[53toppscollector]

I think pop reports are essential, because its really kind of impossible to collect, on a serious level, without knowing how many there are of a certain item. if you want to collect every Babe Ruth card ever made, you need to know 1.) what Babe Ruth cards exist and 2.) how many of each exist

If there are literally 3 surviving copies of a card known, and 25 people want to own that card, you can see why prices are what they are.

Now you can posit that there shouldn't be 25 people who want to own card X, but that is also kind of silly.

There are more people who want to own these cards than there is supply of the card. Which is why you have a common player like Devlin go for thousands in an extremely scarce back. People want those backs. And I think they always will.