A discussion on the term "rare".

[glchen]

I think of rare in terms of supply and demand (and I agree the term scarce is a better word, but I believe this is just semantics since most people think rare = scarce even though they're not exactly the same). Therefore, if say there are 50K active baseball collectors in the world, if there are 25K copies of a card, I would consider that abundant. If there are only 100 copies of that card, I would consider that rare. However, I would also put that in terms of cards that these collectors WANT to collect. For example, anyone would want to collect the T206 Honus Wagner just like everyone wants to collect the 86 Jordan RC. However, there are some sets, like Game Owned sets or regional sets, that not everyone wants to collect. The people who want to collect those issues can be fanatics, but the normal collector would probably pass on those sets. So even if there are only 500 cards of those available for that kind of set, since there aren't that many people who want to collect them, they wouldn't really be considered rare, IMHO.