Has the Junk card era ended? If so, when?

[OhioLawyerF5]

Originally Posted by Balticfox

That's something any set builder such as myself finds difficult to understand. Just one player from all those cards? Oh come on!

Admittedly the plethora of parallel sets, subsets, insert sets, unique Jersey cards, manufactured scarcities e.g. xx/12, etc. (junk?) that has cropped up since the early 1990's has made it difficult for us set builders to decide precisely how to define any set we embark upon collecting. I struggle with it myself. But this plethora has also made the decision absolutely necessary.

Yep. That's why as a team collector, I have to make decisions. Since Larkin is a hall of famer, he is in nearly every set. So having an example from every set, even the extremely rare ones, is preferable to trying to complete just a few sets (as completing all sets is impossible). As a baseball card fan, doing it the way I do means I get to have cool cards from more sets, and enjoy nearly everything the era has to offer.

But there is a set collector mentality in me somewhere. I am obsessed with completing the "rainbows" of all the parallel sets of Larkin in the 90s. Some of which are so rare they take a lifetime to complete. If you don't collect 90s, it is hard to comprehend just how scarce this stuff is. Some Larkin cards have literally never had a public sale. So completing the rainbow is often much bigger a task than nearly all set building.

[Balticfox]

Okay. I understand. A few of the insert sets I've collected over the years are indeed super tough. For example I liked the 1996-97 Skybox Metal Universe Hockey cards so much that I decided to collect all the insert sets as well in the Super Powers(refractor) variant. Well when it came to the Armor Plate (goalies) Super Power cards, there was only one inserted in every 720 packs. But I got those done some ten years ago!

I also keep an open mind when it comes to collecting cool cards particularly if they're not expensive. For example, just this morning I received a 1963 CFL coin I'd bought on Ebay from a dealer in Sherbrooke, Québec. He included eight of these 2021-22 Upper Deck Credentials cards as padding in the envelope:

(Not mine.)

But I really like them! The player really pops against the simple white background. They're keepers. So I guess I'm collecting them as well now.