Seeking Crag Rex’s Card Advice!

Hi @pikapopblog

Your general eBay knowledge and gut instinct is right on the money with the possible value of these cards. In most cases, cards from the 1980s until 1995 or so aren’t worth much money, regardless of which sets, how many cards you might have, or how nice the quality of the cards appears. There are a few exceptions, but for the typical scavenger or someone who knows someone who kept cards from the 80s and 90s in a shoebox in their closet, it’s a good rule of thumb answer.

The biggest reason is overproduction. There were millions and millions of cards printed in the 80s and 90s every year. The reason was that people had started to see the value in older cards, so the thinking was it’s the cards themselves that must have had value. Make more and everyone (manufacturers, collectors, dealers) gets rich!

Of course, that’s not how supply and demand work. Almost every set, and individual card, from that era, were printed in such huge numbers that the value of everything went down. It wasn’t the cards from the 1960s themselves that were really valuable. It was the fact that so few of them survived kids’ bicycle spokes and card flipping games in good condition. This wasn’t the case with 80s and 90s cards (and many other collectibles) because everyone’s mom or grandma (mine too) told them their cards might be worth something someday, so take care of them.

The trading card industry solved this problem in the mid 1990s with higher quality cards and artificial scarcity. There are still millions and millions of cards printed annually, but now there are hundreds of different sets and designs and ways in which the manufacturers have created cards with unique attributes (autographs, limited insert designs, etc) and scarcity. For example, one of the most popular current insert cards is Panini’s cartoonish Kaboom! cards which are only released as rare inserts in one or two sets for each sport, only produced for the best players and these sets have had a nice following for at least five or six years. This is not Panini’s nicest or most desirable type of card, it’s one of many different Panini inserts that collectors and flippers chase after, and the prices of Kaboom! cards reflect both high demand and limited quantity. The same goes for cards from the other manufacturers. Modern card collectors value certain features like an autograph or unique serial number, and the quality of set and player, and since 1980s and 1990s cards have none of these, on top of being overproduced, their value just isn’t there.

If you have a decent quality trading card binder with the cards held in thin plastic pages with an Ultra Pro hologram on the left side of the page, there is more value in the binder and pages than in the cards themselves. Maybe $10 to $15 on a good day? But these types of items are very long-tail and it’s really hard to differentiate them from hundreds of similar listings.

I should also add that Classic Best was basically like a store brand version of trading cards. They only made cards from 1987 to 1994 and the cards were generally pretty low quality. Companies like Topps and Leaf have been involved in trading cards since the 1940s and 1950s, and more recent companies like Upper Deck used much more innovation and higher quality printing techniques. Not that you’d be sitting on a goldmine if it was a binder of 1992 Topps instead of 1992 Classic, but figured I’d mention it anyway.

I really appreciate reading about your expertise even though it’s different than mine and following your selling model which is similar to mine–cherry picking from mega sellers and shuttling certain items off to consignments.

I’ve gotten so much joy from this podcast and learned so much from this community over the years that I feel like the least I can do is share my knowledge with all of you. I didn’t fully realize how much I actually knew about this niche until I started posting here.

I’m confident that my knowledge will serve some of you well scavenging out in the wild, just like what I’ve learned about Americana and Mid Century Modern items will come in handy for me at some point. I’m not selling that kind of stuff now, but in 5 years, who knows. And there are so many modern trading cards produced every year that some of them will sneak out into the world at bargain prices. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way with cards, and a lot of other niches.

I think that cherry picking from mega sellers and smaller sellers is the present and future of scavenging. We’ve already seen the widespread increase of prices at most thrift stores, and  so many people whose full-time grind is to buy every good item from the thrift store as soon as it hits the shelf. With FB Marketplace, OfferUp, Mercari, etc a way of life for a lot of people, younger and older, I’m not sure how prevalent yard sales and estate sales with good, quality items will be in 5 or 10 years. But there have always been bargains to be found from eBay sellers who don’t know what they have, or don’t care about maximizing price, or make mistakes in their listings. I assume those bargains will continue as long as eBay resembles its current form — which for our sake I hope is a very long time!