Top 50 Junk Wax Football Cards Everyone Needs!
Collecting the best Junk Wax Football Cards is a great way to connect to your childhood for a relatively small price, compared to ridiculous modern...
Welcome back to The Hobby! Your cards have been waiting for you – both the ones you collected in the past, and the sports cards you’re going to buy in the future!
If you’re getting back into sports cards after a long hiatus, you likely have tons of questions, concerns and fears. This post should start to educate you on how to start collecting sports cards again.
Just getting back into sports cards? You’re in the right place.
We’ll give you confidence in collecting again, not to say that you won’t make any mistakes, but this article should help you make fewer mistakes than those returning to sports card collecting without a thoughtful plan.
You’re not starting over – you just need to catch up.
Start with something you already enjoy: a favorite player, your hometown team, rookie cards, or a set you remember from childhood. You can always expand or change your focus later.
Are you hoping to look deeper into vintage cards, now that you are an adult and can both afford and appreciate cards from the ‘50s and ‘60s?
The main reason you should choose a focal point is so that you don’t just start buying random boxes – and wasting money that could go buy more bricks for your collecting foundation.
Unfortunately, we don’t have unlimited sports card funds, so we have to be careful with how we spend our money. Some people blow through a ton of money early on before figuring out they could have used it in a better way.
Choose a monthly amount you’re comfortable spending, then decide how much will go toward singles (individual cards) and how much toward opening packs for fun.
Think about one of my favorite philosophies when setting your sports cards budget:
Buy singles to improve your collection.
Rip packs for the experience.
There’s no question that ripping packs has value. It reconnects us with our childhood or at least when we first got into collecting, but in this modern age, it’s very tough to build a great collection solely by ripping. You’ll end up with a ton of cards you might not want.
Collecting with a real-world budget needs intentional ways to build the collection you want, which is buying singles.
A card’s monetary value is tied to several things, including condition, scarcity, the player’s past, the player’s potential, and many other factors. Search “Final Sales” on eBay to get a good idea of a card’s most recent value (comps).
A card’s personal value can also depend on several things, including a collector’s connection to the player or team, nostalgia, history of either the card or the player, etc.
Notice that a card can be valuable in different ways, so knowing why you are collecting (investment, nostalgia, both) is important.
Thirty years or so ago, there were many card manufacturers making many different brands. While there are still many brands (Donruss, Heritage, Hoops, MVP, Optic, Prizm, etc.), there are really only three main card manufacturers.
League licenses are much more limited than they used to be, so most sports have one main card manufacturer. Before 2025, basketball and football cards were licensed through Panini. But Fanatics, who bought Topps in 2022, they also unified the baseball, basketball and football card licenses under one manufacturer.
Back in the day, we mostly bought single packs! But now, there are several different formats of packs/boxes, and it can be difficult to figure it all out.
Sports card grading made card condition a much more important thing than ever before. It also made the number of cards an important aspect, as a card’s population report (pop report) tells collectors how many of these cards have been graded.
A raw card (ungraded card) goes to a grading service for grading and encapsulating (slabbed card).
A card’s grade depends on four condition factors:
“Hobby” products are generally boxes available only through hobby shops (local or online) with bigger hits available than most retail products. There’s incentive to buy hobby boxes because of this.
Unlike our childhood, you can buy cards online at the card manufacturer’s websites, eBay, and dozens of other online marketplaces, local card shops (LCS) and mega card shops online.
“Retail” products are generally boxes available “in the wild,” like at stores that sell other non-hobby items, like Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Scheel’s, Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart.
Just understand that hobby products usually cost more, are tougher to get, and have better hits than retail products. Generally.
A sports card breaker opens a box of cards (or multiple boxes) for a group of people who shared the cost of that product. Each buyer gets one team, or one division, or even one player depending on the checklist size.
Imagine you and several of your buddies when you were a kid pooled your lawn-mowing money together to buy a whole 36-pack box of 1985 Topps Baseball cards, and one person opens all the packs for you, sorts, and ships the cards from your team(s) to you.
Repacks are cards that were previously purchased, repackaged and sold again (often after being graded).
In both cases, the odds of getting a card worth more than what you paid in a break or a repack are stacked against you, but hype often gets collectors thinking it’s a good investoment.
The same way that inserts changed how we collected and what we chased during the Junk Wax Era (remember the Upper Deck holograms!?!), parallels have changed how we collect in the 21st century.
A parallel is essentially the same card photo with a different design/finish/border color. There could be numerous differences from the base card, but a parallel is meant to distinguish itself as something special – which often translates to “more collectable.”
A serial-numbered card is a bigger deal because the scarcity is evident. Lower numbers, like cards numbered to just /10 or /50, usually lure more collectors than higher numbered cards, like /299 or 499.
As you can see, this page is big, and it’s a lot to take in. That’s OK.
Take your time, enjoy the experience of jumping back into the hobby! You will look back at these first purchases with great nostalgia again someday. “I remember when I bought my first PSA 10 card on eBay! It was just one month after I bought my first blaster box!”
You can’t collect everything…
so don’t try.
Start small, and buy cards that make you happy, without making your wallet unhappy later on.
Use this as a model for your first few weeks back.
Consider this guide your jumping off point. We’ll dig deeper into each of these subjects, from deciding what to collect, to setting a budget, to understanding grading and more, so bookmark this page.
You’ve already done the hardest part: You came back!
Now, let’s build a sports card collection that makes you yell, “Happy Hobby!”
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