Not surprisingly, I’ve been getting hit with tags and DMs today including some screenshots of amusing barbs thrown my way. All of which are fair considering how much I’ve talked about the lack of a bridge to a public chain being a major risk for Panini.

This is great news for Panini collectors of course, but it’s great news for all collectors of sports NFTs because having Panini customers getting a full rug would not be good for any of us trying to grow this type of collecting.

Since I’m not a sponsored PR blog and Panini doesn’t supply me with packs and promo balance (it’s a joke, guys), I have to state a few things about the announcement:

1. What properties will be in scope? “Move certain assets” indicates it won’t be all of them, which is no surprise if you’ve been reading my posts. I would expect at least some soccer, Bad Eggz, and maybe WNBA to be included. I think NFL and NBA are longer shots due to the expiring licenses. Maybe the pre-Prizm stuff can make it over if those had some public chain language built into the original agreements. I would be really surprised if baseball made it.

2. Is this a true bridge or a pseudo-bridge using reminting? I think this has to be the latter given the technical challenges of a true bridge. Does it matter? I don’t think it really makes much of a difference to most collectors. Maybe the metadata is handled a bit differently, but that’s not going to be a big point of contention.

3. My guess is they will remint these on Polygon, but there are several “Ethereum network” options that have cheap minting fees and cheap gas that would make sense for Panini.

4. The ability to switch between chains is interesting and I wonder about the mechanics of how this would work if they went with a remint approach. Would there be dupes in Panini wallets? Would they get burned and then reminted? I am curious how they approach this feature.

5. Sales on “whitelisted marketplaces” is intriguing. I’m curious what that actually means. Regardless, you should be able to sell or transfer wherever you want from your wallet if you actually have self-custody.

Regardless, this is a landmark day for Panini Blockchain and provides a much needed lifeboat for at least some of their customers’ NFTs. I’ll be interested in seeing the details about how they’re executing this.

Does this become a market mover? It certainly should for anyone who was concerned about Panini America’s future or their use of a private blockchain. I have to think that’s kept some money on the sidelines. I would just suggest some caution on speculating too much on this news until you know what’s in scope.

Happy for all my friends who still have Panini collections, though—this is a huge development!

Digital Risks

Digital collectors have a higher risk tolerance on the collecting spectrum, but sometimes that can get them into trouble when a bad outcome with digital can mean you can’t access your collection in some cases.

Some questions about unappreciated risks in digital collecting include:

• Platform

  • Can the platform your collection is on survive the company running the platform? That breaks down into some some questions:

    • Do you have your NFTs in a wallet that you control?

    • Will the blockchain still operate if the platform shuts down?

    • Will you still be able to buy, sell, and trade if the platform shuts down?

    • Will the images/videos work if the platform shuts down?

  • Does the blockchain the platform use have technical risks that you understand?

    • If it’s a public blockchain:

      • How’s the foundation or governing structure?

      • How’s the community?

      • Is this something easy for devs to get into or is it more niche?

    • If it’s a private blockchain:

      • What redundancies are in place in the vendor environment?

      • Is the solution well-supported? Does it have regular updates for system improvements and security?

      • What level of internal technical support and management is required for it to operate?

      • What is the most likely point of failure?

    • What are the bridge options if migration is needed?

• Growth

  • There tends to be a core group of digital collectors that move from platform to platform. What is the company doing to grow beyond that core audience that are already bought into digital collecting?

  • Is the product and customer experience good enough that the existing base will be a positive force for growth?

  • Does the company have a competent marketing team that can generate relevant promotions with reach to bring in quality leads?

  • Does the company engage with the community? Does it follow through on suggestions?

• Pricing & Supply

  • Does the sales activity on the secondary market support the price of packs?

  • Does the pace and composition of new releases make sense given market demand?

  • Do buyers of new releases feel like they are getting good value?

  • Are the checklists curated in such a way that star players/characters are not being oversupplied?

  • When there aren’t promotions that stimulate market activity, what does the baseline demand look like?

• Licensing

  • What are the statuses of the key licenses on the platform?

  • Does the company have a history of bringing in new properties?

  • What is the status of your collectibles when licenses expire?

  • When licenses expire, does that impact future portability of your collections?

  • Does the expiration of licenses affect the ability of the company to use those collectibles in future incentives/promotions like staking, crafting/rewards, and collection scores?

Somewhat related, I was messing around with Gemini Deep Research after reading some conversation about the current status of Panini Blockchain’s solutions essentially “not being a big deal,” to get a more objective perspective.

Here’s the prompt I used:

Based on current status of the Sawtooth blockchain platform, would you recommend that as a viable option as a long-term private blockchain solution in a AWS environment?

You can read the full report below or view the highlights on this interactive report.

Sawtooth Viability In Aws

177KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I am not trying to “hate” on Panini with this information but I think it’s important people are aware of the risks they are buying into because I think information coming from the company and some of their unofficial spokespeople is in my opinion skewed optimistically. As always, I suggest you do your own research before making any decisions.

Courtyard Marketplace

If you’re not quite bought into the digital collectible concept but you’re interested in a more modern collecting experience, a nice hybrid is Courtyard.io. They’ve become well-known for their vending machines, which are a multi-tiered repack product line for sports, non-sports (Pokemon primarily), and comics that come with a guaranteed instant buyback from Courtyard (not guaranteed to cover the price of your pack though).

What’s not as well known is their marketplace where you can buy vaulted items that either came from packs or that customers sent in. You can pay with crypto or cards and either keep your purchases in the blockchain-backed vault or have them shipped to you for a fee.

Some people have seemed to get some pretty good deals on offer there, but I’ve not had much luck with that so far. But I’ve been getting stuff at slightly below CardLadder values including these two below:

Digital Disney Pins

Disney Pinnacle has been heating up the last month. The digital pin collectibles are on Dapper’s platform and have been having pop-up marketplace events while they are still in beta. One is going on still as of this writing.

Jumping in can be a little confusing due to the different editions and how things are structured, but Disney has a good write-up on marketplace basics that covers some of the key elements of these pins.

The pins are NFTs, but they don’t emphasize that for what I would assume are adoption reasons. You don’t have full self-custody, but these are stored in your Dapper wallet.

The data available on the site is a bit limited, so if you’re looking at buying I would suggest checking out one of the third-party market aggregators out there (I like Flowvana — thanks to AmISayingMeow for the tip) that can provide details on past sales and give you more robust search and filtering options.

For real-time alerts on bigger sales, the Pinnacle Bot is a good follow on X.

Here’s what I’ve been buying:

• Limited editions of key characters.

• Small iconic limited sets.

• Older open editions with lower mints.

I’ve also opened a few of their Open Edition capsules to see what that experience is like.

This market is still developing and prices are moving quickly when the marketplace is open, so I’d be cautious about going too hard right away. But there’s enough going for this that I felt like putting in a small investment made sense.

Panini Blockchain has been getting deserved positive feedback in social media and various Discords after their very successful (at least in terms of pack reselling) recent NBA Flawless drop. Packs have been selling north of $2k on the secondary market, which is quite a jump from the $250 Panini direct price. There have been some big sales of the key singles as well, but I think it’s fair to saw the overall value is maybe not quite what people were expecting.

If that’s the case, why have the pack sales been so successful? Panini America has made a few things work really well and when they have a product with some unpulled big hits with dwindling supply, pack prices can start moving up very quickly. Panini has whales who will rip, which is a very profitable aspect of their market dynamics and has a lot of overall market benefits as at least some of those proceeds gets reinvested.

The success also has some people wishing the inevitable away and trying to find ways to talk themselves into a story where the future of that blockchain is not difficult.

I’ve heard things ranging from Fanatics still wanting to buy Panini America in part for their NFT success (newsflash: Fanatics doesn’t care about NFTs and that antitrust lawsuit makes the possibility of a merger pretty unlikely) to Panini America putting together some standalone NFT licenses with the leagues they are about to lose for cardboard (that’s ain’t happening either).

I think it’s important that people understand three things about the future of the Panini Blockchain:

1. Secondary fees alone are not going to come close to replacing the revenue they’ve received from new product drops unless valuations or activity massively increases.

2. The remaining major licenses Panini Blockchain will have after the NBA (October 2025) and NFL (April 2026) deals expire come through the parent organization Panini Group, which has experimented with their own NFT platform in the past and currently has started issuing NFTs on the FIFA Collect platform.

3. As currently structured, the Panini Blockchain cannot operate without their own resources: in-house or outsourced labor and technology services.

With those in mind, it’s important to think about the business realities at play for Panini:

1. Panini America (PA) represents a tiny part of the Panini Group’s (PG) estimated overall revenue (PG is a private corporation). PA’s estimated revenue is between $50 and $165 million depending on what analyst you look at. PG’s revenue fluctuates quite a bit depending on when there’s a World Cup (WC stickers are huge business), but annual revenue estimates can approach $1 billion.

2. Per Cryptoslam.io (which admittedly is missing some data, including WNBA sales), Panini Blockchain revenue was $12.5 million in 2024 and is estimated in 2025 to be between $43-45 million based on YTD activity. Actual will be much lower due to the loss of NBA in the fall, but I think it’s worth noting so you see just how more successful Panini Blockchain has been recently.

