and do it again the next week.

Lots of great responses here.

Follow up question…. What is one card collecting thing that will change in the next 10-15 years?

People will finally learn/comprehend that eBay sucks (especially for sellers), and it will die as a venue/exchange for buying and selling cards. It’s a shame bc eBay was once, hands down, the best market place for cards.

Prices

It’s gotten significantly harder to collect. I started as a 10 year spending $80 to $100 at a time and being able to buy a huge range of post war star cards and big time pre war. I bought my Matty white cap for $70. Even as late as graduate school I was still buying Ruth and Gehrig for $500. Now I have to sell to buy anything.

Someone overtakes PSA as the leader in grading. I hope it’s SGC.

Every time I add a $50 common to my t206 set , I know I am throwing it away

I've been collecting since the early 2000s.

When I started, the Hobby had slowed down, or so I was told from many collectors and dealers, when I first started going to card shows with my father. It felt a little more insular, which I don't think was a bad thing. Card collecting was more niche really.

The Hobby is much more exposed now, for better and worse. More people are involved, more money is being thrown around. On one hand, I'm glad that there is so much renewed interest in cardboard, but on the other, I hate the gambling aspect that has seemed to taken over everything now. Breaker culture, the livestream opening of new card products, I don't think it's good for the youth that is trying to get involved in the hobby.

My suspicion is that we are on the road to developing a very stratified, two-tier, (or more) collecting system where an entire piece of the hobby infrastructure caters exclusively to the hobby upper class and has no meaning to the rest of the collectors, and an entirely different segment caters to everyone else. We already see the start of this stratification in a variety of ways:

--Walk a show and see how readily the groups of collectors self-differentiate by class. Not many vintage collectors hanging around the breaking pavilion, and very few card bros are unloading their Zion cases at mom and pop tables of vintage cards.

--The proliferation of vaults. No true collector in the classical sense would give a s*** about a vault; what's the point in owning a card you can't even hold in your hand? An investor, on the other hand, would rather not risk the loss of transporting or bear the cost of insurance on a valuable asset.

--I don’t think it is any accident that the rise of organized investment-collecting catering to the hobby 1% and modern speculators has resulted in a two-tiered auction system where there are expensive catalog auctions and internet only $10 starting point auctions. Now I also happen to think that much of the monthly auction business is stuff that used to go to eBay instead and represents a shift in sale venue rather than an expansion of material per se. The way eBay's fees have gone up (owing to the quirks of eBay's system, the spread between eBay and a typical BP is around 5.5%), and the hostility towards sellers, make the monthlies quite attractive. Do I consign a $300 card to a monthly at 20% or do I sell it via eBay at 14.5% and be responsible for shipping and potential losses? It is becoming a closer question. But the salient point for our analysis is that there is a secondary tier of auctions that are quite popular with less well-heeled collectors.

-- Walk the floor at the National now as compared to a decade ago and it is obvious that the total number of retail card dealer tables at the National has declined markedly, while the total floor area devoted to auctioneers, service providers, corporate booths, card breaks and manufactured memorabilia (e.g., autographs and related paraphernalia) has filled in the gap. I think we are in for more of this, perhaps even to the point where the vintage card dealer is no longer the backbone of the National, as is the case with Comicon’s show floor versus all of the other activities.

In sum, the tectonic shift is already under way. What we make of it depends on us. The move to vertically integrate in a way that most collectors do not like or value leaves an opening for businesses to cater to the mass of collectors, and I suspect that is one reason why local shows and modestly priced auctions are thriving while a venture like Collectable, which sought to securitize cards and create a card stock market that required mass participation, fell on its face. The clientele who likes the financialization of card collecting can buy the big cards directly rather than trading theoretical interests in them and ceding control over the asset and its sale to the promoter, and the group that cannot afford them doesn’t want to screw around with a share of a card they never actually touch and cannot control.

Of course, this is all just spitballing: if I knew the future I would be buying and selling, not screeding on a chat board :D

Agree, grading prices, and internet.

Well said Adam, I agree +1

Digital cards. I just don't get it.

Agreed. Having never finished the 1972 Topps set, I was hellbent on completing the 1981 set. The thrill of opening packs and visiting card stores with my needs list. The satisfaction of finding the last few commons to complete the set. The frustration of spending close to $100 to complete the set and then attending my first show at the VFW in Dale City, VA and seeing a complete collated set for $20 at a dealers table. After that, I just purchased factory sets. The craziness of the 90's and my shift from new cards to vintage cards, autographs and memorabilia. Attending the Tuff-Stuff shows and monthly Tyson Corner shows. Dreaming of finally attending the National. Beckett's monthly magazine. Watching the entire market collapse only to rise again.

Sites like this one, with an array of hobby niches and knowledgeable collectors who willingly share and educate.

The internet. With the internet, you had the ability to research any set, without asking anyone any questions. If you searched and read enough, you would find just about everything you needed to know. I'm living proof. In 2008, I knew just about nothing about the T206 set. Online research, along with afterwards using my own theroy's of print groups and sheet layout's, turned me into one of the go to experts. I'm not as involved as I used to be, but the internet changed my collecting habits. It also made searching and purchasing just about any card, a reality. You just needed the money.