This hobby is expensive. There’s no way around it. Whether you’re spending hundreds of dollars on a single card or putting that money towards wax, it adds up real fast.
Budgeting is essential if you’re in this for the long haul. And with sports card collecting on the rise and prices climbing higher and higher, that really forces us to think about where we’re putting our money.
The ultra-modern cardscape is crazy. For a single season of baseball, Topps puts out upwards of 40 releases containing the same players. And that might be an underestimate. For years, Panini did the same thing with NFL and NBA. Now with Topps owning those licenses too, we imagine this is only going to continue.
Luckily for us, the hobby doesn’t look at every release equally. Some are way more valuable to collect than others.
Today, we’re going to try and rein this in. What products should we be putting more of our yearly spend into? Whether it’s wax or singles, and especially if you’re investing, that’s a question worth answering.
We’re going to look at the last five full seasons’ worth of product. We’ll pick one of the biggest rookies from each year, average their last five PSA 10 base card sales in every release, and see which release is getting the most hobby dollars. Then, we’ll do it again with raw prices for base autos.
We’re leaving ultra high-end releases out of this one. They’d clean house when it comes to most valuable, but more importantly, they aren’t something the average collector can afford to get their hands on. 2026 cards get left out too since we’re still in the middle of that release cycle.
This week, we’re covering baseball. We’ve got our hunches about which releases come out on top, and we’d bet you’ve got a few of your own. Hang onto them. We’ll find out together whose guesses hold up as we work through the comps.
Let’s rip in.
