My Card Collecting Story
This is my first blog post here, so I hope you’ll excuse me beginning with a little about my history with trading cards, which begins in elementary school and continues to today. If you couldn’t give two licks why someone would want to write a blog about cards and card collecting, then by all means, skip to The 6 Types of Card Collectors.
With that out of the way… ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by cards. I think a lot about them. Like all hobbies, the deeper one digs, the more there is to unearth. I have learned lessons on money from buying cards. I have learned lessons in sportsmanship and strategy by playing with them.
Over the years I’ve learned a lot about cards as collectibles. Sometimes they make headlines, like when a single baseball or Pokémon card seems like a retirement package. The hobby is rife with internal drama, too: corporate battles over sports league licenses, bad actors who try to outfox literal children, and an evolving market that peaked during the pandemic.
Credit: metmuseum.org
The History of Trading Cards
These ephemera started to crop up a few centuries ago. People used cards as game pieces—with those now more likely to be found in a museum than a gaming shelf. In the late 19th century, cigarette companies started printed cards: free trinkets to get you to buy their cigarettes. By the 1930s the cigarettes became gum, but the trading card remained an added bonus. These cards, incidentally, can still be found today as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection.
Many readers may be old enough to remember another shift that eventually happened and persisted into the 1990s: instead of gum coming with a card, the cards came with gum. The cards went from sideshow to main attraction. At the time I was one of millions of kids swept up with the baseball card collecting fad. I riffled for hours through a printer box stuffed with cards, always hoping to spot the accidentally-discarded diamond. I still remember my awe at the bold, garish yellow of the 1991 Fleer set, impatiently opening the pack on the car ride home from a Baltimore convenience store. My lifelong dream was to own a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr., which I eventually did last year, long after the market had tanked.
How to Collect Trading Cards
Throughout my years collecting and playing with cards, I have met hundreds of fellow collectors. They come in all stripes. Some collections are a binder of a few dozen cards; others take up a storage unit. Some are worth $10; some are worth $10 million. Some people collected for a few years then forgot about it. Some people have dedicated insurance policies.
There is no one “right” way to collect cards. The hobby is not like, say, kayaking or chess, where creativity is tempered by basic rules of engagement. You get cards, and then that’s your collection. If you want, you can go to a card store, spend thousands of dollars on anything purple, and call that your collection. There are principles that any collector should keep in mind though, such as being mindful of budget, understanding how to appraise value, and learning about the cards.
The 6 Types of Card Collectors
I would argue that collectors can be broadly categorized into six personas. This framework is of my own invention, and I welcome readers to help me identify personas I missed. No matter the framework, rarely does any one person fit neatly into just one type. Individuals can share traits from multiple personas and change how they collect over time. But each persona speaks differently to the overarching goals driving the collector in the first place.
Type 1: The Flipper
The flipper is primarily interested in cards as a way to generate profit. Flippers purchase cards with the intent of selling them for more. I think it is important to note that flipping is not necessarily predatory. There are flippers who camp at retail stores and buy up all the product before anyone else has a chance to get them. Without a doubt that is predatory, and thankfully, not a good way to make a profit right now.
However, flipping can sometimes be a force for good! The flipper who is knowledgeable on basketball cards, for example, may identify a steep discount at an estate sale from a seller who is just looking to clear space and make money. Knowledge of basketball cards is quite specialized, and the seller may have neither time for nor interest in researching the finer points of valuating basketball cards. At this point, it’s an arbitrage opportunity that makes everyone happy. The estate seller clears up space and gets immediate money. The flipper legally and ethically acquires inventory. The research and selling work now falls squarely on the flipper, who spends months if not years looking for the ultimate end buyer, who acquires the card they wanted at a fair price.
Note the critical element of knowledge. The flipper can only succeed by identifying that valuable cards are available at a discount. Even an avid baseball card collector, for example, may have no idea what to look for in a basketball card collection. In fact, a basketball card collector may be unsure when facing cards outside the years they care about! The knowledge is that specialized! Even knowledge around how a card purchase can be resold for profit is specialized. Here are some ways that buyers can try to “flip”:
They buy cards found at a thrift store, garage sale, estate sale, or other second hand sales environment at a very steep discount, then resell for market value.
They buy a card in excellent condition, send it in to get graded, then sell the graded card for a steep premium.
They buy an entire collection and then individually piece it out to sell it.
