Topps Base Fad

[jbball50]

Originally Posted by asujbl

It absolutely is the case

Collectors are OCD.

You can’t have a Kobe Topps but not a Duncan Topps.

It absolutely drives the value compared to some off brand like a Topps Pristine or something.

Especially with new folks. They don’t know what a Garnett Flair is. They know what Topps is.

To each their own, I’ve never cared about a 90s topps base rc and never will. I would also think to most collectors they weren’t hoarding Tim Duncan topps rc’s before last year. I’m into the nicer sets of the 90’s and insert cards.

[asujbl]

Originally Posted by jbball50

To each their own, I’ve never cared about a 90s topps base rc and never will. I would also think to most collectors they weren’t hoarding Tim Duncan topps rc’s before last year. I’m into the nicer sets of the 90’s and insert cards.

Which is fine

You are the minority

[k13]

Comparing 1952 topps to 90s junk ....yikes..
Psa grading will try and justify any rarity.

If you look at 1961 fleer the same way as 1995 topps...lol

Demand always wanes at some point.

Even funnier people calling 90s vintage.

[asujbl]

Originally Posted by k13

Comparing 1952 topps to 90s junk ....yikes..
Psa grading will try and justify any rarity.

If you look at 1961 fleer the same way as 1995 topps...lol

Demand always wanes at some point.

Even funnier people calling 90s vintage.

What do you consider vintage? Serious question

Is it based on your age? The age of the card? Just a made up year?

[Chris P]

Isn't some of it too influenced by the Trout Update? I remember hearing people saying "If a Trout Rookie Paper Topps is this much..a Lebron shouldn't be as cheap as it is (at the time)"

[asujbl]

Originally Posted by Chris P

Isn't some of it too influenced by the Trout Update? I remember hearing people saying "If a Trout Rookie Paper Topps is this much..a Lebron shouldn't be as cheap as it is (at the time)"

It’s all intertwined

Kobe Topps
Duncan Topps
LeBron Topps
Trout Topps
Gwynn Topps
Bonds Topps
Rodgers Topps
Brees Topps
Marino Topps

80’s and 90’s all sports...

Brady was a 6th rounder so I don’t care what he didn’t have a Topps

Collectors and investors are OCD.

They get Topps

They don’t get Topps Pristine

Fact.

[packerfan4200]

Originally Posted by sebreg

That's true. I mean, most of these high pop topps are don't get caught holding the bag at these prices kind of cards in my mind. I like some of the vintage topps card designs, but the junk era topps weren't very interesting for the most part imo.

The population is not that high though. Iverson, Shaq, Kobe and Duncan are the only ones from the 90s over 1,000 in psa 10. Most of the other bigger names guys are 200-300 or less.

Edit for correction: Duncan is under 700 at the moment.

[i4gotmyid]

Originally Posted by asujbl

It’s all intertwined

Kobe Topps
Duncan Topps
LeBron Topps
Trout Topps
Gwynn Topps
Bonds Topps
Rodgers Topps
Brees Topps
Marino Topps

80’s and 90’s all sports...

Brady was a 6th rounder so I don’t care what he didn’t have a Topps

Collectors and investors are OCD.

They get Topps

They don’t get Topps Pristine

Fact.

In this scenario do people get confused with

1961 fleer wilt chamberlain
1961 fleer oscar robertson
1961 fleer jerry west
1986 fleer michael jordan
1986 fleer charles barkley
1988 fleer reggie miller
1988 fleer scottie pippen
1990 fleer Gary payton
1990 fleer shawn kemp

[asujbl]

Originally Posted by i4gotmyid

In this scenario do people get confused with

1961 fleer wilt chamberlain
1961 fleer oscar robertson
1961 fleer jerry west
1986 fleer michael jordan
1986 fleer charles barkley
1988 fleer reggie miller
1988 fleer scottie pippen
1990 fleer Gary payton
1990 fleer shawn kemp

You’re proving my point

As I think LeBron Fleer (compared to Topps) might be the most underrated card out there

Kemp being on this list is weird

[lseecon]

Originally Posted by i4gotmyid

Uh...what? In basketball the most iconic rookies don't come in topps form...1961 fleer, 1985 star, 1986 fleer, 2012 prizm...but go ahead and tout "old school topps" and it's place in basketball lore

you are nominated for dumbest post of the year..!!! congrats!!!


