Can Topps Save Baseball Cards?

In some ways it could help if they deal with the overproduction issues. I lost interest in baseball cards in the early 90's when the market became over-saturated with brands and specialty sets. Every company seemed to have 3 different sets (basic, premium, team, rookies, etc.).

The key to bringing the sports card industry back to relative popularity, is to bring back the enjoyment and "magic" that was mentioned in the article. However, now that baseball, in particular, seems to be declining in popularity with younger generations, it may be very difficult to ever accomplish a major turnaround.

Some of the old card designs are so great ....

http://www.oldcardboard.com/r/r406-6/r406-6.jpg

As I outgrew paying attention to them I also noticed that progressively modern cards tended to focus on technology gimmicks versus vintage iconography.

None of these really stand out from the eighties: http://bapple2286.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/cast-your-vote-be...

That's really too bad that MLB gave an exclusive contract to Topps, at the expense of Upper Deck. I collected baseball cards maniacally as a kid, and Upper Deck's cards were always the highest quality.

Collectibles remain alive and well, but once you recontextualize yourself and think of the "child-collectible" market as a whole, it's hard to imagine sports cards as anything but a very small niche in that larger market. It takes an awful lot of love for baseball to prefer a pack of baseball cards to a pack of Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I'm sure some kids will get there, but probably not enough to keep an industry afloat.

I doubt it. Baseball is declining in relative popularity as a sport, and collectible cards that are also games, like pokemon and magic, are just more fun.

I use to be into baseball cards back in the old days, but then I turned into a geek and they were no longer of interest. An entrepreneur from the early days is capitalizing on the baseball card problem with one of their online games, and they are funded by Sequoia.

http://www.baseballboss.com/collections/view/

I think they should add a few rules and dice, and make the cards into a playable game. They are competing with mtg after all.

Card collecting is a phase for most people. I was big into basketball cards for a couple years when I was about 10.