3. Based on available data (which again excludes WNBA), I cannot differentiate between direct (Panini pack store and dutch auction) sales and secondary sales, but let’s assume a 40/60 split between direct and secondary. We’ll be generous and use the inflated 2025 estimated revenue, we’re looking at $8.68 million in revenue to Panini after estimated license and payment processing fees (45% of pack sales and 50% of secondary fees). Of that, about $8 million comes from direct sales and $668,000 comes from secondary sales.

4. So, if we assume the same level of secondary activity (which I think is way too generous, especially since secondary pack sales will not be as plentiful) and losing the NBA license to cut direct sales revenue by 50%, we’re looking at a drop off in 2026 revenue from $8.68 million to $4.67 million. This is likely optimistic since the NFL license expires in April 2026. In 2027, let’s assume (very generously) that they come up with $1 million in revenue from new licenses and the secondary revenue remains steady they will be looking at a drop from $8.68 million in 2025 to $1.67 million in 2027.

5. From that $1.67 million, Panini America has to cover the costs for their blockchain developers and administrators. This is critical because Splinter (no longer Hyperledger) Sawtooth has been archived as a project at least in part due to lack of interest by developers. So this is on a platform that is only going to become more niche by 2027 and holding onto technical resources that know the blockchain technology is going to be extra critical.

6. Additionally, Panini America has to cover the costs to maintain the infrastructure running their blockchain and related resources on AWS.

7. All of this while their overall business is losing a huge part of their revenue due to the loss of NFL and NBA league licensed trading cards.

If you have concerns about Panini America being able to continue operating as a business, you very much should have concerns about Panini Blockchain continuing to exist as a platform and you being able to continue accessing your collection.

Unlike when Topps decided they did not want to be in the NFT business any more, as currently structured the Panini Blockchain cannot survive without Panini America. And it’s beyond the general case of not paying the bills to host assets which does impact other platforms: the blockchain itself must be resourced by the company.

I don’t see Panini America wanting to continue to invest in the operations of Panini Blockchain when their business will need to restructure. It’s one thing with the NFTs was just some nice bonus revenue to squeeze from their overall licenses and it’s another when the money from direct sales starts to fall off a cliff.

There is something they should do for their customers: plan the next phase.

Panini should start executing on a plan now to remint on a public blockchain. It will not be easy. This took Topps over a year to execute and they were just moving from one public blockchain to another and they had active license agreements with their IP holders. So, if I were a Panini customer I’d want them to use some of this recent revenue windfall to execute Phase 2 of the Panini NFT journey before the business realities make that impossible.

As obnoxious as some of the louder voices in their community are, I don’t wish anyone loses access to the collections they’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money putting together. That doesn’t do anyone in the digital collecting world any good.

See Ya, Panini

The biggest change was getting out of the Panini NFT platform. The link covers the why and how, but the end result has been a letting go of a lot of negativity. Well, I’m going to really avoid buying anything from Panini again, but besides that.

Langford’s Struggles

If you follow baseball, obviously my Wyatt Langford experiment is not looking so hot early on. In my post, I wrote:

There’s always a risk that once a book is out on a guy it will take a while for him to adjust. There hasn’t been a lot of evidence for that during Spring Training, but that typically doesn’t start showing up until the games count. However, his bat talent should provide some highlight worthy power even if he struggles for average early on.

Unfortunately, that power has yet to materialize. Langford was getting a lot of ABs but only had 1 HR and it was an inside-the-park job. He’ll be on the IL for the next few weeks after a hamstring injury, so maybe he’ll be able to work on his power while rehabbing in AAA. Before his injury, he was starting to hit the ball harder so I think it’s just a matter of time before he starts putting them over the wall.

So, what happened? According to Rangers’ manager Bruce Bochy it’s a combination of stance adjustments, playing in a DH role, and not being quite aggressive enough at the plate. I probably watched 50 or so Langford ABs this season and that seems pretty accurate to me. He has an excellent eye for the strike zone, but even the umps seem to be telling him to swing more with some of the bad strike calls he’s been getting.

What is clear to me is he belongs in the bigs. Compare him to Jackson Holliday, who looked completely lost after call-up, and it’s clear that Langford is mentally ready. He has game-changing speed and has shown a good arm as well when he’s been in LF. His average is a little low, but I think figuring out the power issue will help that a great deal. He has such good bat speed that even the ones that don’t go over the fence could do some damage.

I’m still bullish long-term. I got into Langford as a longer play and I’ve not seen anything to discourage me from continuing that. I think this piece is a good breakdown on the prospects for Langford when he is back in the lineup. Clearly, it would have been better to wait to pick up the cards I did but in the end I think I’ll be more than fine with the results.

Selling Again

After getting through the transfers related to selling my Panini NFT account, I started up the old eBay store again and have enjoyed moving some cards that have been sitting around.

I want a little more time with the current tools I’m using, but I’ll do a future post on how I handle selling physical cards. There have been some good developments recently that have sped up the listing process that I was glad to see.

I’ve also sold some of my eBay Vault pickups. The soccer market has been really soft, so I’m offloading a few pieces I wasn’t too attached to. Only one was a loss and that was pretty modest (and it was also a stupid buy to begin with, so I’ll take the idiot tax on that one). With no seller or shipping fees on Vault sales, even the small profits are real profits.

• 2021 Panini Donruss Road to Qatar, Kaboom!, Kylian Mbappe, PSA 10, +$75 (bought for $1,250; sold for $1,325)

  • Mbappe values have not gone up in spec before his Real Madrid transfer at all and these Kabooms! dropped a good bit after I bought mine. So, glad to get a modest profit from this one since I’m not sure there’s going to be much of a transfer bump for him based on what we’ve seen so far. Hard to believe, but maybe just a product of soccer not really growing much in the hobby lately among US buyers. This being a second-Kaboom for Mbappe and me frankly not being a fan of Kabooms anyway, it wasn’t hard to let this go.

• 2023 Topps Chrome MLS, Big City Strikers Gold, 01/50, Lionel Messi, PSA 10, -$25 (bought for $875, sold for $850)

  • This was the stupid buy. I was looking for a Messi slab and talked myself into this MLS card having some potential as a Downtown-type insert. It was a dumb move at the price I paid and I’m glad to have it out of the stash for a small loss.

• 2018 Futera Unique, Rookies, Vinicius Jr., PSA 10, +$100 (bought for $420, sold for $520)

  • This might be one I regret later, but I felt like this could also be the best sale I get for it. Such is the soccer market. I like these Futera cards, but they are obviously not beloved yet in the hobby like the cards from the main producers. Still, this is a very low pop rookie of one of the best in the game and could end up being a great buy down the road.

And there was this notable one on COMC, which did come with fees:

• 2017 Topps Chrome UEFA CL, Base, Kylian Mbappe, PSA 10, +$25 (bought for $175, sold for $200)

  • I’ve got a few of these, so just taking a small profit on one of them since Mbappe values did not pump like I thought they would in advance of his transfer. Small hedge in case that pump never comes.

I’ve also been doing some modest short-term flipping on COMC to see how that goes. Nothing really to note here, but I’ve had a couple small wins. I’m trying to see how long I can go without putting new money into COMC. Expect a future post about this experiment.

Ripping A Little, Too

It seems inevitable that as I go through my cards to get stuff listed I want to get some new cards for inventory. I’ve been ripping a few things here and there. No huge pulls or anything like that, but it’s always fun to rip packs now and then.

Not breaking news here, but one thing is clear: there are just so many parallels in these products. It’s good as a seller, but seems like this will go very wrong down the road in terms of values. In particular with the flagship Topps and Bowman products. I certainly understand the business reasons for structuring the products this way, but unless overall demand really does approach that “10x-ing the hobby” goal of Fanatics we’re all going to have a lot of low numbered parallels worth very little down the road.

So, I’m approaching ripping as just a fun exercise. I cannot suggest doing it as a way to make money from flipping. If you’re moving wax and willing to take those risks, probably that is a more interesting idea for certain products. I do not want to deal with shipping wax (and potential games from less scrupulous buyers related to that), so that’s not something I’ve done more than a couple of times.

But fun is important, too. It’s sometimes very easy to forget that with all the drama and outrage-du-jour in the hobby. If ripping a pack doesn’t still get your heart going, it may be time to do something else.

Once I decided to start treating cards like a business rather than setting my money on fire, I found the very lucrative subculture of baseball prospecting. I think the first year I took it very seriously was around 2010 after I realized that football cards were no longer going to be a good market (more on that another time).

It really took off for me in 2011 after I was able to get a few cases of 2011 Bowman Draft and Bowman Chrome after winning a promo sponsored by Blowout (I’ll tell that story one day, too). That yielded a ridiculous bounty of prospects that brought a very nice return.

I continued for the next couple of years, but eventually lost interest in the prospect game because it was no longer very lucrative: too much competition, too much product, and everything got too expensive to rip.

As I’ve been reflecting on this business and what I used to like about it, I got sucked back in a bit during Spring Training. At least in terms of tracking how some of the big names in the last few drafts were doing. I didn’t buy anything until Wyatt Langford started to heat up. Then I went a little crazy.

I’ll cover that haul once everything has been secured—still have a few slabs with offers and incoming, but with Opening Day arriving tomorrow I wanted to lay out my strategy with Langford as sort of a futures bet on his performance this season.