1957 Topps Bill Russell
1969 Topps Kareem
1972 Topps Dr. Jr
1980 Topps Bird/Magic

Nah....definitely not in top 10 all time basketball rookie cards

[asujbl]

Originally Posted by lseecon

you are nominated for dumbest post of the year..!!! congrats!!!


1957 Topps Bill Russell
1969 Topps Kareem
1972 Topps Dr. Jr
1980 Topps Bird/Magic

Nah....definitely not in top 10 all time basketball rookie cards

Yep

2012 being iconic seems aggressive... and I have plenty

[i4gotmyid]

Originally Posted by lseecon

you are nominated for dumbest post of the year..!!! congrats!!!


1957 Topps Bill Russell
1969 Topps Kareem
1972 Topps Dr. Jr
1980 Topps Bird/Magic

Nah....definitely not in top 10 all time basketball rookie cards

Baylor, west, oscar, wilt, every rookie from the 80s and all the current players...but sure you got 4 cards

[i4gotmyid]

Originally Posted by asujbl

You’re proving my point

As I think LeBron Fleer (compared to Topps) might be the most underrated card out there

Kemp being on this list is weird

I have no problem with topps, but equating it to the best of basketball because it is intertwined with sports history obviously ignores that a large portion of players do not have a topps rookie. (As a Seattle fan I put kemp and payton...who do not have topps rookies)

[derder]

New money not wanting or needing to understand older collecting.

[Giancarlo27]

A big part i think is that for many of these players the top RC to get is the Topps Chrome, which many collectors are now priced out of, so they go with the cheaper alternative with the same image.

[OMG]

90's topps base cards were super cheap so I think alot of these flippers/investors looked at them and thought they are the next thing to blow up, it only takes a couple bidders to bring up prices , others prob noticed the price increase and everyone jumped on the next hype and now prices are skyrocketing.

The card market is beyond crazy atm , this is prob the worst time to buy. All these newcomers honestly believe that every single card they buy will be a quick and profitable flip, they may got lucky before or saw others flippers making a killing and the past year or so prices have only gone up and up and up .... eventually it has to stop or drop. There's just sooo much speculation in the card market now , everyone is trying to find the next big thing, MJ Baseball Base cards are selling for thousands, just last week I saw a fukn Mr.Rodgers card sell for a few hundred , I saw Michael Jackson cards sell , and I even saw a bunch of Bill Gates "Rookie" cards for sale , seriously : /
Look at pokemons recent hype , prices rose fast , everyone jumped on the train and now I see memes/post on instagram how prices have plummeted down. These crazy insane prices just cannot be sustained long term.

Very similar to the housing bubble where everyone jumped into investing in real estate , everyone and their dog thought they could make a fortune on real estate then boom bubble popped and many ppl get screwed. Similar to cards, it was a small market underground , then it gets some attention and goes mainstream everyone jumps on the hype , some flippers make alot of money in short time and others see that, then everyone looks at it and thinks they can make a fortune investing cards. The market is soo saturated right now, I kinda feel bad for the new guys not knowing whats going on, they are following these "gurus" on what to buy and when the bubble pops these newer collectors/flippers will get hit the hardest. I'd hate to be that guy stuck with a stack of worthless masproduced non numbered non auto prizm Base psa 10's.

