Beckett Bi-Monthly Magazines
To cope with the ever-increasing number of sports card sets and to avoid having to put out phone book-size monthly price guides, Beckett devised its Plus line of magazines around the beginning of the 2000s. When Beckett Sports Card Monthly took over as the company's lone monthly publication, the magazines that cover individual sports combined with the former Plus magazines to combine hobby articles with vastly expanded price guides.
Beckett produces bi-monthly editions for baseball, basketball, football and hockey. They cost a few dollars more than the monthly Beckett magazine, and can often be found at book retailers (like Borders and Barnes & Noble), newsstands and grocery stores as well as hobby shops. The magazines can't keep up with quick changes in value for cards that are especially hot or active, but cards that can't be found online or in Beckett Sports Card Monthly usually don't fall into this category.
For really obscure cards, such as those issued as team giveaways or as promotional items with regional products, even the bi-monthly magazines aren't enough. If everything discussed so far hasn't produced results, there's one more level of pricing information available.
Annual Price Guide Books
Both Beckett and F+W Publications, the company behind Tuff Stuff, produce yearly books that list information and pricing on just about every sports card that has ever been printed. F+W's Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards claims to hold information and values for over 500,000 cards.
Beckett's efforts are simply called the Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide and Beckett Football Card Price Guide, and the company also prints volumes for basketball, hockey and racing. All of them can honestly state that they have details on virtually every card ever produced for their respective sports, and they also contain pricing for some collectibles other than cards.
Consider these tomes to be your last resorts. At hundreds or thousands of pages in length, these are big books, but it may be worth your while to spend 20 or 30 dollars on one of them if you have cards that have defied all of the other pricing methods.
Compare Prices for Price Guides in This Article
- Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards
- Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide
- Beckett Football Card Price Guide
- Beckett Basketball Card Price Guide
- Beckett Hockey Card Price Guide