A lot of what I’m doing now is not the prospecting playbook, but I think it’s time to reconsider how that game is played for a few reasons. Before that, let’s review how you’d typically play the prospecting game:

1. Either rip wax or identify a target list to grab raw in the early days of the Bowman Draft release.

2. No pitchers, no catchers, no second basemen.

3. No one over 21.

4. Stick to autos or chrome and paper parallels with history.

5. Grade the good stuff and sell everything during pre-Spring Training hype, during Spring Training, or hold until call-up.

6. Do not hold until after call-up.

Those rules still serve you well most of the time if you can get the wax or cards at the right price. And #6 is almost always the right call. Almost.

I saw a special opportunity with Langford after looking into his cards following some press about his performance in Spring Training. His stuff seemed really cheap to me compared to his power talent, which almost always gets the attention of collectors. And even as he continued to be on fire the entire Cactus League schedule, his cards didn’t move much off the initial bump that I bought into.

Langford was highly regarded coming into the 2023 draft and the Rangers took him with the fourth pick out of Florida, where he only established himself his last two seasons. He wasn’t even drafted out of high school like many of the power prospects who decide to go to college. So he definitely had hype, but not the long-term hype of some of the guys in the draft.

It didn’t seem like many expected he had a shot at the Opening Day roster for the defending World Champion Rangers, but he had such a good spring that he was named to the roster where he’ll split DH/LF duties.

Here’s what I see in Langford:

• Coming into the league at 22, he’s got enough experience to not view the spring as a fluke but he also established this trajectory recently enough to think there could be more upside.

• The Rangers lineup is stacked and he’s going to have a very favorable situation with opposing pitchers.

• Power plays well in the hobby and his exit velocity numbers are ridiculous.

• He’s getting some love in the press that you don’t normally see from a guy who hasn’t had an official at-bat yet.

There’s always a risk that once a book is out on a guy it will take a while for him to adjust. There hasn’t been a lot of evidence for that during Spring Training, but that typically doesn’t start showing up until the games count. However, his bat talent should provide some highlight worthy power even if he struggles for average early on.

So, there’s enough risk to make this interesting but enough talent that I think the floor is pretty high at least this year.

Given the values of his stuff and, frankly, the $250 value limit for the eBay Vault here’s what I went after and what I avoided:

1. Sapphire base PSA 10s — these carry a nice premium (3x or so) over the Chrome slabs that should expand over time due to the much more attractive pop count (right now pop is 81 for Sapphire base PSA 10 versus 1,211 for Draft Chrome base).

2. Very low print run non-auto parallels in PSA 9 & 10 — since his prices haven’t gone too crazy, I was able to get some key parallels in non-auto for good values. For example, I got two Chrome Gold Refractors in PSA 10 for an average of about $2,000 each. I got a Sapphire Black Refractor (/10) in PSA 10 for $3,000. These could be massive cards if Langford blows up. I found low print run parallels in PSA 9 were at very attractive values—I’ll talk more about that in the next section.

3. The autos are the first cards to pick up when one of these prospects starts to blow up, so I stayed away from those other than a SP Variation Auto slab in PSA 9 that was too good of a price to pass up. It helps to zag when others zig in this game.

4. Because the true debuts (1st Bowman labeled) cards were so cheap, I did not mess with any inserts or other products that Langford had cards in. These sometimes can be good plays if the debuts are out of reach, but they will never have the ceiling of the debuts so you have to be picky.

About those PSA 9s—this is not something I’d normally do because they can be tougher to move in today’s market, but I saw an interesting opportunity with a few I picked up. It seemed in the haste to sell, guys following the normal playbook were really discounting their PSA 9s beyond market. My favorite pickup like this was a Sapphire Orange (/25) PSA 9 that I got for $800. That should easily be double that today.

You have to be selective, but I think getting PSA 9s is still an interesting move with his cards. Especially when you see ones where either the gem rate is really low (i.e., there just won’t be many 10s) or it’s really high and you’ll get a favorable pegging to the PSA 10 values over time.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to with baseball. As mentioned, I’ll do a full rundown of what I picked up once it’s all arrived. I have a couple offers out of this writing, but don’t plan on picking up more once the season starts.

My timeline on some of the fringe stuff would be in the next couple of months depending on how hot he starts out. The key low print run stuff I will probably hold onto past this season unless he just really does not look like what I thought. Once a prospect loses the hobby love, it’s hard to get it back so I don’t want to hang on too long.

There’s more to collecting than being tied to trends.

Outside of the stuff it’s just fun to rip or buy singles of, if you’re going to be tying up significant money (whatever that means to you) up in any type of collectible with hopes of getting something out of it later you think about having a thesis like any other investment. Think of it as the theme about why you’re buying.

You see more talk of this in the card world in the last 20 years as more people started looking at wax and cardboard as a place to park money. Some people go a little overboard trying to assign meaning that goes well beyond what makes sense to anyone else. For example, if your reason for buying something starts approaching numerology perhaps you’re just rationalizing. Which is fine, but don’t pretend like there’s any plan involved.

Your thesis doesn’t have to be monolithic, but however many you’re working from there needs to be a consistency to your approach. Why are you buying these cards in particular? If you can’t answer that quickly, you’re just operating based on what you like. Again—that’s fine, but it’s not a plan.

In the real world, most of us are not disciplined enough to always follow our theses. But if you’re going to take this type of more structured approach most of your buys should have a reason that relates back to your “why’s”.

And I bring all this up because I’m about to share what appears to be a pretty random collection of cards but they go back to a thesis.

Art of the Matter

It’s kind of crazy, but for a medium based on artwork and photography the aesthetic appeal of cards is often an afterthought. We talk about key cards and why they matter, but if they also happen to look good that gets thrown in as minor detail. But what if that changes?

As we think about the impact of AI-generated imagery and proliferation of advanced digital media tools, I formed a thesis about a time when nostalgia about human generated, photographed, and designed composition on cards will be valued much higher than today. And with that being a bit of an obscure factor in the success of cards, perhaps there’s a price advantage to picking up those kinds of cards now.

I think you may also see a disruption in the future collectibles as brands begin to lose their meanings, parallel inflation continues, and even concepts like “rookie cards” become fluid. When the old distinctions start to fall away, what is one feature that can’t be ignored? Visual appeal.

I also believe the influence of TCG art and visual focus on collectibility for the massive card on-boarding going on in the younger cohort could lead to a later focus on aesthetics as their card collecting moves into other properties.

With collecting, particularly on the higher-end, become more of a thing done through screens, the visual element does get elevated. From the screen views to the hi-res examinations, the composition of my cards gets more focus as I look through my stash.

For all of those reasons, the look of the card will be a theme that you’ll see in some of my pickup selections for sports and non-sports.

What’s Catching My Eye?

I had planned on wrapping up buying earlier, but saw some opportunities and picked up some good stuff recently. I will be getting a lot more selective going forward for a couple of reasons.

First, prices are moving back up on the types of cards I’ve been looking at. Some reasons likely include an income rebound from post-holiday bill payoffs, early tax refund spending, and investment (stock, crypto) gains. I think you’ll see more headliner sales for CJ Stroud and Wemby cards for the next couple of months that could bring some people back and attract new buyers that will raise overall values through knock-on effects.

We’ll likely see another dip this year before the normal holiday lull and I’ll add some cards when that happens.

The other factor for me personally is I wanted to redeploy what I made from selling off Panini NFTs last year into physical. I’ve now crossed that threshold with just a little extra contributed. This is money I wanted to have in collectibles, but not in digital. So I can check that off my list now.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at cards that I think may not revisit the market price for a little while:

• 2018 Heritage and Chrome Juan Soto PSA 10s

• Attractively priced Acuna and Ohtani slabs

• My soccer prospect targets

• Mbappe 2016 and 2017 slabs

• Haaland rookie slabs

• Early 2000s Upper Deck NBA slabs

Not all of that looking has resulted in purchases, but that’s what I’ve been keeping in my searches.

Probably as we get into prime Spring Training and the UCL later stages, I’ll be sticking mainly to older stuff in my searches.

Menacing Phantom

As I was looking at building out my growing vintage non-sports collection, the image of this card grabbed my attention and I knew I needed to get one immediately.

1951 Bowman Red Menace #53 “Ghost City” PSA 6 - $350

Red Menace was one of several war-based non-sports trading card sets that came out around the mid-20th Century. In some cases, it’s more history focused but this was definitely about anti-Communism. Propaganda art has always been a fascination for me and this card in particular stood out.

“Ghost City,” as the PSA article on the set aptly describes it:

Showcasing a skeletal spirit looming over the ruins of what appears to be Times Square, this card depicts the artist's idea of what an atomic bomb could do to a "great American city."

"The card has extraordinary imagery. It's haunting," said Bengen. "You don't forget a card like that. And if you showed that card to a kid in the '50s, they would probably say, 'Yeah, that's what I dream about at night. That's what I have nightmares about.'"

As striking as it is, the prices are pretty affordable for decent grades. I paid a little premium on this one because the coloring was still so vivid, but it seems like a good price to me based on the age and relatively low pop. Total PSA pop for this card is 168, 37 at 6 or 6+, and only 29 non-qualified grades above it.

I don’t think I’m done with this set, but I’m glad I secured this card with the haunting image.

Holy Nostalgia, Batman

I only got to enjoy the Batman TV show in syndication, but as a kid it was such a fun show to watch. Like many other late X-ers, I eventually found the darker depiction of Batman more favorable, but you can’t deny the fun and madness of the Batman ‘66 aesthetic.

