[marcothefish]

So I've been back into card collecting for about 2 years now and I've seen some things that almost turned me away a couple of times. The main one being the Wall Street card trader who is only a shark out to get everyone around them. I personally collect and trade because it reminds me of my childhood and I don't want that tainted with big money. I want to be happy when I open a pack and not sad that I didn't pull some $500 auto that will sell quickly. With all that said, I've decided to stop collecting sports altogether for the most part. WWE is my main sport with the exception of building a set of Topps Baseball every year. Is the non-sport side of the hobby as cutthroat as the sports side of it? I love pop culture and things like that so collecting wrestling and non-sport cards is where I feel most comfortable anyway. (I'm terrible at keeping up with major league players' stats.) What do you guys think? Do you all see a difference in people that collect non-sports and those who collect sports cards? Are the non-sport collectors more laid back? Thanks for any responses!

[jonathani]

I don't know about "more laid back," but they are fewer.

[happa]

In general, it seems like Non-Sports collectors can be bit more supportive of each other. But it might also depend on what you are collecting. There's a bunch of pop culture to choose from so you're bound to find something that you like to collect.

[RavenNSU]

I evolved into collecting non-sport cards from the sports card world. I still have almost all of my sports cards, but I became more focused on certified autograph cards once we reached the time where autograph cards became a standard hit in boxes.

From there I became less interested in player autographs and more interested in celebrity autographs. The hard part in that was always securing authentication of a star's autograph. The certified autographed non-sport card took that risk away, so then I left sports cards and leaped down the rabbit hole that is non-sport card collecting.

It is a smaller market of course, but thanks to that auction site, I would say that it is a lot more popular now than it has ever been. Also there is a lot of choice in the type of cards you may choose to collect. With major sports you have baseball, football, basketball and hockey. That's about it for yearly coverage and it still may be overproduced.

Non-sport card collecting opens up movies, TV shows, comics, art of all types and hodge-podge sets of just random people in the news. It's a really big universe that can be as broad or as narrow as you decide for yourself. The best part is that there is limited production on many sets, while there is also broad based retail production on some things like Star Wars for example. Prices can be prohibitive on some products and very reasonable on others.

It's an exciting and challenging market and you do need a certain amount of experience to get the hang of it, just like with sports cards. Having been involved with both I can say that I have found non-sport card collecting much more rewarding for me.