Gamers, Collectors, and Fanatics, Gather Around! I was born in the wrong decade for collecting trading cards, and started collecting in the late seventies and early eighties. This was precisely when the big sportcard companies moved away from short runs and tried to convince us that every mass produced card would hold value. This was also during the “Cabbage Patch Kid” craze, when Carter and Reagan were president, and before the Beanie Babies and Boyd’s bears grew to insane values. We just knew we were sitting on piles of gold, holding onto our binders of precious cards like the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit rested atop treasure while Bilbo crept…