Imagine - you are in your local hobby store and you glance at the high-end singles in the case and you think to yourself: What makes the featured cards more valuable than the cards you might have in your pocket or at home? What drives the price of a sports card anyway?
Before the internet era, determining a card's value was a challenging task. Collectors had to rely on sources like Beckett, word-of-mouth, or whatever information they could gather through various means. It was a time-consuming process that often involved a lot of guesswork.
How has the internet changed the game?
Nowadays, the landscape has shifted dramatically. With the advent of the internet, pricing data has become transparent and readily available. Tools and marketplaces have emerged, providing collectors with easy access to accurate and up-to-date information on card values.
eBay being the biggest sports card marketplace available, many of these card evaluation sites use eBay as the primary basis of their information and appraisal. With millions of transactions per year, the sports card market is more liquid than ever (especially comparing to our youth when you could only trade between friends)
Introducing Hobby Hero
One such application that has revolutionized the way collectors assess card values is Hobby Hero. Developed by the experts at Fan-Tastic Cards & Comics, this platform offers a comprehensive database of pricing data, making it easier for collectors to make informed decisions.
While other websites merely track eBay sales over time, Hobby Hero takes it one step further. By using machine learning and data science technology, we at Fan-Tastic made a model that can not only identify cards, but also appraise them using fundamentals that can be applied to all (including yet-to-be-released) cards.
We highly encourage you to check this site out! It's free to sign up.
Factors influencing a card's value
Several factors come into play when determining a card's value. Player fame and performance, the popularity of the set and sport, as well as other intangibles, all contribute to the overall worth of a card. However, at its core, the value of a card is driven by supply and demand.
The rarest cards featuring the best players tend to fetch the highest prices in the market. Collectors are willing to pay a premium for these highly sought-after items, driving up their value significantly.
Anything that can reduce the population of a card, including gem-mint grades, errors, rarer sets (think Topps Tiffany vs Topps), will also increase the value of a card.
Why have cards from the 1980s and 1990s depreciated?
Interestingly, most cards from the 1980s and 1990s have actually depreciated in value over the years. This phenomenon can be attributed to several factors, including overproduction during that era, leading to an abundance of cards flooding the market, as well as shifting attitudes towards cards.
Prior to this era, mostly kids bought cards and treated them more as toys than collectibles. However, with news of vintage rookie cards of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle started to surface, kids and adults alike saved their cards in sleeves and binders, hoping to hit it big.
Additionally, the shift in collecting trends and preferences has also played a role in the devaluation of cards from this period. As collectors gravitate towards newer and more limited-edition cards, the older cards lose their appeal and subsequently their value.
So what did the card companies learn?
The boom and bust of the early 90s almost killed off the entire sport collectibles hobby. Overleveraged and revenue-starved, many brands, even iconic ones, had to shutter their doors or sell themselves off to rivals. During this time, much consolidation occurred with producers and many local hobby stores closed.
Companies had to simultaneously meet two demands - fulfill a seemingly endless demand for base set completionists while also providing rarer cards at various levels of collectability. Thus, they started adding things like parallels, memo cards, autographed cards, and numbered cards. That way, everyone who would want to buy a pack of a flagship product, like Topps Series 1 for baseball, would be able to do so, but there would also be a set of cards, that due to small population, would retain their value over time.