My first post on this app. I’ve been a collector since I was a kid in the ’80s and ’90s, back when sports cards were king. Unfortunately, that also happened to be the heart of the junk wax era. Still, I loved the hobby. Once I got a real job in the early 2000s, I jumped back in and started buying the rookie cards I always wanted.

That era was a down time for the hobby, so prices were still low—except for vintage baseball. eBay was just taking off, and suddenly I had access to cards I’d never seen or even heard of. One of the most legendary in our household growing up was the 1983 Jogo Warren Moon. My brother and I read about it in Dr. James Beckett’s guide and dreamed of finding one.

On a family trip to Niagara Falls in 1991, we begged our parents to take us to local card shops hoping to track it down—or maybe find a CFL-exclusive Rocket Ismail card—but no luck. Years later, thanks to eBay, I finally found one.

That opened the door to a whole new interest: pre-rookie and oddball cards. Think Kurt Warner’s 1995 Iowa Barnstormers or David Robinson’s 1986 MERCHANTE card from Spain. The more I explored, the more familiar names I found on obscure cards. That became my new focus—and the beginning of my next chapter in collecting.