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

[JollyElm]

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.

[Vintagecatcher]

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

[Fred]

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.

[Rhotchkiss]

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

[ValKehl]

#1 change is Third Party Graders (TPGs).