The 1966 Batman card sets produced by Topps were made in the wake of the popularity of the TV show and can be differentiated by the color of the bat logo on the front. The art on these cards is bold and colorful. The pulp-based style is the work of Norman Saunders who worked on the 1962 Mars Attack card set art.

Cardboard Connection has a great list of the top cards across the Batman releases to start building a collection from and one of the cards below hits #2 on their list.

This is another vintage set where the art really is the star and these aren’t too pricey in nice grades (and very affordable in lower grades).

One note of caution if you are a set-builder—picking out the releases and reprint releases can get a bit complicated. PSA has a detailed article on the different releases, but it’s from 2008 and dated on the pop figures.

There was also a live-action color photo card set in the mix that might be of interest if you really liked the TV show.

Here’s what I picked up from this set so far (and will be getting more down the road):

1966 Batman Black Bat #1 “The Batman” PSA 5 - $400

Classic case of “buy the card, not the grade.” I don’t doubt the grade is legit, but it certainly looks like a much higher grade card at first glance and I paid a little extra for that reason. As one of the iconic vintage non-sports cards, this is likely one of those unofficially population controlled by PSA.

Total population on this card is 1,292, with 153 in 5 or 5+, and 349 non-qualified grades higher.

1966 Batman Black Bat #34 “Deadly Claws” PSA 9 - $500

This is a great example of when you stray from the well-beaten path you get a lot more for your money. Of course, that comes with less demand but getting an almost 60 year-old card in PSA 9 condition with such great art seems like a bargain to me.

“Deadly Claws” is not on the top lists of 1966 Batman cards, but the composition is just pure pulp. You could imagine it on some dime-store paperback cover.

Population is a lot tighter for this one: only 281 total graded by PSA, 19 graded at 9 non-qualified, and only 2 are graded higher.

The First Marvel Set

Until I restarted my physical collection, I was not aware that the first Marvel cards went all the way back to the 1966 Marvel Super Heroes set by Donruss.

The cards were related to the popular Marvel Super Heroes cartoon and it contains first card appearances of key Marvel names like Spider-Man, Thor, Daredevil, Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, and many others.

What’s funny is it seems like this set is perennial thought to be very underrated and people wonder why it’s not more collected. You can read the same thing today as what was in a 2012 article by PSA about the set. This may be the ultimate sleeper in collectibles.

The art is classic Marvel, drawn by Steve Ditko and others, and has a corny vibe to it. But that fits with how the Marvel cartoon was, which I also remember from syndication as a kid.

This is a set I plan to slowly add pieces from since it seems you can get nice grades for decent prices—I just don’t want to go overboard since I’m not sure what else it would take to make this catch on. Maybe once vintage comic books just move too far out of reach people will revisit cardboard first appearances.

1966 Marvel Super Heroes #37 “Just What I Needed, A Bug Bomb!” PSA 8 - $320

After reading about this set, I wanted to pick up a Spider-Man card but had a hell of a time closing a deal. This one wasn’t my first choice, but I felt good about the price I could get it at. The seller said this was an error card due to the white leg, but that is not a recognized variant by PSA—although I do see what he means since some are not like that.

Population for this one really gives you a sense of the potential for this set, given the first appearances. Only 120 total of these are graded by PSA, with 34 graded 8 or 8+, and only 23 non-qualified are graded higher.

I hope that was an interesting look at some sets maybe you weren’t that familiar with and gives you a sense of some of the ways I’m using aesthetic choices to figure out what to pick up.

There’s been a lot of focus on non-sports lately, but fear not! I’ve got several sports pickups to go over next time.

Before I sign off I have an update on a NFT pickup I mentioned in my first post written for my Substack:

FIFA+ Collect VIP Membership Card - bought for $1,000, sold for $1,750 ($1,662.50 after fees) - profit of $662.65 (+60%)

I sort of bought it half-heartedly because FIFA+ had just changed the management of their NFT products and immediately did a drop on another blockchain. These sold pretty quickly and I decided to take a shot at it with limited details.

As I said in the earlier post, “My thinking was if this provides early access to their drops going forward, assuming they don’t completely screw this up, the VIP card could have some resell value down the road if I decide FIFA+ is not for me.”

I ended up getting one airdrop pack out of the membership before I sold it, so there is a little extra value in that sale price as well. With not much more detail coming out since that airdrop, I feel good with this sale and was very happy that I didn’t end up losing money on my flyer.

It got better when I stuck the proceeds into BTC just as things were popping with that last week.

Most of my NFT moves since the early days of Candy have not been great, so it was good to get a win in this case.

Sorry for the book this time, but I had a lot to cover. I hope you all have a great time in the hobby, even if it is a business for you. I’m going to be reopening my eBay store for the many physical cards I still have at home once I get through putting my card transaction P&L together for taxes. I’ll probably be writing more about how selling is going and the strategies I use for low- and mid-end sales in future posts.

Take care, everyone!

• There were several pickups.

• Some of them deserve their own posts to share the backstory.

• I’m probably done with additions for a little while, so this will stretch out that content a bit.

One new area I started collecting that I teased last time was Trading Card Games (TCG), particularly One Piece.

I’ve considered getting into TCGs before, but the markets can be pretty complicated with all the variables involved with different parallels, special event issues, country market differences, and determining which characters are the most collectible.

With this iteration of my physical collecting, I’m looking for pieces I think will be worth hopefully much more in 5 years. I’ll post about why that is my time horizon some other time, but as I add things I’m thinking about that with every addition.

While my experience has been mostly with sports cards, I do have concerns with that market looking 5 years ahead. I’ve enjoyed adding non-sports and have some new non-sports slabs to share in future posts. However, non-sports can be very niche and the popularity of TCGs both as games and collectibles caught my attention.

I thought if I’m going to pick up a few TCG slabs, I wanted to look for something I thought I could understand the market for and maybe something that has a little more upside potential than some of the more established TCGs.

I landed on One Piece, which is an extremely popular property in manga, anime, multiple live action versions (Netflix released their take on it recently), and TCGs. The current series is the fifth: “Awakening of the New Era” (aka OP-5).

The One Piece TCG has been extremely popular both for game players and collectors. In fact, it’s been so popular that there has been some friction within the One Piece community about the negative impact of rising values due to limited supply and heavy flipping activity with hobby and retail wax. Some card shops have even decided to stop trying to get One Piece wax until there is more supply available.

The supply issue led Bandai to announce that they would be reprinting One Piece booster packs (more on that in a minute), but they provided no timeline or explained what the scope of that reprinting would be.

So, clearly One Piece has strong demand right now. Why did I land on picking up OP-5 slabs? Here’s what I liked about it:

1. The One Piece TCG has a SSP alternate art parallel called Manga that falls about one per three cases for the English product (there is also a Japanese version that has a much higher print run). In addition to being very rare, the art on these cards calls back to the manga origin of the property with an attractive foil finish.

2. OP-5 has three cards with a Manga version and one of those is the first Manga card of the primary character of the series, Monkey D. Luffy.

3. As mentioned above, OP-5 demand/supply situation is very out of whack which meant a decent percentage of the cards were likely to remain sealed in the stashes of speculators.

Admittedly, I saw the prices going up very quickly for the Monkey D. Luffy Manga PSA 10s and jumped into my first one too early (January 13). Classic FOMO move and there were a couple factors I didn’t realize when I picked it up.

First factor was that these gem at a ridiculously high rate. Bandai, unlike sports card companies, apparently has an extremely high quality control standard and packages their product carefully. Overall, out of the 4,245 OP-5 cards graded with PSA 3,953 got PSA 10 grades. That’s insanely high.

When I bought my first one, the PSA 10 pop was just about 60. Today that is up to 179. Still not that high (consider the infamous 1999 Pokemon Shadowless Charizard PSA 10 pop is 124), but I was not factoring in just how quickly the 10 pop was going to grow. That was my error because I didn’t research that with the previous One Piece releases.

The other factor I did not expect so soon was the teasing about the reprints. I knew that reprints were something Bandai had done in the past, but I thought there would be more time to establish Manga values before that came up. So when that came out, people freaked a bit with these Mangas and the price dropped pretty significantly very quickly in the wake of that news. Basically, these when from around $6,000 to $4,200 in a week.

And a factor with all of these Manga cards is there is a card with a much higher population (for PSA 10 it’s 901 vs 179) that looks very similar except it has Japanese text instead of English. So someone who isn’t super familiar with the market could see a sale for a Japanese version of the card and accept a lower offer than they should or set a lower BIN than they should for their English version.

So, I think the rapid drop was due to a perfect storm of a bunch of PSA 10 slabs coming into the market at once, fear about the reprints, some outlier sales that got more credibility than they should have, and general anxiety related to the high value of these cards that eclipsed the other Mangas by 2-3 times.

Those of you who know me a bit know I’m down for a gamble, so I thought the fear was overblown and picked up two more as prices dropped. In fact, I believe I’ve got the lowest PSA 10 buy out there to date.

Here’s what I ended up getting:

• Jan 13 - Monkey D. Luffy Manga - OP-5 - PSA 10 - $5,900

• Jan 13 - Eustass “Captain” Kid Manga - OP-5 - PSA 10 - $2,000

• Jan 26 - Monkey D. Luffy Manga - OP-5 - PSA 10 - $4,500

• Feb 9 - Monkey D. Luffy Manga - OP-5 - PSA 10 - $3,975

As you can see from the graph above, prices are moving up again and the last sale on February 12 was over $6,500.

