[Card_Trader]

hey hows everyone doing, i havent been on here in years. the boards dont seem as active as they use to be. are there less people trading on here or people dont speak up all that much anymore?

[bojesphob]

Once Beckett started charging for the Org and trading a lot of people left. Some of us still post occasionally, some more than others, but overall it's like a ghost town. I don't do any trading here anymore, but do still like interacting with some of the regulars here on the forum

[ronfir]

I still visit this site but you are right, most have left long ago. I do most of my posting on another sight but even it has slowed down a lot from back in the day.

I have to wonder if collectors are getting tired of these one pack products that costs from $200 to $600 for two minutes of excitment? I like to open packs and for me this is not as much fun.

[savagenate]

I pop in now and then, but I've slowed my collecting down a bit, so I don't have much worth trading. I like seeing peoples collections coming together though!

[gregscardshop]

i use to trade on here all the time. i am only worried about not having many people around to trade with. i've never tried any of the other sites to trade so not very sure where to find legit trade partners anymore.

[kerryandbeth]

The perceived diminishing numbers of available collectors is not because people have stopped collecting or wanting to trade. It is because there is more risk in trading as an increasing number high-end products flood the market.

When I first started trading baseball I was trying to fill base and insert sets of the 90's and 2000's, so it was easy to give up a Trout, Jeter or Ripken to get a few missing cards of lesser famed players in order to fill a 20- or 30-card subset. Once I back-filled everything from 1993 to 2010, it became much more difficult to find someone interested in a Purple Refractor of a 2014 prospect when there were 20+ autograph/patch cards of that same player in multiple products.

So, whether you trade football or baseball or something else, the answer is not to switch to another trading site but to find collectors willing to trade base or base, inserts for inserts, autos for autos, and so on, and then ask those traders who they also trade with to increase the possibility of positive results.

[jfrench91]

In my opinion there is too much product and not enough collectors. In 2014 I couldn't keep an OBJ auto for nothing but now I have 6 and who wants OBJ now? Who IS OBJ anyway? People go for broke with new products(new football year) and forget about the past stuff.. even if that means last years stuff is old news now. Then you get "team" collectors but fail to mention they only collect a certain 3 or 4 players in the history of that team so those other players just go to waste. You do have "player" or "college team" collectors who dedicate their time and collections to only that. So it makes trading difficult to trade with that certain collector when they collect 2 things out of a billion. The "hobby" doesn't have the "trade for whatever just to trade" other than myself. Yeah I have my own PC players and collections but I don't focus all of my attention to that. Then there is the "greed" aspect.. the " my card is worth more than yours" deals.. or the " this guys going to erupt and ill be a millionaire" guy.. in my honest opinion the general idea of this being a "hobby" is a total joke. Its a business anymore and terribly sad. People ruin values by paying whatever they want for a card because well.. credit cards. Anybody with "money" to just throw away without a credit card cant really manage it to begin with. So that raises the costs and prices of stuff. The "quantity" of cards per player are just flat out ridiculous.. Carson Wentz already has almost 700 cards and its week 2 of the NFL. Why does he have 700 cards already? Remember when you opened up a pack of topps chrome and were tickled pink to get that Peyton Manning rookie card or Randy Moss?(just examples).. now you open up a pack of ANYTHING and it has 30 different variants.. also in my opinion is ridiculous. Do I still chase some of these? absolutely, so Im sucked into the idea of it. Its sickening the money I put into this "hobby" of mine compared to what I used to. Nonetheless I enjoy it but sometimes people in this "hobby" make you want to just quit it entirely because its income to them and don't care about the collectors portion of whats supposed to be fun. That's all I have, thanks. Happy "trading"