They buy hard-to-find sealed card products in retail stores, then sell them online at a markup.
They make online offers for a card until someone accepts an amount below market value, and then list the card and patiently wait until someone buys the card for over market value.
They buy cards of individual players that they anticipate growing in demand, then sell the cards for a profit if they end up being correct.
To be clear, these are strategies I see people trying, not necessarily all ones I recommend. Some of them are eminently ethical, such as buying a collection for a fair price then taking on the work of selling it piece-by-piece. However, some strategies are riskier. Retail stores do not generally carry hard-to-find products. A card sent to be graded may end up with a surprisingly low grade. And the last bullet is the most egregious of all; prospecting on players that may grow in demand is most commonly a losing proposition and not a reliable way to earn profit.
Type 2: The Collector-Dealer
Many collectors are drawn to the idea of collecting for “free.” It requires some labor, but there is a way to accomplish this. If a collector is knowledgeable about a specific market segment, for example vintage Pokémon cards, they can take advantage of any found deals and sell them in the secondary market. The profit is then reserved for funding their personal collection.
The collector-dealer thinks not just about what to collect, but also about how to fund the collection. One way to do this is by buying a collection, then selling just enough cards to make the money back. This requires careful attention in both the buying and selling process, as it is rare to find a collection in the hands of someone unaware of its value. That most commonly happens at thrift stores or estate sales.
A collector-dealer can also sell cards in person, typically at card shows but potentially also in a retail environment. The flipper would price an entire collection and lay it out in hopes of maximizing profit, but the collector-dealer would have set some cards aside to go into their personal collection, as well. The collector-dealer is likely also open to trading instead of selling.
Type 3: The Fan
One of the beauties of cards is that they can feature practically any subject imaginable. Not just sports stars, but notable figures across music, film, fiction, and politics, along with athletes from less commonly played sports. The fan is drawn to specific subjects and collects cards for that subject. People experience fandom in many different ways and can be fans not just of individuals but also of teams, sports, brands, or even aspects of the physical cards themselves, such as cards with errors or still in the original plastic.
The fan is likely to collect objects beyond cards, too. When the collector is a fan of non-sports figures such as musicians or politicians or non-card subjects such as comic books or coins, trading cards might only comprise a small part of that person’s collection.
Unlike flippers or dealers, fans may not care very much about the individual value of their cards. All collectors can sympathize with cards having sentimental value because of how they were acquired. Fans are possibly an extreme case of this, where practically every card can have a history involving thoughtful friends, shared experiences, and treasure hunting. Fans (along with completionists, the next persona) may also be willing to pay above market value for certain cards. Cards that are rare but not particularly valuable, for example cards from a set with a low print run and even lower demand, may be practically unsellable for most buyers but command a steep market value from one specific buyer if it features a hard-to-find subject that the buyer’s a fan of.
Type 4: The Completionist
The completionist is primarily interested in defined collection goals. They are usually complete sets, for example all 1960 Topps baseball or all 1985 Garbage Pail Kids original series 1. But with so many cards in existence, there are many different types of sets or goals to complete.
Some completionists collect from a card perspective. For example, they may seek out every parallel of a single card from a set. To illustrate this, consider 2018 Topps Baseball. Every base card was additionally printed in the following parallel versions, with the numbers indicating the total number printed of each parallel:
Black (/67)
Clear (/10)
Powder blue (/50)
Gold (/2018)
“Independence Day” stars and stripes (/76)
Camo (/25)
Hot pink (/50)
Negative black and white
Platinum (/1)
Printing plates in black, cyan, magenta, and yellow (/1 each)
Purple
Rainbow foil
“Transcendent Party” (/1)
Vintage stock (/99).
In practice, collecting all of those for any given player is impossible. There’s not even a guarantee that all the booster packs containing the 1-of-1s were opened. But many collectors look to complete a “rainbow” of the different parallels for their favorite player.
Completionists may also collect from a set perspective. For example, a Los Angeles collector who loves vintage basketball might seek out every Los Angeles Lakers card from Topps Basketball base sets between 1960 and 1969. It’s an ambitious, difficult, and in spots expensive list to complete, but it is certainly possibly to find every single card on the list.
