As a child, I had a good friend who collected football cards and all other assorted sports cards.
He would come in to my dad's toy store and buy all the packs that he possibly could, usually buying out the packs that my dad had in stock.
I will never know where he got all of the money from.
I once asked him why he always bought so many packs, he said that he was searching for a specific card and thought that the more card packs he bought, the more successful he would be at getting it.
I suppose all of his hard work paid off because he eventually got the one he was looking for all those years ago.
Sports cards and football cards as well as baseball and hockey cards, were often called tobacco or cigarette cards because cigarette companies would include these cards in their packs as a sales gimmick, hoping that more people would buy their smokes for the cards.
A player, Honus Wagner is said to have the most exclusive and rare card.
He was so against his card being sold as an insert in cigarette packs, because kids would buy them for the cards that he ordered that his card's production be stopped.
It did, almost immediately, and it is said that at the time only a hundred or so of his cards had been printed, making them extremely valuable.
Being that the card companies have to pay the player that they want to make a card of to use his image, they typically only select professional players to print.
This is so that more people will buy the card, the ones with the more famous and well known faces on them, and the sports card company will make more of a profit from this in particular card.
Every so often is an amateur player printed or is a college player put on a card and only then by the college they are promoting or playing for.
Finding a sports card in mint condition today can be considered a relatively difficult task.
I remember when I was little; my dad showed me pictures of his old bike.
He was very proud of it because of the innumerable amount of football cards placed in the spokes of his tires.
This of course damaged the cards greatly and was a very widespread trend.
I remember him telling me that if he had kept some of those cards off his bike and in a case, he would've been able to sell them for thousands of dollars and sent me to college with that very money.
Since the opportunities for making more, different sports cards with player's faces on them, the sports cards market has begun to use pieces of game equipment, such as bats, flooring, jersey pieces etcetera to keep collectors interested in the ever-broadening market of sports cards that still exists to this day.
There are also sports cards that feature the autograph of a certain player or carry a serial number, both of which are rare than base set cards.