With populations stabilizing until the reprints arrive (and those will hopefully be marked as reprints, but that has not been said officially yet), I think these are a very interesting long-term hold given the population of the game and the property in general.

If you are going to jump in, be aware of the following:

• Make sure you are buying an English version.

• If you want to target Mangas, double check the card background has the manga panels—there are other alternate art parallels that have similar foreground art.

• If the reprints do arrive, look for original print run cards. If they don’t get marked by Bandai, you can at least tell by the PSA number for those that were slabbed before the reprints. The originals are going to be the ones with the best long-term prospects.

• I think putting the Manga sets together from the different series might be a fun project over time, but the Monkey D. Luffy is the one you want to get if you’re only going to get one or two.

I hope that explains a bit why I bought some of these cards that are a little different from what I have been picking up.

Before I get into my pickups since the last update, I’m going to go through some of my hobby plans for 2024.

#1 The NFT Situation

Shortly after the new year started, I pulled down all of my Panini listings and updated my profile to indicate I was going into maintenance mode.

This wasn’t a vote of confidence in Panini. I have a practical reason for it related to my card business and the profitability of those activities lately. Until I generate more income selling cards, continuing to take losses on NFTs isn’t good for the business.

Nothing Panini has done makes me think my NFTs there aren’t losing value every day, but the situation is what it is. I’m glad I was able to extract what I could while things fell apart the second half of 2023.

I’m leaving my listings up for ToppsNFT since there is such little activity there now that it won’t be material. Same goes for Candy.

I don’t have any plans to add any sports NFTs in 2024. I will keep an eye out for Garbage Pail Kids ultra low mint NFTs at good prices on ToppsNFT. I actually added one recently that I’ll cover in the pickups.

By the way, I’ve created a secondary Substack that will focus on NFTs. I don’t plan on writing about them frequently, but when the urge strikes I will mostly keep my NFT-related thoughts over there and keep the focus of this one on cardboard and the hobby in general.

#2 Sports Cards

There are plays to make in every sport, but I’m sitting out everything but soccer for ultra-modern. Values feel too high to me with everything else for singles. I’m not even considering wax in 2024.

I will be looking at adding some vintage basketball and baseball if values come down a bit. In particular, I’d like to add a nice 1980-81 Topps Scoring Leader in a PSA 7 or 8 slab.

With soccer, I’ll continue adding a mix of prospects, young stars, and cheap mega-stars. Mbappe and Haaland cards are still at attractive values and may trend lower after club seasons conclude depending on overall market factors.

#3 Non-Sports & TCGs

I’ll continue to be on the lookout for nice 1962 Mars Attacks slabs (mainly in PSA 8 and up), but those are in a bit of a uptrend at the moment so I may wait that out first.

I haven’t identified another non-sports target set yet. I’m looking into options for a vintage set that has broad appeal.

One new area I’m getting into are TCGs (trading card games), but I’ll write more about that once a couple very recent buys pass the eBay authentication process. In short, I feel like there are a good opportunities with these as younger collectors who maybe aren’t as into sports move along their hobby journey.

Headliner Pickups

2021-22 - Donruss Road To Qatar - Kaboom! #4 - Kylian Mbappe - PSA 10 - $1,250

I had a couple of these in my watchlist hoping they might come down a bit more, but when the Real Madrid rumors started heating up again I decided to bite the bullet and grab one.

PSA 10 values have been around $1.1-1.2k for the last 6 months, but there have been several sales of this over $2k in the past with a high over $4k in March 2022.

This is not Mbappe’s Kaboom debut (that would be his 2018 Kaboom), but this was at a price I felt more comfortable getting in. The 2018s sell for $5-7k with a pop of 48. The 2021 has the same pop in PSA 10, but at a much lower cost. The later card has lower upside as well, but I think making a call on the long-term appeal of Kabooms is hard as well.

If I’m spending $5k or more on Mbappe, I’d rather get a really nice rookie.

Other Pickups

No COMC purchases since last update, but I did get a few others on eBay and one NFT (!) addition.

• 2019-20 Panini Chronicles - Pitch Kings Level IV #R4-3 - Takefusa Kubo - PSA 10 - $250

  

  • I explained the reasoning for picking up some Kubo in the last update and this deal actually closed just after I published. There aren’t a lot nice graded Kubo rookies available, so I overpaid a bit for this one. The last PSA 10 sale was $100 back in February 2023 and a PSA 9 when for $125 in October 2023 to give you a sense of his value growth already. This is a case where I see a lot of upside that I’m willing to reach a bit—I’d say FMV is probably more like $200.

• 1962 Mars Attacks - Death in the Shelter #29 - PSA 8 - $844.85

  

  • This was an auction win—I was hoping to get it closer to $750, but got into a bidding war. I can understand why though—this has some great art and is a very nicely centered card front and back. Could be a candidate for a regrade one day.

• 2003 Upper Deck SP Signature - Authentic Signatures, Gold /50 #AS-LB - Larry Bird - PSA 9 - $949.05

  

  • I will do a segment on my interest in Bird down the road, but he is one of my favorite athletes. So getting a beautiful on-card auto in a pro uniform from one of the peak design eras for UD wasn’t a hard sell. I have a feeling this one is a harbinger of some additional UD slabs to come—I’m not sure anyone has made better looking basketball cards than early 2000s UD.

• 2022 ToppsNFT Garbage Pail Kids Non-Flushable Tokens - Diamond Hans Reward Animation Facsimile Signature Colorization, Legendary - Mint 5/6 - $499.01

  

  • Despite my issues with ToppsNFT and how Fanatics is managing that platform, they will either give us the keys one day or will bring it back to life eventually. Sports prospecting or even loading up on current stars is a dicey gamble when you don’t understand the timeline for a return to “normal.” But GPK interest will be there when it happens—I have no doubt about that. And I’m willing to bet that a NFT set that pokes fun at the early days of NFTs is going to have a nice meta-humor appeal to future collectors.

  • As they become available I’m picking up missing pieces from this set—I’m down to the legendary tier for the most of the characters. This particular NFT was of interest for the irony of the name along with it being one of the more limited reward pieces.

Just A Card I Used To Own

In this section, I’ll share some cards that I used to own and the stories behind them.

• 2002 Playoff Honors - Award Winning Materials /150 AW-9 - Game-Used Patch and Autograph - Barry Sanders

  

  

  • Here’s a prime example for the “They Don’t Make Cards Like They Used To” binder. I was a big fan of Playoff’s cards back in the day as well. This was a loose pack pull from my local LCS and was the biggest card I had pulled when I found it in one of the 5 packs I bought that day. The card was numbered to 150, but only the first 10 or 15 were autographed. In addition to having an actual game-used patch (with the provenance provided not he back), this jersey was actually from the 1997 season when Sanders won the MVP award along with Brett Favre.

  • I sold it in 2010 for $227.50, which was a fair price at the time. Then the buyer got squirrely because he saw condition issues in the photos that he did not notice before bidding. I agreed to cancel the sale and relisted noting the issues. It then sold for $113.50 at auction, which really sucked. Given the significance of the patch, I believe now it would probably sell for $500-600.

Classic Designs

Rounding out my new recurring sections will be a quick highlight of a card set design that I enjoy. These will likely skew towards older products, but I will try to mix in some more recent stuff as well.

2001 Upper Deck SP Authentic Football

The 2001 SPA line across sports was really top notch, but 2001 football’s modern and ultra-clean design was my favorite of the group.

Boxes had 24 packs and 5 cards per pack. As it says on the box, this product introduced the rookie patch auto (RPA) concept and the biggest of them all was Michael Vick.

The RPAs were obviously the big chase, but the base cards had a great design with a lot of white space—something modern designs don’t use nearly enough.

It’s one of the few sets that I kept of a base set of just because I liked how the cards looked.

I ripped a fair amount of this back in the day and my best pull was this LaDainian Tomlinson Rookie Gold #120:

I sold that for $77.51 back in 2010.

That’s it for this edition. I hope you enjoyed these new features and I’m already looking forward to putting the next one together.

Good luck out there and remember to have fun!

-Card Aficionado

Headliner Pickup

2017-18 Topps Chrome UCL #41 - Kylian Mbappe - PSA 10 - 2 @ $175/ea

I think this card is an interesting bellwether for the overall modern soccer market. It has a decent population so there are regular sales of it in the different grades and Mbappe is obviously one of the top names in the sport (although admittedly his star isn’t shining as bright as it once did). He’s also a name who will likely be changing clubs in the near future, so you’ve got a nice balance of collecting interest and speculative interest.

However this card has been on quite a ride. It’s not a true rookie (that would be in 2016 Foot sticker), but it’s essentially his major card debut.

Per Card Ladder, this card in PSA 10 had a peak value of almost $2,000 in April 2021 and there were a few sales at around $500 and over in the past year. I picked up a couple in October for about $300 each, so I was surprised to see how much further these had dropped when I saw a couple on COMC listed for $200.

Whenever I see pricing that far off my expectation, I go back to eBay and I saw there were a few auctions that had ended recently around $185. So I took a shot and offered $175 each for the two. I was pleased that the offers were accepted.

