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I appreciate everyone's input, especially Bob's detailed explanation with regards to identifying different eras of card collecting and comparing that to the different eras of the game itself. Lots of good points have been made and I agree with many of them.

In my efforts to stress the importance of identifying what is and is not considered a "card", I believe that I led many readers astray by focusing so much on that part of things. My end game here is to one day reach a consensus, player by player, as to which card(s) should be the one(s) collected by those looking to acquire rookie cards of BB HOFers. My purpose is not to define for the hobby what should and should not be considered a card, it's simply eliminating some items from rookie card consideration due to the various parameters that I mentioned in an effort to get to a bottom-line choice or choices. I believe that what is causing most of the difference in opinions here is simply that an item can certainly be considered a rookie collectible for a certain player while not qualifying as a rookie card for that player. It does not lose its relevancy because it isn't a card, it can still pre-date the rookie card, but if it is catalogued as a photo, supplement, sticker, stamp, etc. then by definition it cannot also be a card. This is where I don't really understand the difference in opinions. Let's take Max Carey as a hypothetical example (all of these items may not actually exist for Carey). If I give you the following 4 items and ask you to identify which is/are card(s):

Helmar Stamp
M101-2 Supplement
B18 Blanket
T207

Does anyone on the board feel that the correct answer might be all four, or the Helmar Stamp or M101-2 Supplement or B18 Blanket? I hope that everyone would go with the T207.

I believe that if we take each of the parameters that I mentioned and look at them as being part of the bigger picture, always keeping in mind our ultimate goal of identifying pre-war rookie cards. As Bob already mentioned, this has basically already been done for us during the Topps/Bowman era and carried on for decades thanks to Beckett, the Standard Catalogue, etc. If I ask you what the rookie cards are for each of these all-time greats: Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente, Pete Rose, Mickey Mantle, etc., I'll bet everyone on here can answer correctly within a matter of a few seconds. I would like that to be the case with pre-war rookies one day. Giving it an open mind, I think you would be surprised how many players we could get through where there is not much debate.

As far as "earliest collectible", lots of us have chosen to pursue that avenue of collecting rookies and how loosely you set your parameters is all totally up to the individual collector. When I was collecting these back in the 2000's-early 2010's, I started out with the traditional post-war rookie cards but slowly gravitated to the earliest collectible that I could find/afford for pre-war. I was accumulating foreign issues, newspaper supplements, stickers, team postcards, type I press photos, pinbacks, etc. This was the greatest collecting experience that I ever had as I was exposed to such a variety of different types of items, not to mention different issues and series, and learned so much from all of this experience. As everyone always recommends, collect what you like and you won't have any regrets.

For those that wish to stick with cards though, and there are certainly many, I would like to see it become possible to try and assemble a set of BB HOF RC's as I once set out to do and the first step along the way is to have a complete want list of what to go after. Hopefully, this explains things a little better and I apologize if this thread originally came across as one man's attempt to define what the card collecting hobby should and should not accept.