Plans for 2024, New Pickups, and More
I hope everyone has had a great 2024 so far. I’m not big on resolutions for a new year, but I do like to take advantage of the buffer time that becomes available during the holidays to think about what I want to do in the year ahead.
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