Were these buys at a bottom? There already have been a few higher sales, so market price seems closer to $200 now. As long as Mbappe doesn’t get hurt or have a major dip in performance going into his serious transfer speculation period, I would be surprised if it goes under what I paid again.

Even though this is a recent base card from the new printing boom, the populations aren’t too crazy: 1,220 in PSA 10 and 2,547 overall from PSA. Mbappe has been around but he only just turned 25, so there is a lot of time to add to his resume. His next move should be to a stronger club than PSG and will improve his profile if he can live up to expectations.

Other Pickups

As mentioned last time, I wasn’t looking to add much this time of year so my other COMC additions were pretty small. Here’s a quick list with some reasoning:

• 2021 Futera FC Barcelona - The Headliners #BH31 /139 - Gavi - raw - $12.99

  • With his recent injury, Gavi values have taken a hit. I thought this was a good price to get a serial numbered early Gavi card. Futera checklists are a bit messy, so this will never be a huge card but it’s an attractive design.

• 2022-23 Futera Paris Saint-Germain - GOAL! #PGL12 /112 - Warren Zaire-Emery - $25.25

  • If you’re not familiar with Zaire-Emery, he’s 17 year-old PSG starter who just got his first cap with the French national team (and scored). He is out right now with an ankle injury, but should be hitting the pitch again in early 2024. He also has very few cards out right now, which makes this Futera a little more attractive than they would normally be for a spec buy.

• 2022-23 Topps Chrome UEFA Club Competitions #3 Blue & Gold Seismic Refractor /75 - Mohamed Ali Cho - $11.25

• 2022-23 Topps Chrome UEFA Club Competitions Jade Edition #3 Orange Jade /25 - PSA 7 - Mohamed Ali Cho - $26

• 2022-23 Topps Chrome UEFA Club Competitions Jade Edition #3 Year of the Rabbit /99 - Mohamed Ali Cho - $10.45

• 2022-23 Topps Merlin UEFA Club Competitions #123 Green Refractor /99 - Mohamed Ali Cho - $9.25

  • This group is a great example of the ridiculous parallel structure to ultra-modern soccer, but there just aren’t a lot of Cho cards out there and so I hold my nose to get some low print run cards locked up for this 19 year-old French player. Cho’s ceiling projections have come down a bit this season, but I like his tools and he has a lot of time still to get turned around and on the radar for a major club. As you can see, I’m not betting super high but these seemed like reasonable prices to pick up.

• 2021-22 Panini Mosaic La Liga #63 Orange Fluorescent Prizm /25 - Takefusa Kubo - $28.25

  • Kubo, 22, seems to be poised for a move to the EPL next summer and as that story heats up his prices will rise. His highlights are fun to watch, but will his game continue to dazzle with the stronger competition? This seemed like a decent price to add a Kubo to my soccer spec collection.

COMC Grading

Until I recently started using COMC again, I was not aware that they offered grading submissions for cards in your portfolio. I decided to try this service for a few cards and got my first one back this week.

To use this service, you just click on one of the cards from your inventory and from the action menu select “Submit for Grading.” You’ll get the options to use COMC’s grading estimate service ($5 for modern), PSA (price depends on value and service level), or CGC (price also depends on value and service level).

I picked up a 2003-04 eTopps #43 LeBron James and decided to grade with PSA. I believe I the slowest service I could choose for the card value (raw was bought at $327) was 20 days, which ran me $40.

This card is a very long-term hold for me so I wasn’t that concerned about the price, but typically this would be a bad example to grade without having it in hand. This, like many eTopps cards, was still in the sealed hard case that Topps shipped these in so judging card condition through scans on COMC was not really possible. I could tell the corners weren’t sharp, but not much else. This would probably be a good candidate for the grading estimate service if I was concerned about that.

The submission process is really easy—once you select the service level, the card just disappears from your inventory and you don’t have to do anything else. There is a Grading Submissions section on your dashboard that you can use to track what you submitted, but it doesn’t provide any ETA on the grading other than the service level you selected.

That brings me to one issue with this service—I’m not able to tell exactly when COMC submits my card. I submitted this for grading on November 7 for the 20 day service and got the grade back on December 22. That’s a little over the service level, but there was Thanksgiving in there. Still I don’t know if PSA processed this within the 20 days or not since I don’t know when they got the card. Small issue, but wanted to mention that.

In this case, my card came back a PSA 8. Not ideal, but I can see the corner and edge issues (some edge peeling on back) that probably resulted in that grade. Between the market softening and the grade, I probably lost about $150 in value plus the $40 for the grading.

I like having this option at COMC—it adds some incentive to picking up raw there that might grade well. If I’m more concerned about an expensive flip, I’ll give their grading estimate service a try and will report how that goes.

That’s it for me this time. I hope you all have a great New Year and stay safe!

I’m not sure I’ll do this every Sunday, but I would like to have a more frequent update going over any pickups I’ve added, my plan for the week ahead, and thoughts here and there on what I’m seeing in the market and hobby circles.

Pickups

As I mentioned on other channels, I’ve slowed down my pickups the past few weeks. In addition to the normal need to divert discretionary funds to holiday requirements, it feels like the market is on the verge of moving lower. Football is going through its normal down cycle as hope for rookies begins to fade in the later season weeks, but like all sports it’s experiencing general weakness right now.

But I did see one card I wanted to jump on. I normally would not post about a pickup until it’s in my possession, but since I have nothing else on the physical side you get an early look at it.

1962 Mars Attacks “Smashing The Enemy” PSA 8 - $1,850

I wouldn’t say this was a bargain by any stretch, but it’s in the second tier of rarity for PSA 8 population (34 and only 3 are PSA 9 without qualifiers) and this card looks outstanding front and back apart from the edge issues on the front left. I’d say for the card and grade it was probably a $700-800 overpay but the eye appeal with the nice centering and really good looking back was worth the premium to me.

FIFA+ Collect VIP Membership Card - $1,000

FIFA+ Collect had a few announcements this week. One was that they will be doing a drop on OpenSea using Polygon, which was a big change because everything so far had been on Algorand. A new development team is in place and they seem to have a plan to drop product on both platforms going forward.

I feel better about the news than I did initially because it seems like they will be dropping specific kinds of products on OpenSea to create some differentiation between the two collections. But this certainly has the potential to fracture an already small community and generate a lot of confusion.

This past week they dropped a limited mint of 100 VIP membership cards that got my attention:

VIP MEMBERSHIP CARDS

In an innovative fusion of digital art and exclusive access, the upcoming NFT initiative reimagines the traditional membership concept. We're introducing a limited collection of 100 NFT FIFA+ Collect Membership Cards, each a unique digital asset offering unparalleled access to the world of FIFA. These NFTs go beyond mere collectibles; they are keys to a realm of VIP experiences and privileges within the FIFA ecosystem. As holders of these NFT Membership Cards, members will own a piece of art and gain the status of Original VIP FIFA+ Collect Members.

What's FIFA+ Collect Membership?
The membership status unlocks a list of unique benefits:

1. Preferential access to FIFA+ Collect releases and more

2. Guaranteed right to purchase a ticket for the newly expanded FIFA Club World Cup 2025 ™

3. Opportunity to get two tickets for the final of the FIFA World Cup 2026 ™ (December 26 Airdrop)

4. Opportunity to get two tickets for the final of the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 ™ (December 26 Airdrop)

5. First 100 numbered VIP badges ever for a football fans community of over 5 Billion

This is only getting started! More benefits for FIFA+ Collect membership club will be announced in the future.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

New VIP benefit for our FIFA+ Collect VIP membership card just announced. Card holders will be granted adidas Level 4 (top level) membership, normally obtainable only by earning 9k+ points in adidas goods (1$=10pts)*.

December 26 Airdrop for FIFA+ Collect VIP members:
The membership status unlocks a series of future benefits, a key one being the special airdrop of the FIFA Club World Cup Saudi Arabia 2023 ™ NFT Pack on December 26. If you hold your VIP Member status on the 26th you will receive an airdrop of a key moment from the tournament, and two of these moments will grant tickets to the finals in 2025 and 2026.

FIFA Club World Cup Saudi Arabia 2023 ™ NFT Pack will contain 1 NFT Video Moment from the FIFA Club World Cup 2023 Tournament. Total 100 Packs: 1 to 1 free airdrop to existing NFT Membership card holders. There will be two rarities: Iconic (2) and Epic (98):

• 1 Iconic NFT moment will grant Two tickets to the FIFA World Cup 2026 ™ Finals in the USA

• 1 Iconic NFT moment will grant Two tickets to the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 ™ Finals in the USA

I really wrestled with this one—I’ve got a fairly expensive FIFA+ collection already and the potential utility seemed interesting, but I’ve got my doubts about this new team running things.

I waited until there were about 4 left and then decided to go for it. If nothing else, the Club World Cup airdrop will yield a NFT and a shot at some tickets for the 2026 World Cup Final.

My thinking was if this provides early access to their drops going forward, assuming they don’t completely screw this up, the VIP card could have some resell value down the road if I decide FIFA+ is not for me.

I’ll report back how things look in a few weeks, but I certainly know this may have been a bad decision in the end.

Plan This Week

The big thing for me this week and through year end is trying to move as many NFTs as possible for get losses on the books for 2023. ToppsNFT is pretty dead at this point, but I can do more to get things listed over at Panini and will be refocusing over there when I have free time.