Collecting literally all of any notable sports figure is no longer possible by modern standards. There are way too many parallels, 1-of-1s, independently-produced sets, and all sorts of ways that turn a checklist into a novel that’s still being written. This goal might be possible when the years are limited to the pre-modern era (roughly through 1979), the player is less prominent, or it’s a non-sports subject with just a few cards. It can be tough to pin down the definitive “rookie card” for, say, a famous musician, celebrity, or fictional character. I kid you not, at one card show I saw a card being sold as the “COVID-19 rookie card.”
Type 5: The Pack Ripper
The pack ripper doesn’t care about meticulous spreadsheets or carefully monitored costs and revenues. The pack ripper loves the experience of opening sealed card products and getting to keep what’s inside. This is usually a “losing proposition”; in other words, the value of the cards opened is nearly always less than the cost paid for the packs. However, there is joy to be found in the random nature of what is opened.
Card companies have found many ways to appeal to pack rippers. Wizards of the Coast currently releases several types of Magic: The Gathering booster packs, for example, with one type being called "set boosters." These are designed not to be played with, but simply to be opened and placed into the opener's collection. Practically every card manufacturer right now prints serialized cards, that is cards with a printed serial number on it, for example "347/999" as card number 347 in a print run of 999. (See The Completionist for a list of many of the serialized cards in 2018 Topps Baseball.) This practice of serializing has existed for over a century in books and art prints, but only a few decades in trading cards as a way of adding surprise and scarcity to opening packs.
The pack ripper’s collection is going to be eclectic. They own desirable cards for athletes—and perhaps even entire sports—they otherwise don’t care about, and they may own many game cards they would never play. I will theorize that almost every card collector started out as a pack ripper. Even people who don’t care about cards can appreciate the joy that comes from opening the packs. It’s gambling; it's an adrenaline rush. Moreover, the pool of cards to collect only exists because of how many packs of cards are opened. It’s a sort of farming that keeps the hobby alive.
Type 6: The Investor
I see a lot of collectors call themselves “investors,” so I want to be careful in how I use this word and be clear that cards do not generally make good investments. Their value is volatile and unpredictable. They can be lost, stolen, or damaged. They can be expensive to insure. They are extremely hard to liquidate for “fair market value.” Many self-described investors may be more properly considered collector-dealers who pay close attention to their cards’ values.
Personally I think all collectors have a little “investor” in them. We spent money on this thing, wouldn’t we like it to one day become valuable? Yet it is the investors who are solely interested in cards that have potential to grow in value over years. They purchase cards with no intent of selling them in the short term and are unlikely to buy cards of players who are still actively playing.
The most similar asset classes are art or historical artifacts, both of which describe trading cards too. Ideally, the owner derives joy from actually owning the cards. Please note that I am not providing investment advice and, if anything, would advise against investing in trading cards over financial instruments that carry far less risk and are easier to liquidate.
That said, the best cards to invest in are graded blue-chip staples of the hobby. I imagine the Platonic ideal portfolio of the investor is really just 5 cards, all graded 10 by Professional Sports Authenticator:
1952 Topps Mickey Mantle
1986–87 Fleer Michael Jordan
1979–80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky
1993 Magic: The Gathering Alpha Black Lotus
1999 Pokémon First Edition Charizard
And there's a lot of room for debate among those top 5. Some would argue the list should be all baseball or all basketball. I believe there are viable contenders from football, soccer, WWE, Star Wars, and prewar-era cards, to name a few. (I skipped the T206 Honus Wagner because that’s out of basically anyone’s price range.)
One does not need to be a millionaire to be a successful investor, however! Collecting lower grade or non-rookie year cards of the players listed above would still be strategic investing, in my opinion. I would argue, however, that proper investing—not merely collecting—of trading cards requires a minimum of a few hundred dollars.
Evaluating Your Type
All said, that’s six personas that I’m arguing cover the full spectrum of card collectors:
The Flipper: Sells cards for profit.
The Collector-Dealer: Sells cards at a profit then uses the profit to purchase new cards.
The Fan: Acquires cards that all share a specific quality (e.g., feature Michael Jordan).
The Completionist: Lists clear collection goals (e.g., all 1960 Topps baseball).
The Pack Ripper: Opens sealed products and builds a collection from what is opened.
The Investor: Acquires cards that have high potential to grow in value over years.
I feel it’s right to end with an additional reminder that people are complicated. A collector who was once a pack ripper can become an investor, and over time be a little of both who dabbles in completionism and fandom. My goal in writing this article is to validate the different ways with which people express themselves by buying cards. It’s a little bit childish and a little bit playful, but hey, all the funnest things are.