Three series, 352 cards and the trading card debuts of Yoda and Lando, with a growing following among vintage Star Wars collectors. When The Empire Strikes Back opened in May 1980, Topps was ready with a much bigger set than...
Ridley Scott's horror classic on cardboard: 84 cards, 22 stickers and the most famous scene in sci-fi. Alien hit theaters in May 1979 and changed science-fiction horror for good. Topps, fresh off the success of its Star Wars cards, issued...
The first color Star Trek cards in America, from all three seasons of the original series. By 1976, Star Trek had been off the air for seven years, but reruns had turned it into a phenomenon. Topps responded with an...
The last vintage Topps Star Wars set, and the one that completes the original trilogy on cardboard. Return of the Jedi closed out the original trilogy in May 1983, and Topps closed out its original run of Star Wars cards...
After the blue series came red, yellow, green and orange. Here's how to collect the rest of the original 330-card run. Topps' first Star Wars series sold so well that four more followed in 1977 and 1978. Each kept the...
Seventy-one cards from the golden age of the TV Western, with Steve McQueen among the stars. In the late 1950s, Westerns ruled prime time. In 1958, Topps captured the moment with a 71-card set covering 11 shows, from Gunsmoke to...
Forty-four lick-and-stick parodies that launched one of Topps' longest-running brands, and that most kids destroyed. Before Garbage Pail Kids, there were Wacky Packages. In 1967, Topps issued 44 die-cut cards that parodied the grocery products every kid knew. The jokes...
Ninety-six cards of slapstick, a set of extremely rare checklist backs, and fans in every generation. In the late 1950s, the Three Stooges' old short films found a whole new audience on television, and kids who'd never seen them in...
The first Star Trek cards: scarce, quirky, and more reprinted than almost any vintage set. Star Trek premiered on NBC in September 1966. A year later, Leaf issued the show's first trading cards: 72 cards of black-and-white photos with captions...
Eighty-eight cards that imagined humanity's trip from Sputnik to Saturn, issued just as the Space Race began. In October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, and suddenly every American kid wanted to know about space. Topps answered with an...
Fifty bug-eyed monsters from TV's scariest anthology, issued under the same dummy name Topps used for Mars Attacks. The Outer Limits premiered on ABC in 1963 and gave a generation of kids nightmares with a new monster almost every week....
On paper, a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 are one step apart. In the market, the gap can be anywhere from a modest premium to a tenfold difference. Understanding why helps you buy smarter and decide which cards are...
Silver Age Marvel on cardboard: the first trading cards to feature Spider-Man and Captain America, with a checklist built like six comic books. In 1966, Marvel was the hottest name in comics. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko had...
Sort it into tiers, sell each tier through the right channel, and know what each option really costs you. Selling a Pokémon collection well is mostly about sorting. A typical collection is a few cards that carry most of the...
The sticker set that got banned from schools, sued by a doll company and remembered by a generation. Here's how to collect the original. In June 1985, Topps released a set of gross-out parody stickers aimed squarely at the Cabbage...
Grading feels like free money when you're scrolling PSA 10 sales. It isn't. Every submission is a bet: you pay a fixed cost up front for an uncertain grade months later. The good news is that the bet can be...
Norman Saunders pulp art, orange story backs and the hardest #1 in 1960s non-sports. The Batman TV series premiered on ABC on January 12, 1966, and the country went bat-crazy almost overnight. Topps answered with five Batman card sets that...
For most collectors, "vintage Pokémon" means the Wizards of the Coast years: Base Set's U.S. debut in January 1999 through Skyridge in 2003. It's a short window, but it produced the cards the hobby still measures everything against. Here's where...
The resale premium, the grading scales and the right grader for each kind of card, compared for collectors who've submitted before. Here's the short answer. PSA still earns the biggest resale premium on most Pokémon, vintage and modern alike. CGC...