I’m hoping to get the first of my PSA submissions that I entered through COMC back this week. I’ll do a write-up on how that process went and what the result was once that comes back.

No plans for significant additions in the near future. I will probably start buying some again in January to take advantage of the post-holiday lull in the markets if it materializes, focusing on soccer and baseball.

Quick Items

• Topps has another headache on their hands with what seems to be backdoored or badly collated superfractors from 2023 Bowman Draft

• Topps also expanded their baseball card gimmick of the Tom Brady Expos card in 2023 Bowman Draft to include a completely fabricated card of Bill Belichick as an Expos manager. Fanatics knows how to get press, but I’m not sure these gimmicks are really helpful to the hobby. Breakers love it though, so I wouldn’t expect this to go away—the Brady chase has been a huge hit.

There are many other things to discuss in the hobby, but I’ve got to run.

Hope you have a great week ahead and enjoy the Christmas season if you celebrate!

Let’s take a break from the world of sports card NFTs for a moment and dive into a convention of modern physical cards that serves as a great example of how the trading card companies take an idea, run it into the ground, and then make it so meaningless that collectors forget what made them interesting to begin with (and saving these companies a lot of money in the process.

I’m talking about relic cards–aka memorabilia “mem” cards or jersey/patch cards.

The definition of relic has some amusing context with this story:

relic
noun
rel·​ic ˈre-lik 

1 a : an object esteemed and venerated because of association with a saint or martyr
b : SOUVENIR, MEMENTO
2 relics plural : REMAINS, CORPSE
3 : a survivor or remnant left after decay, disintegration, or disappearance
4 : a trace of some past or outmoded practice, custom, or belief

By the time we get to the end, you’ll get the joke if you don’t already.

Beckett has a concise history of these cards that’s worth a read, but the origin story goes back to 1996 when they made their debut from the mainstream card companies. That year there were 151 relic cards, which were a huge product chase for the companies making them. They were special and they were game-used. By 1999 the number had grown to 1,048 cards and when 2001 was done the total was 15,452. The peak as of that article was in 2005 when there were 78,954 relic cards produced.

This is a pretty standard pattern in trading card history. Something new comes along and unexpectedly becomes huge. Then companies adjust to the demand but the margins don’t improve due to acquisition/production costs increasing. That leads to companies cutting corners to try to fill the need at a lower cost, which kills the appeal of the original item or the novelty just wears off. And then everyone is looking for the next hype cycle.

What is interesting about the relic cards though were some of the particular issues they caused companies looking for material to create them. For relic cards of historic players there have been controversies about destroying game-used uniforms to make cards with people arguing these items shouldn’t be cut up. There also have been many examples of questionable provenance for “game-used” relics or outright frauds.

It’s fun rabbit hole to go down if you’re relatively new to card collecting because many of the issues surrounding these cards are part of the core struggles in the hobby between collectors and the card companies.

My favorite relic cards were from the run up to the peak production: 2002 Playoff NFL Piece of the Game. If my memory is correct, this was the first product that had a relic card in every pack. This wasn’t a cheap product at the time, but obviously this was at a point that these relic cards were easier to pull. What I liked about them was the transparency for their source material: you got a photo of the items used for that player’s cards and in some cases you even had the game it was from identified. Playoff did this for some of their other products of this era as well. I put together some examples to illustrate what these cards looked like at the bottom of this post.

That type of detail may not be something companies what to legally expose themselves to now, but as a collector it was a really fun experience. Not only did you know this stuff was game-used (as much as you trust these companies), but for the specific games you could look up how that player did in the game the relics were from.

I have to laugh when I see what collectors get now for the most coveted cards these days: the “logoman” cards that have relics from the league logo on the uniform. When these first came out they were extremely hard to pull and due to being one per uniform there weren’t many made. Now players have multiple logomen cards in some individual products. How does that work? Well, these are now “not associated.” That could mean they came from uniforms worn by other players or uniforms not worn by anyone (in a game or otherwise). And it could mean they even come from uniforms not player-issued (i.e. off the rack). This is true for these most special patch relics as well as the rest of the relics in these products.

Compare the provenance for the relics above to these from 2022 products that I pulled off eBay.

An interesting side effect of this cost-saving and production-friendly approach by Topps and Panini (among others) is it has created a niche for short print true game-used relics with solid provenances to be produced by some of the non-officially licensed card companies like Leaf. Is an unlicensed card with a game-used logoman that has a solid history better than a licensed rookie logoman that could be from a store bought jersey? It’s an interesting question modern collectors are going to have to wrestle with.

I think this is also an interesting point to raise with physical collectors who like to make fun of digital collectors spending money on “fake cards.” If your relic card has nothing to with the player on it, is that really much better?

I hope you enjoyed this slice of something different and I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic. Be sure to check out some of those links for more examples from the history of these cards that brought some new excitement to the hobby even if everyone doesn’t love them now.

Note: This was originally posted on my blog on 12/9/2023

With news of Juan Soto completing his destined move to the New York Yankees (a move rumored since he was called up by the Nationals) this week, I thought back to one of my favorite stories of my recent time in the hobby.

I’m a huge fan of Soto and at one time had a very sizable rookie collection focused on 2018 Topps Update, Topps Chrome, and Topps Heritage (his rookie is in the High Number series or HHN). I sold most of it in 2019 and 2020 when his values reached a crazy level.

My biggest “COVID bubble” flip was also a Juan Soto rookie–I had a PSA 10 Update Xfractor auto /125 (center in the image below) that I bought for $5.5k on 12/19/2020 and sold for $11.5k on 3/8/2021. That was a crazy time in the hobby.

I’ll do another post down the road going into some of the special Soto cards I had at one time, but this one is about a specific card.

One of my all-time favorite years of product to rip was 2018 baseball and even in 2021 I was still ripping it. Such a huge rookie class at the time with Soto, Ohtani, Acuna, Gleyber Torres, and many others. At one point, even base rookies of those guys for cards in decent condition were selling big raw. I was selling 2018 Update Soto raw base for as much as $75 at one point. So even as wax got very expensive over time, you still had a decent floor to work with. Much different situation these days.

I really enjoyed HHN that year as well. The 1969 design had great eye appeal and the parallels and variations weren’t too out of control yet. But there was a big negative to ripping in 2021: one of the redemptions that year was for Soto’s rookie autograph card and they expired in August of 2020.

I was very active on Blowout’s forums at the time and whenever people asked about ripping HHN after the expiration, I’d bring up the status of Soto’s autos along with others who were aware of that issue. It’s something the less familiar wax rippers might not be aware of and we thought they should know. One guy on the forum gave us a hard time about it eventually, suggesting it was “arrogant” to avoid ripping HHN because of the expired redemptions since it was such slim odds you’d ever pull one.

In March of 2021 I was not into the current products and decided to splurge on a couple of boxes of 2018 HHN, which ran me $260 a box. On the last pack of the break, I pulled this and had to laugh:

I got some offers when I shared the news on Blowout that I pulled the expired redemption, but I decided to hang onto it as a funny piece of how the hobby can be and since I was a Soto fan it had some additional meaning.

After a couple of months, I decided to at least ask Topps to see if there was anything I could get for it. So, this is what I sent:

I just pulled an autograph redemption for Juan Soto from a box of 2018 Heritage High Number. The redemption expired last August, but due to the value of the card I wanted to at least check if there was any chance to redeem it.

Topps had a reputation for never fulfilling expired redemptions, so I was quite surprised to get this reply 4 months later:

Thank you for contacting Topps Consumer Relations about the expired redemption card you have.

Topps redemption cards are valid for two to three years depending on specific product release.  Any redemption request must be submitted prior to the expiration date to be honored.

We are happy to make an exception to this policy. If we have the card in stock, we will redeem the redemption code to have the card ship to you.  If we do not have your expired redemption in stock, a care package will be sent to you.

And at that point, the best I was hoping for was the care package mentioned. I certainly did not expect the update I got a few more months later in the Topps redemption center that they had assigned a Soto autograph to me.

And few months after that, this showed up at my house:

Considering what a Hail Mary it was to even get that fulfilled, I vowed that I’d keep this one in my collection as long as I had cards. And I’ve kept that promise so far.

I need to get it slabbed–especially if Soto begins to really shine in his time in New York (which is what I expect–he’s made for that stage), but I was extremely lucky that Topps hooked me up on this one.

In terms of the card itself, this is a pretty rare rookie auto but still affordable given the rarity. The red ink variation is hand numbered to /69 that year, but even this base auto only has a total population of 77 over at PSA and 33 over at Beckett (may be some crossovers counted as well that inflate that). I think this one is probably a 9 at best due to centering, but the PSA 10 population is only 39 as of this writing. A PSA 10 last sold on eBay for a little over $1k, but that was back in October. I would guess you’re looking at least $1.5k now for one.

If you do look into picking one for yourself, be aware that many “after-market” autographed base versions are floating around raw and in slabs. If it doesn’t say “Topps Certified Autograph Issue” at the bottom, it’s not a packed out auto and has a much lower value. The card number for the base version is #502 and for the auto version it is #ROA-JSO (or #JSO on the PSA flip), so that’s another way to tell the difference.

Note: This was originally posted on my blog on 11/25/23

Series Introduction

"Why Collect?" will be a series that will go into certain sets that are interesting to me--some I've collected in the past, some I'm currently collecting, and some I just think are worth a look. I'll disclose what the situation is for the set I'm discussing is at the time of writing.

