So I know nothing about sports cards. Sports yes but only football and baseball.
Now my question is. Are vintage sports cards a thing like Pokémon, mtg and comics?
I went to the national last year in hope of finding Pokémon stuff but obviously it’s mostly sports. A lot of the stuff I saw was modern stuff.
Are modern sports cards more popular than vintage unlike Pokémon and mtg and comics?
I’m definitely not as well versed in sports as Pokemon, but yes vintage sports cards is a huge market. From what I can tell it’s one of the biggest collector/card markets. In a sense we can thank Sports cards for things like MTG and Pokemon TCGs, without them it’s hard to know if we’d have as many TCGs and similar things today. They’re definitely an important part of card based collectibles, both historically and in the present time.
What I did find when I did some research in vintage sports is that at times there’s been a lot of shady stuff going on. I’ve seen stories on things like trimmed/altered cards, weird back room deals at auctions, all kinds of shady stuff compared to what I’ve seen happen in Pokemon so far. I would say the closest thing in Pokemon I can think of would be things like the GI Joe booster box deal with Logan Paul and some of the other silly things that we’ve seen the past couple years. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing here.
Modern sports have grown increasingly popular. There’s a ton of serialized cards and other limited releases that people go for. Pokemon doesn’t really have serialized cards specifically, so it offers a unique chase in comparison. I don’t know if it’s more popular than vintage sports or not, but I do know the prices on them have come down very hard the past year or so (much worse than modern Pokemon). Just check out Sports Card Investor or someone like that, he was putting out quite a few vids last year talking about the market collapse going on.
I was primarily collecting sports cards (Hockey + Basketball) from 2010-2014 / middle school so my opinion might be a bit dated.
For vintage, it’s very set dependent. Some cards from pre-1930s you can get mint for cheap, others are equivalent to the cost of a home. There are also a lot of areas of vintage (tobacco era (1800s-1940s)), wax era (1950s-1980s), and junk era (1990s).
In tobacco era, not a lot of people collected and they mainly came with tobacco.
In the wax era, more collected but primarily kids.
In the junk era, companies just printed so many cards that rarity didn’t exist.
At the end of the “junk era”, companies like Upper Deck starting putting in serialized cards and memorabilia (game-used jerseys and stuff) / auto cards to create chase cards. This evolved into the modern market where the most valuable cards are #'d rookies, patches, and autos (all three together are called RPAs).
I’d say most of modern sports card (2000s) are tailored toward high-end buyers and basically just gambling. It’s not very set dependent anymore (as sets are almost impossible to complete with serialized cards) and people just go for players they like. Since the cards are connected to real people, prices are more dynamic and active players skyrocket in value after good games / seasons.
The sports market is way larger than TCGs. I personally still collect some sports cards here and there but mainly focus on non-sports (Star Wars specifically) cards outside of Pokemon. In a lot of the Topps sets, they have 1/1 sketch cards where an artist draws on a blank card and they insert them 1/box – these are really cool imo
I collect some vintage baseball (1930s and 1940s). It had a massive boom in 2020-2021 as well but has settled down and lost value on the lower end since then while the high end has mostly continued to grow in value. I collect some modern if I like the player or the card itself but I think stuff like 20 different panini parallels for each set is a joke
think of your biggest grail card in pokemon, and dudes are dropping that amount of money on hype prospect rookies before they even get drafted to a pro team. cards go up/down based on torn ligaments and news scandals. its a different beast
Went to a local show this past weekend with a buddy who does sports. He was absolutely swarmed and sold tons of stuff. He had a 1/4 of my table and even with 20-30% under market prices, most people only wanted to trade or buy things like ES. I thought it was dead, but it seems to be doing just fine.
Nifty card and all but calling something from 1952 “almost 100 years old” in 2023 is like calling a newborn baby “almost 30 years old”. I guess by that logic most e4 members are almost 50 years old! 
Lol sorry 71 years ago
Lol amazing card but 2021 had some crazy hype prices so who knows if this one will break it
Man I wish I was at the National. I went last year
1952 is pretty old. But it’s not hard to find cards that were almost already 70 years old in 1952 
