Sports Card Stories

  Another trend in the boom years with sports card magazines with cards inserted, usually on a cardboard sheet.  Krause Publications started the practice in the mid-1980's with reprint cards in Baseball Cards Magazine. (I'll have to do another article on Baseball Cards Magazine). By the late-80's, insert sheets appeared in BCM.  They mimicked old Topps and Bowman sets but featured modern players.   In 1991 a full-color, high gloss magazine appeared in card shops,  Legends Sports Memorabilia.  Legends was on very high quality paper and looked a lot like "The Robb Report," a magazine geared towards high-end cars, vacations and boats. The articles were on sports card investing.  There were a lot of carefully researched articles on pricing trends- if you followed their advice you would buy cards like 1986 Fleer Canseco rookies for $50 and 1985 Eric Davis rookies for $25.  Oof.  That's just how people thought back then.  Cards were consi...

              1991 Wild Card Football Welcome to Sports Card Stories.  Where I blog about sports cards (and maybe some non-sports/entertainment cards) that are just a little bit different.  Every card has a story- just some are more interesting than others. 1991 was probably the apex (or nadir depending how you look at it) of the sports card boom.  The National Convention achieved attendance records that haven't been challenged since.  There were several major release offerings for every major sport, all printed to excess.  In fact, there was so much cardboard used that paper manufacturers clear cut every tree in the Mojave Forest for card production, leaving the arid desert that we know today.   When speculators moved on to the next thing, billions of cards were orphaned.  The past year has finally seen some of these cards find new homes in the new card boom.  Wild Card football came on the scene in 1991....