I think this year 2021 will be an interesting year for the hobby and will dictate where we go in the future because I already started to notice some cards dropping price and I see alot of panicked flippers making posts online because their card has gone down 5% in value. We are still seeing record high sales selling for millions and millions of dollars but thats the 1% of all cards that will hold value, the rest of 99% of cards will fall

[drobfan8]

Originally Posted by jbball50

To each their own, I’ve never cared about a 90s topps base rc and never will. I would also think to most collectors they weren’t hoarding Tim Duncan topps rc’s before last year. I’m into the nicer sets of the 90’s and insert cards.

Same.

I remember passing on TD Chrome RC Refractors for $300. Silly now. But was never a huge fan. Instead I wanted his Flair RCs and particularly his Row 0..

I busted a box of 97/98 Topps. I swear I threw out all the Bass junk and kept the Jordan's, Kobe's and Duncan's but cannot find them anywhere..you got about 5-7 of each per box.

I would love to cash in right now though. But Topps /1000,000 are not worth the money people are paying. But hey, if you're a seller, good work. I'd be turning that money in to quality cards over Topps Bass.

[sebreg]

Originally Posted by drobfan8

Same.

I remember passing on TD Chrome RC Refractors for $300. Silly now. But was never a huge fan. Instead I wanted his Flair RCs and particularly his Row 0..

I busted a box of 97/98 Topps. I swear I threw out all the Bass junk and kept the Jordan's, Kobe's and Duncan's but cannot find them anywhere..you got about 5-7 of each per box.

I would love to cash in right now though. But Topps /1000,000 are not worth the money people are paying. But hey, if you're a seller, good work. I'd be turning that money in to quality cards over Topps Bass.

Same. I find 90s Topps (and chrome) very boring and unappealing. Feel they had more interesting designs and photography in the 00s.

[mc1]

Originally Posted by packerfan4200

The population is not that high though. Iverson, Shaq, Kobe and Duncan are the only ones from the 90s over 1,000 in psa 10. Most of the other bigger names guys are 200-300 or less.

Edit for correction: Duncan is under 700 at the moment.

Theres thousands and thousands of these at PSA waiting to get slabbed.

My LCS had dozens of Duncans and Kobes that are still waiting at PSA.

You get about 350 base in a 36 pack box. Thats 3-4 base per player. They arent rare.

[jbball50]

Originally Posted by drobfan8

Same.

I remember passing on TD Chrome RC Refractors for $300. Silly now. But was never a huge fan. Instead I wanted his Flair RCs and particularly his Row 0..

I busted a box of 97/98 Topps. I swear I threw out all the Bass junk and kept the Jordan's, Kobe's and Duncan's but cannot find them anywhere..you got about 5-7 of each per box.

I would love to cash in right now though. But Topps /1000,000 are not worth the money people are paying. But hey, if you're a seller, good work. I'd be turning that money in to quality cards over Topps Bass.

Same, I know I have Kobe topps rc’s back at my parents somewhere and when I find them I’ll be selling them. Same with the ugly 1998-99 topps rc’s of nowitzki, carter, and pierce which I know I have in one of the boxes in my house. I have multiples of them pulled from boxes years ago.

[Spacemanspif]

Originally Posted by packerfan4200

The population is not that high though. Iverson, Shaq, Kobe and Duncan are the only ones from the 90s over 1,000 in psa 10. Most of the other bigger names guys are 200-300 or less.

Edit for correction: Duncan is under 700 at the moment.

Originally Posted by mc1

Theres thousands and thousands of these at PSA waiting to get slabbed.

My LCS had dozens of Duncans and Kobes that are still waiting at PSA.

You get about 350 base in a 36 pack box. Thats 3-4 base per player. They arent rare.

