Sports Card Terminology Trivia Quiz

Answer: Retail

The differences between hobby boxes and retail sports card boxes are grand. Hobby boxes generally cost more money, because they guarantee more types of insert and higher-end cards. Retail versions are the types that retail stores like Wal-Mart and Toys 'R' Us purchase.

They generally have more base cards, but often lack the higher end cards that make hobby boxes so popular. If you are unsure about what type of box you are buying, look at the writing on the box, often times, it clearly says if it is a hobby or retail box.

Answer: SP= short-printed, BV= book value.

If you ever come across a card which is an SP, you have something called a short-printed card. That essentially means that limited quantities of the card were produced and available in packs. Short-prints can be as low as serial numbered out of one or can be as high as the tens of thousands. BV is the book value of a card.

There is a company called Beckett which produces pricing guides for all sports cards and using that, you can determine the book value of a card. Book value depends on the player, the type of card, the rarity of the card, the condition of the card, and so on.

There are far too many pricing factors to list.

Answer: A game-used card is one that contains a piece of game-used memorabilia on it.

Game-used cards are a fairly new innovation. While autograph cards were created in the early 1990s, game-used memorabilia cards did not come about until 1997. A game-used card contains pieces of authentic game-used memorabilia. Among the many I have seen are baseball bat pieces, shoe pieces, jersey pieces, baseball skins, hockey stick pieces, puck pieces, skate pieces, sock pieces, pant pieces, and emblem pieces.

In just over ten years, since the introduction of game-used cards, literally hundreds of thousands of different ones were produced and randomly inserted into packs of cards.

In the beginning they were VERY rare, appearing in maybe one in every 100 boxes. Nowadays, most hobby boxes guarantee at least one game-used or autographed card within them.

Answer: Pacific

Pacific came to be in 1996. They quickly emerged as a top-competitor for Upper Deck. Pacific set themselves apart, at least in the beginning, for including parallel cards in their sets. If someone collected Mark Messier cards, they could often find red, blue, green, gold, copper, silver, and emerald versions of the same card with nothing but cosmetic and print-run differences.

While it was refreshing for sports card fans in the beginning, collectors eventually felt that they overdid the parallels.

The disillusionment of card collectors and the badly timed NHL lockout led to the bankruptcy of Pacific in 2005.

Answer: A piece of hardened plastic which has an open top to load a card into.

The purpose of a toploader is simply to protect a card. With the hardened plastic, the card resists bending, dust, and even UV light. I do use the term resist, because nothing is 100%. Don't try to bend your card in a toploader, because intentional bending will still damage the card and kill the purpose of having it within a toploader. If the card is extraordinarily valuable, especially a Michael Jordan rookie card, as mentioned in the question, a simple toploader is not enough to preserve it. A screw down or magnetic holder with UV protection is optimal, unless you decide to get the card graded.

Answer: To carefully analyze a card, give it a number grade, and preserve it in a special protected case.

Grading is the optimal decision when coming into possession of a valuable, or very vintage card. Grading assigns number scores, with 0.5 point increments based on the card's centering, the card's corner wear, and the card's overall condition. A 10 is the best, and very uncommon with older cards, whereas a 0.5 is a heavily neglected card, that is beaten and bruised.

After a card is graded, it is placed into a hard protector with it's grade. The beauty of grading is that it not only preserves the card in it's current state, it also raises the value of the card.

For example, a graded card of a Wayne Gretzky rookie, with a grade of 10, can go for nearly 50 times the ungraded value of the card.

Answer: A full card set with all of the base cards, inserts, and rookies.

A master set is a full set that consists of all of the base cards, the randomly inserted insert cards, and the more valuable rookie cards. If all autograph and memorabilia cards in the set are included in the master set(they don't need to be), the value of the master set can skyrocket based on the scarcity and frequency of the cards within the set.

A factory sealed complete set is generally less valuable than a hand-collated master-set from a product.

Answer: True

Prices for sports cards can really range based on the quality of the product. Because I primarily collect hockey cards, I can use them as an example. A kid-friendly product called Victory is released just before the start of every NHL season. A full hobby box of it with 36 packs can go for under forty dollars. On the other hand, there is a high-end product called "The Cup" that releases after the Stanley Cup final, and one pack of it can go for over four hundred dollars. Of course, the more expensive the product gets, the more of a gamble the hobby becomes. Nothing is worse than spending hundreds of dollars, only to discover that the cards within the pack are only worth a few dollars.

The odds of pulling great cards are drastically increased in a very expensive box, though.

Answer: A white-whale is a card so rare and elusive, it only presents itself once in a very long while.

A white whale is the dream for a whale hunter, just like the "white-whale" is the dream for a card collector. A Dan Marino "white-whale" might be his 2003 Leaf Certified Materials Black parallel. Because there is only one in the world, it would be considered a highly sought after card if it pops up.

It would be a prized possession for anyone who manages to acquire it. Like a mythical white-whale, the card is elusive, rare, and highly sought after.

Answer: False

While cards may have kept troop morale stable in intense times of combat, the earliest distribution of sports cards began in the mid to late 1800s. The first ever baseball card was made in 1868. Those early cards were essentially post-cards that now have card status. Hockey cards appeared in the very early 1900s, distributed in cigarette packs.

Other themed cards appeared later. The earliest vintage cards are very valuable and highly sought after pieces of not only sports, but history.