Ten Things That Are Killing the Sports Card Hobby

[patriotsguy]

I think that patch fakers ahould be near the #1 spot on this list

[corperryale]

Great post!! Everything I can agree on!

[xelloss1012]

The unwillingness for UD especially to not track their legit patches will hurt them, albeit the horrible quality assurance they have.

[metrotheme]

As a high school teacher, I can say that none of my students collect baseball cards, especially the baseball players. If anything they collect magic / role playing cards.

[race crazy]

This is a good thread-a lot of these are exactly why i quit collecting basketball cards all together and focused solely on racing cards-sure theres some problems there too as well-but not nearly as much-plus the high end racing product is only about 110 a box-very doable for a poor collector like myself-its really more enjoyable for me-I feel bad for all you other sport collectors going after fake patch cards and 10 quadrillion parallels of every base card in a base set. Sorry guys lol.

[Hawks4life]

I think the number one thing that has ruined the hobby is ebay. I have been out of collecting for a while and recently got back in, ebay has taken away so many card shows and drastically decreased the value of cards. The second thing is the internet in general, I started collecting when I lived in a small town called Coeur d'Alene, ID. Before the internet was around and being used there were 4 card shops in town, since then all have gone under and a new one recently opened, for how long who knows? I doubt it makes it a year though. Shops cant stay in business selling products when they are always competing with some internet outfit that is giving the wax away.

[YouNoahMe]

I got 1 major, 2 part question

Why is EBAY such a threat to the hobby / why am i purchasing cards on ebay everyday for 50-90% book value?

[Hawks4life]

Think about what you just said...youre buying the cards for half of book value, so how is that book value? Ebay makes book value mean nothing. It decreases the value of every card in existence, thats pretty obvious and you just said it right there.

[themanishere]

Think about what you just said...youre buying the cards for half of book value, so how is that book value? Ebay makes book value mean nothing. It decreases the value of every card in existence, thats pretty obvious and you just said it right there.

I think too many people use eBay as a scapegoat. eBay itself does not decrease the value of cards.

The overproduction of jerseys and autos, the endless parallels being created, the amount of hits increasing - all of these things (among others) are more responsible for the value of cards going down than eBay.

[Phathugo2467]

I think too many people use eBay as a scapegoat. eBay itself does not decrease the value of cards.

The overproduction of jerseys and autos, the endless parallels being created, the amount of hits increasing - all of these things (among others) are more responsible for the value of cards going down than eBay.

The Way I see it, a card is only worth what I'm willing to pay for it. Since "hits" are so common now, I'm less likely to bid on a single and more likely to buy the product knowing that I may get a hit instead. Likewise, If I don't bid on a card on ebay, that's one less bid, which means the final ending price will be one bid further away from the book value.

Ebay and Card Companies didn't create "problems", but collectors did. We loved JSY and Relic Cards and Paralell cards so much, that companies produced them until there was enough for everybody to have some. The scarcity of an item was diminished because everybody wanted one and was willing to pay for it.

I'm being completely serious when I say that a way to stabilize the market for JSY cards could be to collect 25 or so of a card #ed/300 with plain swatch on it and burn all 25. That makes the card that much harder to find. Think of it like controlling an animal population in the wild. It may be our only chance!