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As the world continues to amaze me, something that brings me back from my youth is baseball cards. I used to love getting the small foil packages at my local card store. There was nothing better than finding a Ken Griffey Jr card in the pack.

Cards were huge when I was a kid. Every corner had a place to buy them. The market was flooded though with cards. Very few if any were worth more than a dollar. They were not very fancy or particularly nice either. I think all of my friends had the 1990’s Donruss full set because at the time it was like $10 to get a full set of cards. They might have been on the cheapest paper possible too.

Fast forward to 2021 cards have come back in a big way.  My kid is trading Pokémon cards every day now. Old ones have become very valuable too. I see people lining up at Targets to buy cards both baseball and Pokémon.   Collectors are buying boxes of cards just to find the one card that is ultra-valuable. Big companies like Topps are limiting the supply of high-end collector cards and creating value in what cards are produced, like autographed and special edition cards.

So why all of sudden are people flocking to cards again? I think the world has changed and people have more free time. So a generation is rediscovering their youth through cards. Paper prices have increased and so has the demand for cards. This pushes the cost of the cards up and makes the demand for cardstock used for these even higher.

So if you are like me you are going to read this and start digging in your parent's attic trying to find that one card you remember as a kid. For me, it was a Jeff Bagwell error card.  Maybe it has changed in value since I was a kid. I know this trend is helping respark the printing industry though.