Comments on: Your Turn: What are your best memories of collecting in the 1990s? (with polls)

By: Tom Sterk

Tom Sterk — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:04:13 +0000

I started in 1990. My dad bought me a box of 1990 Topps baseball. He told me he remembers me pulling that Thomas NNOF. I can’t find it today. Overproduced definitely states what collecting in the nineties was like. Then again, 50¢ per pack was great. $500 per pack is horrible. I would love to see these lower prices again (of course I won’t see 50¢, but 99¢ or $1.49 or $1.99 is just the right price).

By: Ron

Ron — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:14:43 +0000

I was visiting my local coin shop in 1990 and for some reason he had a box of 1990 Score baseball cards on the counter. He told me about the B/W Bo Jackson card that booked for $15 (.50 now) so I bought a couple of packs and wouldn’t you know it I got one. My first big pull. This really got me hooked and I’ve had some big pulls since then, a couple of Brett Favre autos,my first memorabillia card-a Marcus Camby Press Pass redemption card and many others.Now I have over 10,000 auto and memorabillia cards and am still collecting.
What I really miss about the 90′s is that the the Jackson card started me on set building. The excitement of busting boxes to get that complete set has really gone away with the inclusion of all the numbered base cards and the price of boxes/packs. The hobby took a lot of fun away from collecting when it went so commercial.
Now I no longer buy boxes and I pick up my memorabillia/auto cards from a flea market or my local card shop for a couple of bucks even from high end products that cost 100′s of dollars a box. Just yesterday I purchased 36 2011 Bowman Sterling USA Baseball and major league rookie jersey cards plus 9 other random Auto/jersey cards for $1.30 a card ($58.00 total).
I remember when Upper Deck packs were the premium brand a $1.00 a pack. Times were oh so much simpler then and kids could still collect. The future of the hobby is the young and the card companies need to do more for them if they hope to keep doing business for the next 25 years.

By: Joshua (jpleazme805)

Joshua (jpleazme805) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 23:36:05 +0000

I would save my lunch money to go buy packs of cards. I collected from 1990-1995, then stopped completely in 1996. Had to spend money on clothes, entertainment, & girls during my high school years. I collected briefly in 2000-2001, then got addicted to collecting cardboard again in 2007. Since then I been going back down memory lane to complete the sets I once started or obtain the cards I’ve always wanted as a kid.

I loved Skybox, Fleer Ultra, & Hoops. Back in the 90′s I tried to collect every set, in each sport. I found out fast, as a kid, you can not do that. Especially in today’s market. It just costs too much!!

I fell in love with the hobby during Shaq’s RC year. Before him, I collected mostly MJ, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Malone, Ewing, & Pippen. I still collect those players.

I loved the inserts of the 90′s. “Nicknames”, “All Defensive Players”… Magic’s All Rookies, Supreme Court, Skybox’s USA inserts… too bad there are no “buyback autos” of those. That would be awesome!! I love the SE Die-Cut All Star cards… I am slowly trying to complete that set today.

I wish today’s hobby had more inserts, instead of parallels. I hate when a product has tons of parallels, including different print runs (serial numbers), jersey’s, & patches.. Keep it simple. I’d rather see more inserts.. i.e. auto inserts… not just auto parallels… like what Panini did with Hoops 2011-12.. I loved the Hoops of the 90′s… why did Panini make the revamp so plain?? I bought one box & stopped buying hoops.

Since there are no RC’s in 2011-12… I been going back & trying to buy old 90′s boxes & complete old insert sets I once started or thought about collecting back int he day.

I am 32 years old now. I love the hobby. I wish more people were interested in collecting. I have yet to find a young person that collects cards in San Diego, ca. I’ve only found a hand full of collectors.. a few in their late 20′s/early 30′s.. the rest are in their late 40′s or older.. they all collect baseball & limited amount of basketball…

I can only afford to collect one sport, so I go with my passion. Basketball!

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:27:35 +0000

There was nothing better than Pacific Hockey

By: T

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:19:30 +0000

Best memory by far is going to the card shops in Liberty, Mo. with my grandpa. There was one on the square in downtown we went to the most, next to the Hardware Cafe. We would go in, he would slip me a 5 and whisper ‘Don’t tell your Grandma where you got this.. you found it ok.’ with a wink and I’d pick out a few packs then go back to their house and open and inventory them on paper using my Beckett. I still open each pack the way I did when I was 10. Last time I was in Liberty the card shop was a photo store and The Hardware was a Mexican Restaurant. Man do I miss those days with Hermie…

By: Mike F

Mike F — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:17:47 +0000

The 90′s were awesome. As a kid growing up in the early to mid 90′s, nothing was better than going to the mall and going to the card shows. Baseball was my main hobby and I loved when each new set came out each year. I especially loved Fleer, Fleer Ultra, Donruss, Leaf, Studio and Upper Deck products. The insert craze is what did it for me. Just think how far the industry had come just in a few years. I think 1992 Bowman is what jump started the RC craze and then 1993 SP and Flair jump started the innovative craze and by then every set had inserts. And of course Griffey and The Big Hurt were the main guys that everyone wanted. But, as I entered high school and then college in the late 90′s and into the early part of the 21st century, it was clear where the card industry was going: autos and game used.

