Well yeah, but that’s like complaining that this Leonardo Da Vinci is worth a crapton more than my nephew’s fingerpainting.
They’re both paintings, but one is rarer and in a lot more demand.
Well, not anything. Some of the comic books marketed in the 70s as “Limited Collector’s Editions” are actually collectible now.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Billy Beer yet.
Heh. On a recent road trip I saw cans of Billy Beer on display in 2 different local history museums. (Laws Railroad Museum & Mono Basin Historical Museum)
Well, not entirely. Magic: The Gathering (A collectible card game) came out in 1992. I think there were a lot of people even in the mid '90s who expected the prices to match that of Beanie Babies. Damned if the good cards from the early days don’t keep going up in value every single year.
I offer post # 36 in my defense.
I was about to say that, but Magic gets a slight pass, since it wasn’t only produced as a collectible, it was produced as a game, and that game continues to increase in popularity. A substantial portion of the value of the older cards is related to the fact that they offer powerful effects in the game that are generally not duplicated by other cards.
That sets it apart from things like baseball cards in my mind, which, as I understand, you just sort of “have”.
My Generation X #1 and my complete run of the Age of Apocalypse is gonna be worth enough for me to retire on. Just you watch…
No, but a significant fraction of the population bought it. And who could blame them? I mean, except for the music.
We elected the wrong Carter. [/Homer Simpson]
The downside bieng, of course, that after the apocylypse comes you will have Spam.
A company I worked for built the “trading center” shown in some Franklin Mint ads, where “traders” spend their days monitoring the constant rise in value of Currier & Ives Christmas plates of the 70s. It was in their HQ. I never got to go and see if the traders really used their monitors to monitor their soaps.
What I’ve done is I put an ad on Craigslist offering some family members’ old records for free in exchange for digital recordings of them. I’ve gotten a couple of replies so far, from an audiophile/engineer and a hiphop artist. I haven’t given them away yet though, I’m still waiting to schedule it.
I might be making a mistake in not charging for them, but I don’t really know the condition of them and all, so I figured I wouldn’t make much money on 100 random LPs. I did find the audiophile guy has an ad apparently offering to buy people’s records AND do transfers, but I already tipped my hand.
Yeah, but they usually have a limited run of 10,000,000.
On the topic of Magic cards, some of them are valuable because they really do have a significant impact in the game. Black Lotus, for instance, is worth thousands of dollars, because it’ll significantly improve pretty much any deck it’s put into, and it hasn’t been printed in decades. On the other end of the scale, though, they also made foil editions of some cards, explicitly for the sake of making them collectibles. Unfortunately, though, most of these foils are things like basic lands, which are the backbone of every deck, are produced in greater quantities than any other card, and will always continue to be printed for as long as the game exists. So a foil edition of a forest might be worth ten cents, instead of the five cents a regular forest would be worth.
re: sports cards: actually, the market right now is crazy about “inserts,” limited run cards with a known scarcity (e.g. 5 total sets made, 1 total set made, etc.) “Common” cards that aren’t part of a special run are pretty much worthless all the way back to 1985, assuming by “worthless” you mean less than $5 each. The last decent card I saw was ~$20 for an '85 Roger Clemens rookie, but the '84 Donruss Mattingly is going for $600 on ebay.
The inserts have stacking bonuses as well, for example: Red Refractor Chrome Autograph Jersey Rookie Card.
I just busted open 2 boxes of 2008 Bowman Chrome, and the commons were worthless (at most maybe 6), the basic Chromes Rookie cards were ~.25-.75, the jersey inserts were ~$1, the basic autographs were ~$1, and the inserts were around ~$10 for the commons(!).
The “holy grail” of card collecting right now are the Red Refractors and the Superfractors, which have a limited run of 1-5 sets in the world.
Nitpick: 16 years. The game was only created in 1993, and the last printing of the Lotus was in 1994.
Another reason M:tG cards can gain value is…they’re used to play a game.
And few people, if any, played with them in card protectors, at least into the late 90s (I haven’t played since '98 or '99, since I haven’t had anyone to play WITH.).
So cards tend to wear, so the majority of extant copies of a particular card will have battered edged, and other signs of use…so the ones that don’t…will be worth a lot more due to the rarity.
If this is true, then Tony Gywnn rookie cards from the same year should sell for around $300,000.
Yeah…the Magic cards which really got to ridiculous prices (such as Black Lotus and the Mox cards) were ones that WotC realized, fairly early on, were “broken” in the game, and were taken out very early on. Thus, they printed relatively few of them.
I started playing Magic in the spring of '94, when Revised was the “current” base set, and those big broken cards had already been taken out of the set. A few months after I started playing, I saw a set of the five Mox cards in a card shop, for sale at $15 each. I thought, “that’s absurd…who would ever pay that much for cards??” Ohh, had I only known!! (Within a year or two, they were selling for well over a hundred dollars each…I have no idea what the current price for them is.)
I’d also note that “collectible”, in the case of Magic, was never really meant to be “keep these for a long time, and they’ll appreciate in value”. The idea behind the game was that you would buy packs with random assortments of cards, build a “collection” of cards, and then use cards from your collection to build your deck for game play.
What about … Richie Rich and other Harvey-published comics? There’s a ton of 'em – 1960s and 1970s – in the basement at Dad’s house, in quite good condition. I’m thinking it’ll be a couple more generations before they’re worth more than the paper they’re printed on, because they’re not superhero comics. Maybe they’ll be valuable in 2050 or so, because so many were tossed due to lack of collector value at the time, and most who were involved in the production and consumption chain would be dead by then.
A few other things I’m wondering about:
- Collectible spoons, thimbles, and other series of knick-knacks that were marketed towards women.
- Giveaways by fast food chains; e.g. glasses from Burger King, Happy Meal prizes, and the like.
- Aren’t McDonalds spoon-shaped coffee stirrers from the 1970s and 1980s worth some outrageous amount?