Interesting Business Week Article on Topps w/ Vintage Content

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Posted By: Bob C

Topps going private?

<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18233047/</a" target="_new" rel="nofollow">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18233047/</a&gt;

edited for spelling

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Posted By: Frank Wakefield

Topps closed today at 9.99. Above the 9.75 buyout bid price.

http://www.marketwatch.com/quotes/topp>

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Posted By: Dave Hornish

I think Topps' problems really began when they screwed with the base set. I know a lot of people who stopped collecting Topps cards when the main set went down to 300 or so cards. Lots of collectors would put together a set every year but they ruined it for the guys who did it year after year.

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Posted By: Russ Bright

792 cards is a LOT for any set!!! and I think it has a lot more to do than "Topps had less cards in the set" - It's more about pure saturation...

I'm not that old, but when I first started collecting, there were 3 (ok, I was close to Canada, so 4 if you count O-Pee-Chee) sets to pick from - from 3 separate manufacturers. and then we had 40 different card manufacturers all putting out 20 sets a year to cash in on the "baseball card fad"

Bankruptcy and buyouts leaves us with 2 companies now... and I actually heard a shop owner LAMENTING the fact that there was ONLY 40 Baseball sets being put out this year...

It amazes me, but I am a willing participant. I spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on Old Cardboard, AND hundreds if not thousands on shiny crap.

It's not getting any better, and gas is going to be over 4 dollars a gallon soon... Times used to be better, but what can you do?

I for one can't stop collecting, I'm addicted... lol, my ONLY vice left!

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Posted By: Alan

Russ -

Here's what you do. Just enjoy collecting, however it works for you !!!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Op9FtWEllD4

Alan

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Posted By: peter chao

Russ,

An example of one of the reasons Topps started going downhill was their 2006 product. In this set they randomly inserted vintage cards. Now Topps has been in business for 50 years and your thinking wow I could get something special.

Well, the vintage cards they inserted were mostly from the '88 and '89 Topps set. They were trying to pass cards that were massively overproduced as "vintage cards." Topps could have done better than that.

Peter

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Posted By: dennis

peter now that is funny

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Posted By: Dylan

Everyone thought they were gonna strike it rich buying bsaeball cards in the 80's, consequently topps left the printing presses on 24 hours a day and over saturated the market. Now they serial number half the cards to tell us how "rare" and "valuable" they really are, thing is they were all trying to get away with printing a gazillion sets. Same idea just wrapped in different package. Produce as much of the crap people will buy at the present date, future value (and confidence of buyer in the modern card hobby) be damned

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Posted By: dennis

i always thought years ago ,that i would purchase 1 complete topps set per year.i started in 1976 and continued thru 1989. it really is sad to see what the new card hobby is today.

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Posted By: Dave Williams

From about 1990 on, the manufacturers made it too complicated to collect.

It became difficult to figure out what the rookie cards were.
It became difficult to figure out what the valuable sets were.

They all looked shiny and bright, but to figure out if MIGHT have some value you had to wade through a huge price guide hoping you could figure out what card you had, and what it MIGHT be a subset of.

I haven't bought more than a handful of packs in 15 years.

Even though I knew there was no investment value, I used to put sets together from packs up until 1990, when it suddenly became to hard to do.

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Posted By: peter chao

For some of us old timers we tried to put together master sets of 1950's Topps and earlier. When Topps and Upper Deck started making modern sets with parallel cards, serial numbers, and whatnot. I wonder if anybody has put together a master set of one of these humongous sets.

Peter

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Posted By: Jim Dale

How could you put together a master set of cards in today's modern sets with the various chase and parallels they offer? Many of them are limited to 1/1 which is pretty limited the last time I looked? Distribute those 1/1's over 3m packs of cards and getting them together for a full set is done...set collecting in the modern card world - is done.