My Experience
I'm having some random thoughts today on my previous sports card collection. As a kid, I loved collecting cards. As an adult I started again around 2014. At that time I was starting to collect the graded PSA cards and amassing a collection of HOF players. In fact I checked my records and as a reference I purchased a 1933 Babe Ruth Goudey #144 graded PSA 3 for around $1600. I sold most of that collection a few years later as I was starting a business and wanted to use the funds. That card today would be worth around $22k !!!
So to answer my own question, it depends!
Research
Doing research suggests buying and holding key players from each decade has great returns. Buying and holding potential prospects is a big gamble.
Case in point that 1989 Upperdeck Griffey Jr. in a PSA 10 is worth $2000. I was able to buy that card for $250 in 2014.
Tokenizing A Project with NFT's
So these graded cards are in fact NFT's. They just aren't as easy to trade/sell as digital NFT's. I'm thinking about getting back into collecting. What if I tokenized key cards, keep in a vault. They are sold for HBD/Hive/Some new coin. Said card NFT's can be traded, sold, collected and anytime you want to redeem the NFT for the actual card you could do that. In fact we could take in cards from someone wanting to tokenize it, store it and then you can trade or sell the NFT. This could be applied to additional genres of collectibles eventually. Just a thought. I'm not sure if there would be much interest.