General Forum

I collect vintage baseball mostly and just started entering in all my old cards into TCDB. What a fantastic addictive place!

As I'm a Cubs fan I decided to see how many Cubs cards I have and was curious about collecting ALL of them. I mean how many could there be? 10-12k? lol - little did I know. Reminder, I don't get much of anything past '86 unless it's Cubs. So all the purple bubble chrome serial numbered parallels are new to me.

So I did a little research.

From 1937 - 1986 (50 yrs) there were about 6,500 DIFFERENT Cubs cards made. (2,350 of which were made from 1980-86)

And over the past 5 years 2016-21 there were over 58,500 different Cubs cards made. WTF!?

So almost 10x as many different cards in 10x less amount of time. So at this rate, there will literally be over 1 million different Cubs cards 50 years from now.

Seems a little excessive, no?

If you just stick to the purple bubble chrome serial numbered parallels you'll be fine, as there's only 1,300 of those. ;D

Sheesh. That would be quite a binder  ;-D

Wow.  That's crazy.  Absolutely believable, but crazy none the less. All the variations and parallels these days definitely get confusing to me.

Yeah, I looked at Kris Bryant's total cards and there are 11k+ of em. Guy has been in the league less than 7 years. Places like TCDB definitely help new card newbies like me, but sometimes I'll spend 10 minutes just trying to catalog a new card.  Feels like 99% of these cards can't have any long-term value outside of the HOF auto/relics.

Woah, that's a big increase in production, and probably a big reduction in quality.

Certainly highlights why I don't take much interest in modern cards, especially with all the insets and parallels.

The short answer to your question is "yes"

Even more laughable than that, there are guys who will never play a game/down/shift/etc in a major sport who have "at least" many hundreds of cards. Panini pumps out so many rookies in football who never get past the practice squad and due to the insane amount of parallels, they have many more cards than some hall of famers. 

While I'm generally fine with low-level rookies being included, box prices are bloated, products over-promise and under-deliver (i.e. 3 autos per box, but 75-90% of the auto pool are scrub rookies).

Parallels are fine - to a point. I can't imagine the phenomenon is going away. My feeling is it is used to mask the higher production numbers. More parallels likely means more product out there. Look at Panini Prestige (NFL). Every card has five or six un-numbered parallels and numbered /299, /249, /199,  /149, /99, /75, /50, /25, /1. Wait. Check that, TWO parallels for each serial number (yes, two parallels /299 and so forth). That is some 14-15 parallels per card. In "numbered" copies of that card, there are 2,292 (more than Topps Gold) and all those un-numbered parallels on top of that (not to mention the nearly - at this point - worthless base card). It has gotten incredibly out of hand. I have seen 1/1's of that product sell for a lot less than you'd expect them too (double-digits for solid vets and low hundreds for rookies).