Because of that, I stopped collecting as it wasn’t as much fun. But as I started to make more money, I wanted to buy all the 90′s Michael Jordan cards that I thought were amazing as a kid and all the RC’s of players that were great when I was growing up. And boy am I glad I did. It has been a great investment. But, rarely do I buy anything new and I never buy a box of cards that sell for hundreds of dollars. I figure that could go to an MJ card that i need. But, I always think back to how much I miss the 90s.

By: CW Crane

CW Crane — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:29:02 +0000

Like others have said, I believe the internet changed the landscape of collecting. I remember when I was about 15 and saving money from my bagging job at a local grocery store in order to buy a few boxes of 1993 Donruss baseball. I saved up for months and months until I was finally able to buy 10 boxes of the stuff. All I wanted was to pull one, just ONE, Elite card! Out of 10 boxes I did not get one. My local shop had a Juan Gonzalez for sale for some ridiculous price around $400. That was the only Elite I had seen up to that point and I desperately wanted to join the cool club of those who own one. The cards looked amazing (still do) and they were numbered to “only” 10,000! I worked that out to it being an average of only 200 cards of each player being available per state. My thinking was that it’s like a needle-in-the-haystack type odds of getting one! Fast-forward to today, I can get that same card for less than $10 off eBay.

Yes, the mass production of cards in the 90s didn’t help the industry, but I think it was the internet that really delivered a fatal blow. Though cards were mass produced, the fact remained that the common collector was generally limited to whatever cards were available locally. Looking at collecting today, those “rare” cards are no longer rare with the entire world selling at your fingertips. Even searching for 1/1 cards shouldn’t be looked at as an impossible task. Difficult? Sure, but with eBay, Beckett marketplace, forums, photo bucket, online card shops and a multitude of other collectors willing to help us search for our “white whales,” seemingly impossible to find cards are no longer just part of our dreams.

It was shortly after the 1993 Donruss purchase when I decided to stop collecting; which is what I remember most of the 90s. It wasn’t until almost 15 years later when I began collecting again.

By: K. Miller

K. Miller — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:03:47 +0000

I got back into collecting big time in the 90′s, and though many companies sprouted up and over-produced (Pro Set), there were still some amazing cards to spring forth. UD always had nice products and Black Diamond was always a fave-though untouchable at the time. Pacific had some awesome subsets and inserts and still rank as my favorite all-time cards

By: Dan C.

Dan C. — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:47:32 +0000

The 90′s should almost be broken up into two half-decades. The early half was really an extension of the 80′s, with ridiculous over-production and cards that are near-worthless today. But the latter half was the explosion of hundreds of products, premium cards, autos, game-used, etc. and when companies realized that some cards should be tough to get. My favorite part of collecting in the 90′s was that 80′s cards were actually worth something. Remember the Griffey RC craze? Those 89 Fleer Griffeys going for 25 bucks apiece…now you can get them for a buck. The home run race, collectors going nuts over 85 Topps. Now you can get that prestigious McGwire RC for 5 bucks. The late 90′s was the best age for cardboard in the last 50 years. Lots of different companies, many different products, and many new innovations. Now we have a couple card companies (one in baseball), only a handful of products (many of which are essentially the same) and those once-incredible innovations have been over-done many times around. Card collecting can never return to those days. Today’s collectors are more interested in prospecting, parallels, and money than simply collecting great cards of great players.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 08:15:05 +0000

I only collect football cards, so my answer is geared mainly toward that sport. What I miss most about the 90s is that the products, and the hobby in general, were driven by VETERAN STARS. Favre, Elway, and Marino were routinely the best pulls in any product, followed by a couple HOF RBs (Emmitt & Barry) and some guys named Rice and Aikman. I started collecting Favre when he got traded to the Packers and I still collect him today. Today, all “the hobby” seems to care about is rookies, and the companies overproduce them like crazy. Cam Newton has over 1500 cards, 634 of which are autographed. Guys like Brady, Manning (either one), Rodgers, and Brees should be driving the hobby, but they almost afterthoughts except for their autographs. (Brees is basically an unlisted star, which is absurd to me).

Jersey cards meant something because they were actually game worn and not worn for 10 minutes at one event by someone wearing 25 jerseys at the same time with random numbers on them. And they were HARD TO GET. Make it actually worth the chase. Boggles my mind that a game-worn jersey card by any player would be worth only $4, but that’s what happens when you are guaranteed 4 hits a box! Not to mention autographs, which were like winning the lottery!