Collecting Basics 4: Base Cards

Now that you have chosen your sport, picked up a couple of packs or boxes of cards, now comes the best part, opening them. However, if you are new to collecting, you may not know what you are looking for or what to find. That's where I hope to come in to help. For the next few posts of Collecting Basics, I hope to break down what you can find in a pack of cards. From base cards to insert cards to parallel cards to memorabilia cards to autographs.

Today's topic will be covering BASE CARDS. Most of these topics won't take very long to post about. Just trying to do my best to explain each part of the hobby the best way I can.

Base cards are the cards in your pack that will make up most of it. If you have lets say a 10 card pack, more than likely 8 of those cards will be what's called base cards. These are plain cards that make up the base of the product. They may be shiny, numbered (usually to a higher number), thick, thin, framed, straight-up photography, but you can almost always tell which ones they are.

Here are examples from 2014 Topps Baseball:

Here is the main base card design. On the back you will find the stats and to the top right of the card (in landscape form) the number the card is in the set.

Some cards may have writing like Future Stars (shown below), All-Star, RC (rookie card, shown below as well) and other titles. These too are base cards as you can tell by the picture of the back of the card. These cards are called subsets. They are slightly different than the base with the extra writing, but still make up the set and still are the base of the product. In older days, they made some subsets a little more challenging to find in a box of cards so they were almost inserts. Now they seem to fall a few in every pack.

Even this card below is a base card. This one in particular is a No Hitter subset.

I hope this helps you decipher what base cards are in the pack of cards you just opened. If you need anymore help with the explanation, please feel free to ask below.

Part 5 of Collecting Basics I will cover parallel cards.

As always, HAPPY COLLECTING!