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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

I was a kid in the late 1980's to early 90's. That was the height of the "Junk Wax Era." Baseball cards were so overproduced that stuff from that era is almost worthless. You can still buy sealed unopened boxes of complete sets of cards from that time.

https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/ranking-junk-wax-er...

I mention this because I don't really trust anyone's opinion about how rare something is or price guides created by groups trying to get you to buy more cards.

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It's more so you've missed the window.

The hotness is whichever athletes were popular when current 24-26 years olds were children. The group that is just getting their first taste of disposable income and starts chasing the things they missed as kids.

I'm about the same age and watched cards like Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter spike about a decade ago and come crashing back down. These days its Lebron James and Ichiro Suzuki.

I probably spent about $100 total on sports cards as a kid. I never bought an individual card, just a random pack of cards every once in a while.

I had a friend with thousands of cards. His dad was a doctor and he would buy multiple boxes of Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck, and more. He would open one and categorize everything in 3 ring binders. Then he would have unopened complete sets.

He also had a hundred or more individual cards in plastic cases. I know he had a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. That one is probably still worth a lot.

It was cool to look at and that kid is a successful lawyer now but I haven't seen him in 15 years. I wonder if he still has all those card. They took up multiple book shelves in the guest room they had.

Becket (through Becket Price guide) told us what the market price was back then, only that it wasn't. We had no idea how many cards were being produced (it was A LOT) and we didn't even know that print run was an issue.

Today, card prices is all market driven (there are some bidding shenanigan's that happen though).

Today, people mostly buy graded cards, which have pop reports through the grading agency. There are also many good ways to know how many cards in a Print Run. Scotty B's cards on youtube goes over these in detail. Since there are serial numbered cards that have pack odds, you can reverse engineer the print run.

That being said, its not a wise idea to buy base cards anymore. What you really want is licensed serial numbered cards, preferably rookies with on card autos of the base card. Of course this is sport specific, such as in hockey the young guns cards are most important.

I have made about 40,000$ this year in revenue selling cards (revenue, not earnings - doesn't include cost).

My kids are into collecting pokemon cards big time. We have this conversation pretty frequently; why didn't I buy pokemon cards in the 90's? We'd be rich! I try to tell them about the over production and glut in collectible cards in the 90's but it really doesn't sink in. At the time we had just come off the beanie baby and pog fads. I personally had no interest in buying any thing. I still have no clue why these cards are "worth" as much as they say they are. On the other hand those black lotus mtg cards I used to see for $10, that is real scarcity I understand.

Yea, what the other people are missing is there were 100+ other collectable pieces of shit that ended up in the dump worth nothing. The people that managed to buy the right crap, then keep it for decades are the ones that effectively won a lottery. But really it was pure chance they happened to win.

And the ur-example is baseball cards. My dad's childhood collection was worth something like $40K in the 90s. He literally bought about 800 of them over 3-4 years in the mid-late 50s, then not only lost interest in them but in baseball completely, and the cards sat in the same clean, dry, temperature-controlled basement for 40 years until they became lottery tickets.

What everyone needs to do is to take that hobby when you bought a lot of rare, fragile stuff, and publish a high-priced coffee table book about it. Some rich bore will use that book and his money to simulate a personality, and other jealous idiots will try to imitate him, bidding up the prices.

Why does anyone say this type of thing? Someone with different interests from you isn't simulating anything. They are just being a person with interests. Honestly I disdain those who speak about such interests condescendingly much more than I would anyone who chooses to spend their money on a hobby.

Pretty much anything sold as collectible, by definition, isn’t.

Limited editions of video games seem to do decent. Many runs sell out and then buying them on amazon costs 2 to 3x the price of the limited edition originally. It is extremely rare for such an item to go much above that these days, compared to some games from the past where a new copy is 10x the price or more, but it is still enough to count as collectible.

But is some limited edition swag gonna be worth 20x in a few decades? I think not.

Not always. M:TG has always been sold as a collectible card game, and many of its early cards are extremely valuable.

M:TG wasn't immune to the collectibles glut in the 90s. The Fallen Empires set, which came out in 1994, was so overproduced that you can still get factory sealed booster packs for the same price as current expansions.

In fairness, only Hymn to Tourach was really any good long term from Fallen Empires.

Aren't the ones that are valuable mostly misprints and low volume variants?

No, but they are from the first couple sets when production runs were smaller. WotC has made a promise to the community that they will never reprint (tournament legal versions of) some of those early cards which helps keeps them rare and expensive.

You wouldn't really want those cards reprinted anyways. They're very overpowered and seem like amateur design if you look at them through a lens of the rest of MTG design history.

You may be thinking of the different border on cards from the alpha and beta sets as variants. But that's the way every card was printed back then.

Not necessarily variants or misprints, but many old powerful cards are extremely expensive. By this point the volume is much lower just due to time, but many cards from the first ~4 sets are worth hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the card and condition.

You are confusing terms. "Collectible" doesn't imply that something will gain or hold value.

I still have my 90s Pokemon cards. Haven't found any that are really worth anything.

Well consider it this way. If Fanatics produces only garbage that falls apart immediately then there may be a collectors market for it in the future since most of the existing products will have been lost to landfills. The poor quality may ironically increase future resale value, just so long as you tie steps to preserve it.

I’ve gotten packs from that era as free box stuffing gifts when buying merch from smaller companies

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