Comparing the Price Guides

March 16, 2005

Collectors of sports cards, autographs, and figurines tend to rely heavily on price guides to track the value of their collections, determine how much they are willing to pay or trade for an item, and read about the hobby. Three publications dominate this market: Beckett guides, Sports Market Report, and Tuff Stuff. How do these publications stack up in a head to head comparison? Let’s take a look:

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Beckett Guides

Probably the most well-known name in the business, Beckett Publications produces monthly price guides in baseball, basketball, football, hockey, racing, and vintage/collectibles. They also publish more comprehensive price guides on a quarterly and annual basis. Beckett also is one of the major players in the card grading industry with BGS and BVG.

The Pros:

Specialized monthly price guides by sport allows collectors to avoid paying for and reading unwanted information about sports they don’t collect.
Widely accepted as the authoritative pricing guide by traders and card shops, and therefore seen as indispensable by many.
Separate pricing information available for graded and raw cards along with a wide variety of insert cards maximizes usefulness.
Nice variety of articles and features, including the Singles Hot List, product previews and reviews, and Readers Write.
Monthly listing of upcoming card shows arranged by state allows collectors to stay on top of shows coming to their area.

The Cons:

Specialized monthly price guides by sport requires multi-sport collectors to spend a lot more money to keep abreast of what’s happening in each sport of interest.
Excessively self-promotional with too much prime ink devoted to listing their overpriced items for sale and disguising these listings as articles. Beckett also has been shameless in pushing Carmelo Anthony (who inked a deal to sign a lot of items exclusively for Beckett) onto their readership. Beckett Sports Collectibles Vintage, which rejected vintage basketball altogether, regularly devotes 2-3 pages per issue to Carmelo Anthony and his merchandise.
Too much redundancy across guides at times. For example, a recent issue of Beckett Baseball Collector featured a lot of material taken directly from the previous month’s Beckett Sports Collectibles. This is nice if you only buy one of the guides, but when you subscribe to both it feels like money wasted.

Sports Market Report

Published by Collectors Universe, Inc. (the company that owns PSA grading and PSA/DNA authentication), the SMR exclusively prices PSA graded cards in the four major sports along with items such as game used equipment, autographs, and ticket stubs. Although modern graded cards are priced in the SMR, there is a clear emphasis on vintage material and the publication is targeted to vintage set builders.

The Pros:

Comprehensive and incredibly accurate in its pricing of vintage and modern material in a wide variety of commonly collected PSA grades. SMR prides itself on reflecting the current market and appears to pay substantial attention to auction values in determining prices.
Pricing for non-mainstream issues such as Kellogg’s baseball, Icee Bear basketball, and Topps Stand-Ups football is highly desirable for collectors whose tastes diverge from the mainstream.
Population reports on widely collected sets or players are published each month. This is a quite interesting feature when applied to a player - the current SMR lists the populations of all cards of Reggie Jackson that PSA has graded, including a wealth of oddballs!
Articles are in-depth and interesting.

The Cons:

Truly a niche publication, at least insofar as pricing goes. If you don’t collect PSA graded cards, you won’t find much here for you in the way of useful pricing information (with the exception of getting a ballpark idea on what to pay for some oddball vintage issues that aren’t easily found elsewhere).
Lots and lots of advertising - could use a couple of more articles per issue.
Unless you are a deep-pocketed collector, you will have an inferiority complex when you close the SMR. With their regular featuring of the very best registered sets of graded vintage cards and the slew of advertising by big-money auction houses, the SMR clearly is not everyman’s magazine.

Tuff Stuff

Published by Krause Publications, Tuff Stuff is the only major price guide not associated with a major grading service. It has price listings for the four major sports and auto racing, along with autographs, gaming and entertainment cards, and figurines. Of the three major hobby publications, Tuff Stuff probably pays the least attention to vintage material and players.

The Pros:

Lots of pricing that seems somewhat more in line with what you find on the open market than is true in Beckett publications.
A great many articles, features, and columns each month, including Web Stuff (collecting on the internet), Market Reports for each sport (with Top Ten Singles and Top Ten Sets), and Sig Stuff (collecting autographs through the mail).
Tuff Stuff is a good value with everything under one roof and plenty of information on each sport. Handles the problem of having too much to cover by providing an expanded pricing section relative to the other guides and by focusing feature articles on in-season sports.
It is refreshing to read a publication without feeling as if you are simply reading an extended advertisement for the publisher’s merchandise.

The Cons:

It is sometimes hard to find the articles amongst the advertisements. The magazine would benefit from setting off the articles from the ads a little more sharply.
Although the pricing in Tuff Stuff is more realistic than the pricing in Beckett in many cases, it’s still hard to trade using Tuff Stuff book values because of Beckett’s domination in the minds of many collectors.
The inclusion of gaming and entertainment cards seems beyond the bounds of what most collectors would need. I don’t know many sports card collectors who collect gaming cards, and I don’t know many gaming card collectors who collect sports cards.

So which guide is best? As with most questions, the correct answer is "it depends." For collectors whose interest center around vintage material and graded cards, the SMR is the clear choice. For collectors whose needs are focused around a particular sport, the Beckett publication for that sport makes a lot of sense. For collectors whose interests are more varied and who don’t want to spend a fortune on an armload of separate price guides, Tuff Stuff is a great deal. All the publications offer interesting articles and unique features and all have their merits and drawbacks. In the end, there is no "best" guide; they are all enjoyable and useful to the right reader. Sample them all and consider subscribing to more than one. Subscriptions make the publications far more affordable and it’s always a nice day when a new issue arrives in the mailbox!