[Bowrag]

Im sure there are hundreds of different answers to this questions:

What is the best brand of cards to collect? I am mostly interested in rookie cards. I would like to have the best valued rookie card of each player I am interested in. Im a huge Astros fan and prefer these guys. We are about to start a rebuilding phase and I want to be out front of the rookies.

I used to collect when I was in college 25+ years ago and things have changed with the addition of all of these brand cards...

What do you guys recommend?

Bowrag

[brian2345]

For Rookies & Prospects Bowman brands are the best.

[yankees_pride]

Well the "rookie" card isn't very popular anymore. It's more of prospecting now.

[Bowrag]

Well the "rookie" card isn't very popular anymore. It's more of prospecting now.

What do you mean prospecting? Sorry for my ignorance

[Murzcoach]

Prospect's are the guys on the cusp of making it to the bigs. There are multiple sets released each year. These sets will only include minor league players or prospects.

If your mainly into Astros I would recommend buying singles. There are a few major sites that guys in this forum like to go to. If you get the itch to bust some packs buy a hobby box of one of the Bowman products, but don't go crazy.

[yankees_pride]

No offense but Astros have such little good players (is that even English, haha) that Topps Chrome didn't even have one Astros player in it.

JD Martinez is the biggest "prospect" coming up.

[prymetyme1035]

johnthan singelton is a good prospect for the astros

[tntmclmm]

They had the #1 pick over all with Carlos Correa, and Jose Altuve is pretty damn good.

[Bowrag]

They had the #1 pick over all with Carlos Correa, and Jose Altuve is pretty damn good.

Yea... Altuve is legit. Correa should develop in the minors... But I guess this would be the definition of a 'prospect'

Ok back to the question.... So, there are sets that focus on prospects? Bowman seems to be the most online with rookie cards... Both for baseball and football.

Im a Houston guy so I want to only start or stay collecting Astros, Texans, Rockets, etc... Looks like the hobby is overwhelming compared to what it was when I used to collect. Pretty much Upper Deck was brand new and Topps was all you focused on.

My problem, I grab a great rookie or prospect card for someone (example, JJ Watt... There are 5-10 other brands out there that have a higher dollar value than the one I have.) How do you keep up!?!?

[uvaspina]

If you really want to collect the "highest value" rookie cards, then you'd be looking at getting the serially-numbered (SN) cards. -The lower the better. Just about every set has them. In Topps/Bowman sets, blues are /199, blacks are /100, gold /50, red /25 (usually, sometimes /5) superfractor/canary /1. There's plenty of variations, particularly when you get into subsets and game used (GU) cards.