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Been to a baseball card shop lately? Unless you have, you wouldn't recognize the place. They are a lot different than they used to be.
Now days card shops don't just carry baseball cards. Or even sports cards for that matter. Cards shops now days carry Pokemon cards, Magic cards, Star Wars cards and even comic books.
That's not all that has changed. Card collecting has become big business. Gone are the days of putting a card in the spokes of your bicycle tire or getting a piece of gum in a pack of cards.
However, there are a lot more choices now days. originally Topps was the only manufacturer around when it came to cards. Then came Donruss and Fleer. Now there are eight or nine manufacturers, and each one releases several sets of cards a season. So if you don't like how a certain set looks, there are plenty of others to choose from.
There are also several sports to choose from. There are cards for almost every sport from hockey and soccer to bowling and swimming.
Today's cards are, for lack of a better term, supercharged. First of all the photos on the cards all look better. The colors are more vibrant and attractive. Not only that, but the stock the cards are printed on is better quality so they will be sturdier and last longer.
But with better quality come a higher price. While sports cards used to run about fifty cents a pack, you'll pay between one to seven dollars for a pack now. And you get a lot less cards. A pack used to have around fifteen or twenty cards in it. Now packs sometimes have as few as five cards.
To offset the decrease in the number of cards per pack the card manufacturers have done some interesting things. For one, they print a lot fewer cards which means an individual card becomes more rare and therefore more valuable. Also, the card companies make valuable inserts that they put in random packs. These inserts include such things as a piece of a jersey worn by a player in a game or even a famous player's baseball bat or basketball cut into pieces and made into cards. The odds of getting such a card is low but the cards can be worth quite a bit.
Cards have certainly changed a lot over the years but one thing has remained the same, card collecting is one of the only hobbies that is both fun and potentially lucrative.
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