Roberto Alomar Forum

Missing a lot of different Alomars, most are rare inserts, Autos and game-used/relic card issues. Damn card companies, particularly Topps keeps pumping out all these limited parallels and 50 billion other inserts every year. 

If you think Topps is bad, Panini is worse. I'd be okay with it if the designs were classic/innovative, but it's all rehashed photoshop nonsense. 

I'm really limiting my Marino to pre-2005. And a lot of PSA master collections limit to retirement year + 1. It's impossible to keep up so don't even try! Don't get discouraged and just collect what makes you happy.

If you think those 1250 you have are the only ones that are different then you aren't very good at inventing VARs yet. 

Stick around TCDB, you'll get the hang of it. 

very good

Bounty13,

Exactly. The number of parallels are especially ridiculous. And since around 2010, the number of certified auto issues has skyrocketed; which means now even autographs are being devalued by the card companies. I stopped looking at Beckett magazine 20 years ago after I saw the relatively simple pattern of how they assign values to cards in their pricing guides. All they do is just continuously market the newest stuff, because the card companies are who pay for their magazine. They're in cahoots. Their little scheme is so easy to figure out after a few years of following the pricing. I knew their pricing was all bogus when they started moving hall of famers to the "Unlisted Stars" list and artificially inflating the newer stuff - stuff they were advertizing on the ad pages. Making a challenge for collectors is fine, but what we continue to see is just more and more of the same (or very similar). Like you said, it's basically like photoshop. Just take the same card and color the frame or borders to pink or blue or any color of the rainbow, rather than the base set color of white. In a way, it makes me wish they would just go back to producing 500,000 to 1 million copies of just 1-3 sets per year. There's not much of a difference now, except the 1 million cards per year are around 3 or 4 million cards that are split up into 500 different sets and subsets, so it creates the illusion that collectors are getting a rare card when they pull something limited to 100 or less. That used to be the case, in the late 90's or early 00's. But now, you see 200 different 1 of 1's every year for every player. So in reality, a 1 of 1 is not really a 1 of 1. Maybe I should be glad that I don't have as much of the newer cards for the players I collect! 

Hahaha.. I'm seeing that more often in fact ... 

INVENTING? 

Nobody invents a card, but they do find them!

As much as ERR/VARs "naysayers" want to complain, there will always be errors and variations to search for in the trading card industry. Their popularity and collectability have forced card companies to purposely add SPs and other similar cards to the collecting mix. 

Good for the hobby!