In today’s market, we see several different kinds of cards that a person can pull out of a sports card hobby box. We see fancy cards with autographs, jerseys, patches, numbers, balls, gloves, subsets, parallels etc. Lost among all these special cards people often forget about the base card. Each product produced has a base set, sometimes big, sometimes small. A lot of times these days with all the fancy cards out there, people forget to stop and appreciate the cards themselves. Many products produce a beautiful base set.
Back in the youthful innocence of hobby card collecting we saw nothing but base cards. If you look at the O-Pee-Chee and Topps products from the seventies and eighties, aside from a few “league leader” cards, every card was a base card. We forget about the thrill it was to pull a superstar base card out of a pack. When we were kids, pulling a Gretzky card out of any year was an amazing feeling. We used to live for the chance to pull one out of those thirty five cent packs we bought. I find today, people are hung up on the special rarer more valuable cards that can be pulled out of many products. Lost is the appreciation of the work that card companies put into making their base cards attractive and in some cases artful.
Many people nowadays only open products for the special cards in the box. A lot of times the base cards are given away or discarded as worthless. Let’s put this into perspective. We may have a product which advertises twenty-four packs in a hobby box which features eight cards per pack. If you do the math, that’s one hundred and ninety two cards. This product may advertise that you will get a special card on average in one in every four packs. That’s six special cards out of one hundred and ninety-two. Some of these products cost over one hundred dollars for one box. Doesn’t it sound silly to pay one hundred dollars for six special cards and discard the rest? It’s amazing how many people have discounted the base card as nothing but a waste of cardboard.
Of course there are always exceptions to this logic. The collectors who remember what it’s like to actually collect a set and not just a bunch of special cards with exceptional market value also realize the value in attaining an entire set of base cards. We forget that collecting a set is fun and gives us a sense of accomplishment when completed. This is the sign of a true sport card fan. If a person can look past the glitter of the special rare insert cards and focus on the actual “collecting” of sports cards in today’s world, then they remember what it’s all about. Our inner child can still prevail in today’s collecting world.
We have to realize that today sports card collecting is less of a hobby for children and more of a hobby (an expensive one at that) for grown men (and women). Grown men who collect though, also should take a look at how they collect and what they want out of it. We need to better appreciate the hobby we’ve chosen. Don’t throw away those base cards; look at them, read them, appreciate them, collect them. You will find a better appreciation for the hobby as a whole.
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