I'll provide a little history on the set, some things that are notable about it, some things to look out for if you decide to check it out, and what the long-term outlook might be for the set.

I try to provide accurate facts to support my position, but these are opinion pieces and should not be considered financial advice. You should do your own research before making a decision to buy or sell any sets discussed in the series.

For my first entry in the series, I wanted to cover the set that has been in some of my recent pickups shared here that may have been a head scratcher to those of you not familiar with non-sports trading cards. The set has an interesting place in the history of the hobby and Topps. I also like that nice cards from this set in good grades are still relatively attainable. More than most, these cards have really interesting art that stands out in a collection and has some cross-over appeal that I think will help it's longevity.

Without further ado... Mars Attacks!

A Little History

The first Mars Attacks release was in 1962. The card series told the story of a martian invasion of Earth that was intended to be a modern version of War of the Worlds, but the plot and character designs were original to the cards with inspiration from the sci-fi comics, paperbacks, and movies of that period.

Len Brown of Topps said he wanted the cards to reflect the artwork of paperback covers to convey the plot points on the card back, which let to the dramatic style the set is famous for. The art itself was penciled by Bob Powell (who worked previously on the violent Civil War News set for Topps) and painted by pulp-cover illustrator Norm Saunders.

It took six months to complete the artwork for the 55 cards, which was then submitted to Topps president Joel Shorin for approval before printing. Shorin was concerned about the violence and scantily-clad women in the Mars Attacks art. The art for 11 cards were revised based on his feedback, but Shorin was still concerned about the reputation risk to Topps and decided to remove the normal Topps copyright line from the card backs and replaced it with “Bubbles Inc.” This was a tactic used with any sets they felt could generate negative publicity for Topps .

After the product hit stores, the media covered the sensational reaction to the card art and story. Shorin was contacted directly about the cards being unsuitable for children by at least one district attorney. Plans to shipping product to new markets (it was never distributed nationally) or expanding the series were scrapped.

Due to the hardcore fandom that the series created, there have been a number of reprint or expansion products since the original release:

• 1964 – reprint of the original released in the UK by Topps’ international company A & BC Gum

• 1984 – reprint of the original released by Renata Galasso Inc.

• 1994 – Mars Attacks Archives released by Topps with a reprint of the original plus new art for the 11 cards based on the pencils that were revised as well as subsets with new art

• 2012 – Topps released a book and calendar for the 50th anniversary that contained a set of 4 new cards

• 2013 – Topps released Mars Attacks: Invasion that was an all-new story told through a set of 95 cards

• 2016 – Topps released Mars Attacks: Occupation through Kickstarter that was another new story over 81 cards

• 2017 – Topps released Mars Attacks: The Revenge! that was sequel to the original 1962 series over 55 cards

• 2021 – Topps had another Kickstarter project called Mars Attacks: Uprising that had 42 cards plus additional subsets

If you’re interested in getting a good look at the art for these cards and learning a little more about them, I highly recommend the book Topps put out about Mars Attacks for the 50th anniversary. Brown has an introduction to the book talking about the inspirations behind the projects and its legacy.

The Case For Collecting

Like many people my age, I had a vague notion of Mars Attacks but didn’t really get exposed to it until Tim Burton’s 1996 film adaptation. I don’t know if there’s another film in this franchise, but it goes to show the property has appeal across generations and that’s no easy feat. So, that’s one reason I like the 1962 set to collection versus some others in the non-sports category: I think people will still be interested in Mars Attacks in 20 years.

The other thing this has going for it is relative scarcity. In addition to the normal factors with vintage–poor handling from initial collectors, lower quality standards in the printing and cutting, and deterioration for cards not stored properly–there just wasn’t a lot of this stuff printed to begin with.

It’s pretty incredible that as of this writing there are only 2 sealed 1962 wax packs graded with PSA and only 17,285 cards graded with PSA. From the anecdotes around the web it seems like no one has seen an unopened or complete box for many, many years.

So, understanding that level of scarcity I find the pricing for nice graded slabs of this to be pretty reasonable.

Outside of the statistics, these are just fun cards to collect. The art is bold and fun–I’m a big fan of pulp art so it’s right in my wheelhouse, but I think it has an appeal to your general sci-fi nerds, as well as comic art and pulp art fans. While this is no doubt a very niche set, it has some decent populations to pull interest from.

It’s also worth noting there is a small but dedicated group of current collectors. That’s helpful when evaluating the product because there’s enough action to get a sense of value and you’re also not speculating on future interest coming along to maintain values. With Mars Attacks, it’s not massive but it’s definitely present.

What To Watch Out For

Just to be upfront, I’ve been a fan of Mars Attacks for a while but only recently have I gotten serious about collecting the original set. So, this information is what I’ve learned recently and I don’t claim to be an authority on the subject. If you have some other things to watch out for or think I’m getting something wrong, please leave a comment.

With that said, here are some things I would suggest watching out for:

• Stick to slabs — Unless you just want to put together a cheap set, I would stick to slabs. They are not that expensive for mid-grades and it will give some assurance that the cards you buy are authentic and unaltered. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s tough to judge raw over the internet and I’ll take my chances with PSA.

• Note that product list above — there are multiple official reprints of the 1962 set (in addition to the normal unofficial “reprints” that are always floating around), so be sure you know which card set you’re buying. I’ve noticed a number of the 1964 cards showing up in eBay with 1962 titles–be sure to double check the slab flip or the card back to confirm what the listing is for because the art and condition for the 1962 and 1964 sets especially are hard to distinguish through a screen.

• If you go the PSA slab route, be sure to check for qualifiers. There are a lot of centering issues with this set among other issues that lead to quals. The 1962 set has an over 10% qual rate for the total graded population. If you’re not familiar, those indicate an issue with the card that is noted and ignored in the number grade. That can lead to a card that is a PSA 9 but has a major miss-cut or centering issue that leads to a qualifier that majorly impacts value. If you see a cheap high-number grade slab, be sure to double check for qualifiers. If it has one, I would not recommend buying.

• Speaking of qualifiers, it’s worth mentioning that some Mars Attacks cards were slabbed before qualifiers were a thing and grading seemed to be more relative to the set. To me, this is truly a product where you want to buy the card *and* the grade. The centering for me is a huge part of the eye appeal and I will pass on a card with a good grade if the centering is particularly bad. In my opinion, a badly centered card is always going to be harshly punished in value when you try to resell.

Buying Factors

Like any other set, 1962 Mars Attacks has some key cards that are more popular outside of the core collector group. Given the overall scarcity and low distribution of high grades, it doesn’t take much outside interest to make those cards a lot more expensive. I think if you’re looking at a general PSA grade to target for buying, you’ll need to have one number for most of the cards and then one that’s 1-2 grades lower for those key cards if you want to spend about the same amount for each.

I think there are a few more to add, but Cardboard Connection lists these as the key cards from the 1962 set:

• 1 – Invasion Begins

• 21 – Prize Captive

• 36 – Destroying a Dog

• 55 – Checklist

I’d add #17 (“Beast and the Beauty”) and #43 (“Blasting the Bug”) as other cards that command a premium.

Values also differ a bit based on the art work. I find myself drawn to the cards with the martians on them–I know I can’t be the only one. So those are going to be a little more expensive.

Populations also vary a bit throughout the set. Overall pops are around 300, but the grade distribution is not even. For example, I’m mostly targeting PSA 8s but for the most popular card (#1, “The Invasion Begins) there are only 19 in PSA 8 compared to most being in the 35-45 range. Theory is that’s because it was typically on the top of the card number sorted stacks that kids put together back in the day. The first two and last two cards in the checklist are much lower in PSA 8 pops than the rest, which supports that theory.

Pricing on PSA 8s without qualifiers is running me generally between $600-900. If you’re not so picky about centering, you can probably get the same grade at a better price.

And keep in mind there are just 238 PSA 9s (and over half of those have qualifiers) and only one PSA 10 out there: card #29 “Death in the Shelter”.

Given all that, it’s probably obvious that there aren’t a lot of these listed in higher grades. Building a high grade set is going to be a drawn-out process, but that can be a fun way to chase too–at least that’s how I’m looking at it. Going slow gives me a chance to really learn about these cards and enjoy the ones I get to snag.

I enjoyed my blog, but it was just too associated with a certain platform of digital collectibles. Even as I tried to move to other content, I could tell the interest in what I was writing was so much more when I went back to the old topics.

It’s tempting to just give people what they want, but that material is not something I’m interested in exploring any longer. It’s time for new folks to write about the new problems over there and that’s a game for people who still care.

I’m not in that group.

But I still love collecting. I enjoy discussing the business of trading cards. I like writing about what these dumb pieces of cardboard have meant to me. I like reading about what they have meant to you. And I enjoy sharing what I am collecting and what I used to have in my collection.

This isn’t a cash-grab Substack. It’s always going to be free. This is just a blank slate on a platform that is content-first. I don’t need to worry about anything but the words and a few pictures here and there.

I hope you enjoy this new adventure, but no hard feelings if this is not what you want to read from me. I may write about my NFT adventures with the sandwich crew one day, but it will be from a personal perspective.

I don’t know how frequently I will post something new, but I will be pulling over my posts from the blog that fit this new approach to add a little history. Just don’t expect that pace for the new content.

Take care everyone.

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