The reason the POP is low is because until now, they generally weren't even considered for slabbing. I guarantee most people on these boards probably have some of these paper rookies in shoeboxes somewhere. Even the superduper stars like KD, you could buy those Topps rookie sets for a couple bucks less than 2 years ago, so even if there's "only" 10k of them graded right now (which is still a lot, no?), I guarantee there's another 20k-30k sitting out there somewhere. A lot of these cards are just "graded cards available on ebay" scarce, not actually scarce. A quick search for "shaquille o'neal rookie card topps psa 362" gave me 15 pages of results in February alone. but whatevs, people are gonna pump and people are gonna be left with expensive slabs. it's just Bass Prizm revolution 2.0

[Tallboy]

Originally Posted by rogueriver

Can someone please explain to me the Topps Rookie card fad going on now with all these players, Garnett, Kobe,Shaq and so on. I left the hobby in 2000 and came back 2 years ago when I left Topps from the 1990s was Junk nobody wanted Kobe Topps Rookie Cards, this was way down on the list at number 48 or so.... Now all of a sudden it is his like number 3 rookie card.. This is across the board on a ton of players. Shaq is another one. These were solid dollar box cards, I am not saying they were not decent cards to have but there were much better rookies to have that Topps. Why all of a sudden is Topps Getting so much love this is some kind of market manipulation going on. Nobody who collected these cards in the 1990s collected topps base....

Definitely the question to be asking at this time.

To try to give you something super-short to understand:

Do you remember when Topps Chrome first came out and people said "Why the hell would a little bit of shiny make me want to buy boring Topps cards?"

People understood from the beginning how closely relating the Topps base and Topps Chrome were, and it led to an initial tainting of the Chrome brand. But then things changed, for a lot of very interesting reasons, and Chrome became the hot brand.

And once that happened, I think the question flipped around: "Why am I spending so much more for the shiny version when I could get the clean version for so much cheaper?"

I'm not saying that happened overnight. The card everyone points to on this is the Topps Mike Trout rookie in baseball which had no Topps Chrome counterpart. The absence of Chrome by '90s logic would have meant some other premium brand would capture the hobby. But by the 2010s, running over to "the flagship" made more sense to people.

I'll say, it helped that it's just an awesome card:



I'm not hear to tell you that all skyrocketing Topps base cards are beautiful designs - they are not. But I do think that the ones that started the trend - the Trout, the Kobe, the LeBron - were all cards that truly were spectacular, and the momentum those cards created allowed Topps as a brand to get established as the Coca-Cola of sports cards in a way it wasn't back when you and I were cutting our teeth in the hobby.

Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't say: The reason why any particular thing is skyrocketing right now is that people are paying attention to the market. Once anything gets momentum, people who see the logic in that momentum tend to jump in.

So if you're asking not "Why is Topps KG more valuable than SP KG?" but "Why is Topps KG an order of magnitude more valuable than SP KG?", the main answer is that the market is exaggerating differences like this, and a counter-trend could change that at any time.

But as to why Topps is the one experiencing this over its contemporaries, it really is rooted in history from the '90s even if those in the '90s would never have expected this.

[rogueriver]

You are right the population numbers at PSA and BGS on these cards are so low because WHY WHY ARE THEY SO LOW.....ANSWER>>>>>>NOBODY WANTED THESE CARDS UNTIL ABOUT 6 MONTHS AGO

[KingInTheWest]

I feel like I went back in time to a parallel universe of 1994 but in this parallel world collectors prefer plain old Topps to Topps Finest, Stadium Club and Fleer Ultra.

[packerfan4200]

Originally Posted by mc1

Theres thousands and thousands of these at PSA waiting to get slabbed.

My LCS had dozens of Duncans and Kobes that are still waiting at PSA.

You get about 350 base in a 36 pack box. Thats 3-4 base per player. They arent rare.

Right, this is well known. But if KG or Dirk goes up from >200, to say, 2,000 psa 10s, who really gives a sh!t? There’s 15k Luka and Zion prizm.

And I don’t care how many are in the queue at psa, there isn’t a ton of these being unearthed in gem form because 1: they mostly all came with defects out of the wrapper and 2: nobody gave a #@#@#@#@ about these for 25 years. They were left in boxes un-sleeved by the dozens and 3: Psa isn’t going to be easy on these.