Team / player collectors vs casual collectors

[footballholic]

I wanted to make a small personal statement about how the collectors world is all about today. I have noticed that there seems to be only "casual" or "picky" card collectors. Iam not harping on it, just a opinion. But i see that many many many, sports card collectors of today are only interested in those "special" looking cards. Cards with jersey fabric (patches), or GU & autographed cards, refractors, chrome, etc. And that's perfectly okay if that's all you want to collect. But what happened to all the card collectors that want to have cards of their favorite team, no matter what the card is. The newer or younger card collectors of today have it so much better. It's far more improved with quanity, and quality of how the cards are made. And sky rocketing prices that go along with that. Iam an old school collector. Ima a fan of the cards that go back into the 70's & 80's, and some of the 90's.. Of course things were so much different then. The way they made cards, and only one company making them once a year was all there was.
All iam saying is that there seems to be more collectors interested in only those special looking cards, more than team cards of basic commons. I treasure the old cards i have, no matter what team it was or players. Those were the good old days from the 70's & 80's. They dont make them like they used to.
Would it be safe to say that for those collectors who want to have only those specialty cards are coincidered " casual '" collectors?

[jradford]

One thing I noticed also is back in the day, if you got a card which was miscut, or had a gum stain on it, we just said darn. Luck of the draw and maybe try to find a better card down the road. Now people yell about it and return the card for replacement. I can understand that on the high end cards, but even topps base I have seen people want to return if they get a bad card. Oh well. I still collect any and all Dolphins. I love the autos from the 90's and cards of kickers and punters.

[dornbos]

Different strokes for different folks! There are still companies making base sets so I'm guessing there are still people buying those. I have a collection of kicker cards back to 1956 (when there were only 12 NFL teams and only 7 of their kickers had a card.) I only buy one card per kicker per year and if there is a choice, I try to buy the cards from the dominant set of that year. If it is the cheapest base set then so much the better. Also, I only collect the cards with the previous year's stats on the back, at the least the total field goals made and the total extra points made. If it is just prose about the kicker, then I don't put it in my collection. I do have a couple of other smaller collections as well but they aren't football related. If all that makes me a casual, picky, avid, or some other description collector, so be it. I do it purely for enjoyment, not to profit from it or to impress anyone.

[rw2jn01]

I too am a "whole team" collector. If I don't have it, I want it. I do think, however, if you just collect a few players or even a certain "type" of card, not only is it easier as far as cataloging and organizing and what not, it is also less expensive. I'm chasing 10's of thousands of cards, and some I'll never be able to afford or may never even see... it would be much easier on my wallet (and sanity) if I only had to look for hundreds of cards... It's a bummer when I have to choose between a killer Rivers Autograph or a killer Dan Fouts autograph.

I'll give you another example. As a San Diego Charger collector, there's only a couple of Robert Meachem cards to collect, then there are tons of Antonio Gates to chase, and sometimes Robert Meachem gets the neglect... just my $.02.