By the time Sy Berger launched Topps’ redesigned series in 1952, the relationship between candy and cards had flipped: Then, it was the sweets that were included in a pack of cards. Three years earlier, the Bowman Corporation was the first company to print and sell baseball cards, but they were much like the stoic, black-and-white images of yore. Berger’s were bigger, with player bios and more-vibrant colors. Their visual charm quickly made Topps the industry leader, and it also didn’t hurt that Berger doggedly courted players, getting them to sign exclusive contracts with his company. Four years after Berger’s new series was introduced, Topps acquired Bowman, its closest competitor.

By then, American boys (girls were rarely welcome) had a strong culture of card-collecting, and Topps only made it stronger. When the kids who grew up in the 50s became adults in the 70s, they had a lot more money and plenty of baseball-related nostalgia to justify spending a lot on trading cards. The writer Dave Jamieson provided a well-researched account of this period in his 2010 book, Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. One early collector told Jamieson about making as much as $10,000, simply by selling the cards he acquired over a period of two weeks after placing a few classified ads asking kids to sell him their collections. There were many passionate, informed collectors, but prices varied wildly, and opportunities for arbitrage were rampant.

It took another grown child of the 50s to correct this information imbalance. James Beckett III, a statistics professor who had fond memories of collecting Berger’s early Topps cards, noticed the widespread confusion about prices. The catalog he released in 1979, the Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide, would later feed into the eponymous Beckett guides—in the decades that followed, these would become definitive, taken as holy texts by young collectors.

After the release of Beckett’s first guide, the industry grew saner, but only slightly. Even as competitors such as Fleer entered the market after Topps lost an antitrust lawsuit in 1981, cards were still thought to be highly scarce, and some were valued at hundreds or thousands of dollars. There were even some people who believed in the power of baseball cards as an asset; The Wall Street Journal called them “nostalgia futures,” adding that, while still risky, they hadn't lost value in the way that other collectible "inflation hedges" had. As the market filled up with adults, kids were priced out, and in the mid-90s they began to look for cheaper hobbies.

The trust in baseball cards as an asset turned out to be almost entirely misplaced. For one thing, they weren’t nearly as scarce as they appeared; one trade publication suggested that there were about 80 billion cards made per year in the late 80s. And well-preserved cards featuring star players—whose high value were contingent on their rarity—meant a lot less when any child who encountered them immediately knew to keep them in mint condition, increasing supply. As collectors wised up, the industry tanked. By one estimate, sales of new cards declined from $1.5 billion in 1992 to $200 million in 2008.