Search Tips  We believe our database is the best on the internet for football cards.  It allows you total flexibility in narrowing your search down to only what you are interested in finding, whether it be a certain player or team, autographs, game-used cards, cards of players from a certain college, or cards from a certain brand in a certain year to complete a set.  Along with this flexibility comes the possibility of missing the results you want because you don't have your search set up right.  The following points are intended to help you understand how our database works so your searches will deliver exactly the right results every time.

 

v     Quick Searches.  The searches on the left side of the page are searches that are run with a single mouse click.  These searches cannot be refined.  If you click "autographed cards" you will get all autographed cards.  If you click "hall of famers" you get all hall of famers in our database.  You can't search for hall of famers from 1990 Topps for example.  The criteria on the right side of the page have no influence on Quick Searches on the left side.

v     Resetting Search Criteria:  If you run a search, for example, 1997 Pacific, then while viewing the search results you click the "back" button on your browser, then you run a search for "Emmitt Smith", you will actually be searching for 1997 Pacific Emmitt Smith cards only.  Clicking "back" on your browser does not clear previously-used search criteria and can result in a lot of missed cards in your searching.  Always click on "Home" to return to the main page.  This will clear all search criteria and let you start over. 

v     Year:  The year truncates to the right.  In other words, if you enter "2" you will get all cards from year 2000 on (e.g. 2000, 2001, 2002, etc.).  If you enter "198" you will get all cards from the 1980s.

v     Player:  You can enter player names by first name then last name without any punctuation.  Or, you can enter last name then first name but there must be a comma after the last name.  Either of these works:

Emmitt Smith

Smith, Emmitt

 

This does not work:

            Smith Emmitt

You need the comma to use last name, first name.  You do not need to use upper case letters.  The database does not distinguish. 

If a player has a rather unique first name or last name, you can search with only one name.  For example, "Emmitt" will retrieve mostly just Emmitt Smith.  However, if we have any cards of Emmitt Thomas, who had a few cards in the 1970s, it would also retrieve those.  Just entering "Smith" however would retrieve cards for anyone with the last name of Smith as well as names such as Highsmith, Smithfield, etc.

v     Brand:  Not quite all brands are listed here but we're close.  There are just a few brands that are not listed the way Beckett lists them.  For example, if you need Paramount or Revolution cards, look under Pacific.  They are listed as Pacific Paramount and Pacific Revolution.  There are also a few quirks such as SP which, in addition to SP, SP Authentic, SPx, etc. also retrieves Sportflics, Sportflix, and Sports Illustrated.  However, due to the various ways cards can be listed (e.g. UD versus Upper Deck, Fleer Metal versus Metal, Skybox Dominion versus Dominion, etc., rather than let you type in a brand and risk not getting hits because we list them differently, we decided to go with a dropdown and show you how we have them listed.

v     Team:  There is not much to say about this field except to remind you that since only NFL teams are listed in this dropdown, there are a small number of cards in our database that will not show up under any NFL team.  Examples are USFL or XFL cards and checklists.

v     Colleges:  We have only listed colleges that we have a fairly good selection of players from.  If you don't see your college listed that doesn't mean we don't have your college.  Please ask if you don't see your favorite college.  We can E-Mail you a list of what we have. Of course you can also search by player name from the college of your choice.

v     Searching for New Cards:  At the very bottom you will see

All Cards - All $'s  

New Cards Last 30 days

 

The default hers is all cards. If you check around once a month and click on "New Cards Last 30 days", it you will be shown only the cards we have added in the last 30 days that we did not have in stock before that fit the criteria for year, brand, college, team, etc. that you have selected. If you have already purchased everything you need from our inventory and just wish to check from time to time for new cards we have added, this can be a very useful tool..

 

v     Search Questions:  If you are having problems please feel free to e-mail us with questions.  Perhaps we can help you set up your search to get the results you are after.