Basketball Season is Here!

With all these new brands, subsets, sub-subsets, etc...it's very hard to keep track of today's basketball RC's. There are just way too many RC cards for each player now. Look at Finest for instance. There's a base RC, refractor, x-fractor, superfractor, black ref & x-fractor, gold ref & x-fractor, green ref & x-fractor, red ref & x-fractor. That's 12 RC cards for each player, just from Finest! It doesn't even matter that they're all #'d, autographed, or whatever. All this does is take value away from the product as a whole. I think that SPx has it about right. They have a base & Spectrum RC. If you notice, SPx auto RCs typically has a higher value than Finest auto RCs of the same player and with a similar #'d to. I believe that this overproducing of RC versions is a big reason why.

Another problem that I'm having is card companies cannibalizing their own brands. I think that there are too many brands out in the same MSRP range from the same companies. For Upper Deck, they have SPx, SP Authenic, SP Game Used, SP Signature, Sweet Shot & Trilogy. Personally I don't have the money to be buying so many different brands. I'll probably focus on 2 (maybe 3 at the most).

My fav brands to buy for Basketball are SPx & Bowman. They have reasonable pack prices and if you pull an auto RC, chances are it will will have a relatively strong value in comparison to similar RC's from other brands.