Trading cards aren’t just for baseball anymore.
The $500 million industry is attracting collectors of all ages for trading cards featuring sports stars, movie stars, political candidates, Pokemon, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch, “The X-Files” and comics characters, even Boy Crazy! cards that link boys with girls. The Internet has broadened that reach by offering collectors the opportunity to buy and sell cards at auction sites and to share stories of their hobby in chat rooms, where they can find what’s available in the greater trading card arena.
“We’re starting to see more hobby stores selling their products on-line,” said Colin Hagen, chairman of the Sports Card association. “The industry has definitely rebounded in the last couple of years.”
Trading cards, once inserted into cigar and cigarette packs at the turn of the century, became mainstream in 1951 when The Topps Company of New York began selling its Bazooka gum with baseball cards.
Over time, sports cards from the NFL, NBA and NHL entered the market. Music and TV fans in the ’60s started collecting cards depicting the Beatles, Elvis and characters from “Gilligan’s Island.” Although baseball cards continue to be a leader in the industry, the fact that they branched into entertainment cards, Hagen said, “was a natural extension of what people wanted to collect.”
The trend continued and the trading card industry peaked in 1992 with an estimated $1.1 billion in sales, according to Richard McWilliam, CEO of Upper Deck, a trading card company that is a leader in selling sports cards with accompanying interactive CD-ROMs featuring audio and video of sports stars.
In the years following the boom, the industry was hit hard by the baseball and basketball league strikes. Recently, however, trading cards rebounded with popular entertainment cards such as Pokemon, which have attracted a younger audience. And with the introduction of interactive trading cards that provide a multidimensional trading card experience.
CD-ROM Trading Cards
Last year Upper Deck introduced a CD-ROM the size of a traditional trading card that allows collectors to see, hear and experience their favorite sports stars. The CD-ROM fits into a 21/2- by 31/2-inch trading card case so collectors still can save and organize the cards in binder sleeves. But this trading card includes 32 mb of information, game action video footage, music, photos and career highlights of stars like Michael Jordan.
“This is an opportunity to invite more card players to card collecting,” McWilliam said.
“It’s better than a regular trading card,” said John Bennett, vice president of marketing and sales for Anteater Design Group, which runs Cardlinks.com, a Web site linking collectors to 3,500 trading card sites.
Creating personal interactive environments for card collectors also is attracting new on-line companies to the industry.
“Our goal is to create digital fun around collectors’ favorite interests and build communities of collectors on-line so they can constantly see the hottest, latest and cutting-edge products,” said David Filler, president and CEO of CyberAction.com, a site that lets its 25,000 members download digital trading cards with video, audio, stats, bios, trivia and games depicting sports, TV, movie and wrestling stars. The digital cards also are available on CD-ROM. In the next six months, CyberAction plans to develop a card that can be e-mailed to friends and fellow collectors, and to launch a chat room and digital trading rooms.
Video clips currently run about eight seconds for easy downloads, but as bandwidth broadens in the coming years, CyberAction.com will add content, video, photo archives, tips, stats and games.
With the introduction of more interactive cards, industry leaders say there is a renewed interest in trading cards, especially on-line.
Dealers such as Kit Young, a vintage sports card dealer in San Diego, has been buying and selling cards since the ’70s.
He still distributes a 100-page catalog monthly to 10,000 of his subscribers, but he now has taken his business on-line, stepping into ebay (http://pages.ebay.com/
tradingcards), where each day he can put up to 150 items on-line for auction that sell from $100 to $4,000. He guarantees his products and warns collectors, “When you’re bidding on-line with someone, you never know who the seller is. Know your seller, ask questions and ask for references.
“And don’t buy something because it’s priced low,” Young warns. “If the price is too good to be true for a 1952 Mickey Mantle card, it probably is.”
He also suggests ensuring cards are graded correctly and being weary of cards classified as “rare.” “It’s hype in some cases.”
But there are benefits, he added. “The Internet gives sellers access to the mass market, and gives buyers access to cards they can’t possibly see in local card stores that can carry only so much.”
Where to start
www.cardlinks.com is an international index for locating sports and trading cards for all levels of collectors and dealers. Whether you’re a beginner or lifelong expert, CardLinks helps users locate hard-to-find dealers and collectors sorted by category. An estimated 3,500 listings are available in the index.
www.collector-link.com/cards is a search engine by Collector Link for locating trading card collecting sites on the Web, news groups, price guides, card issuers, dealers and private collectors. More than 2,000 sites are cataloged.
http://www.the-master-list.com is “The Master List of Comic Book and Trading Card Stores” featuring an extensive list of hobby stores.
Virtual Cards
www.upperdeck.com Upper Deck PowerDeckTM trading cards feature game action video footage, music, photos and career highlights of superstar athletes. Choose from “PowerDeck baseball” (pack of 50 cards for $5), “Michael Jordan’s Greatest Games” (three-card pack for $5) or “Athletes of the Century” (tributes to Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana and Michael Jordan, $20). It’s a digital card that fans can see, hear and experience. Also available are Digimon trading cards and other interactive sports cards.
www.cyberaction.com is CyberAction Interactive Digital Trading Cards that users can collect by downloading from the Web site or buying CD-ROMs. Cards feature live-action video clips, audio from soundtracks, scores and announcers plus stats, trivia and games. CyberAction sells digital trading cards depicting Major League Baseball players; Major League Soccer players; Xena: Warrior Princess; Hercules: The Legendary Journeys; Star Trek television and movie characters; and World Championship Wrestling stars. Round CD-ROMs, which include 55 digital cards, cost $20, 10 digital cards run $5 to $8 depending upon the property, and there is no charge to download CyberAction’s viewer or samples as a member.
Specialty Cards
www.boycrazy.com, Boy Crazy! trading cards feature 363 boys’ pictures, stats such as height and favorite actors, plus their ideal traits in girls. The cards are aimed at girls 10 and up as an alternative to Pokeman, Magic and sports trading cards. Sold in packs of nine for $3, the cards offer bios on boys 12 to 22.
Entertainment Cards
www.tradingcardnation.com, owned by Collecting Nation of Stamford, Conn., calls itself the “ultimate trading card community” attracting 156,178 members to its site, 11,154 auctions and $134,455 in cards for sale. Auction sites include a variety of cards from Pokemon, Peanuts, Beanie Babies to “The X-Files.” Users can click on an item for a summary on which to bid and a clear, color image of the card.
www.beanietradingcards.com specializes in Beanie Baby trading cards by allowing users to order cards on-line for shipping.
Sports Cards
http://pages.ebay.com/tradingcards Ebay, an on-line auction site, offers 250,000 baseball, basketball, racing and other trading cards for sale.
www.allstartradingcards.com has sports plus Pokemon, Star Wars and Star Trek.
www.sportshotstradingcards.com offers users the opportunity to view and bid – on a variety of sports cards.
www.gochamps.com states all of its products are authenticated.
www.sgccard.com is the “Sportscard Guaranty (SIC) Card Grading” site, which is the standard for baseball card and sports card grading and authentication.
