General Forum

For me, it's 86 - 92. I have tons of Topps baseball if anyone needs them. 

I'd say it started in 1988 when Score came on the scene.  The competition betweeen the companies really kicked in then.  And has it really ended?

Cards are NOT junk. Ever. Under any circumstances. 

"Junk" is just a colloquial term used to refer to the devaluation of trading cards due to overproduction.  The cards themselves aren't junk, their relative monetary value is junk.  Just like the stock market and junk bonds.

From a hockey collector its easy to define the start of the era.

1990-91 when it went from just Topps/OPC to Score/Bowman/Proset/UD +++

the end is a bit more undefined.

I feel the the main boom-era was from 87 to 93, and give or take a few years befor and after that with certain sets.

I would say the end of Topps exclusive contract in 1980 until things settled down, and then the hobby started picking up again in the late 90s.

But a more pricise era would be between 85 and 94.

I have always looked at the hobby as different size era... start to mid 50's.

vintage era... mid 50s to 73

Single set era.. 74 to 80

overproduced era... 81-99

modern era...2000- present

The Era, misnamed "Junk" and more appropriately called "Boom", to me is '87-'93, and I can accept anyone's explanation to expand on either end. 

The way I see it,  great strides were made in our hobby during this period for which the general product available now is testament to.

The term came about as greed brought investors into a hobby not built with them in mind. Cards no longer are seen as part of an investment portfolio, though they do cost 10 times more than they should, but the term stuck with some except they changed its meaning to connote worthless. And they are not. 

For Hockey the "junk era" started in 1989-90 when there were only two manufacturers with essentially the same set. O-Pee-Chee (bilingual) produced for the Canadian market and Topps (english) for the US market.  OPC was so over produced that year, that Topps were scarcer (in a relative way).  A slew of new card manufacturers arrived in 1990-91 including Score, Pro Set and Upper Deck. In the following years, more new manufacturers arrived on the scene and each were producing multiple sets. By the mid 1990s some companys (OPC, ProSet) were already done. Not sure when the era ended, as I quit collecting around that time due to skyrocketing prices for packs and the over abundance of  not only sets but "rare" (manufactured) chase cards. I didn't get back into collecting for more than a decade (late 2000s). The upside was that when I restarted actively collecting again, I was able to obtain most of the early 1990s insert sets and singles for a fraction of what it would have cost back in the day.