Why I Got Interested In TCG Slabs
Going further into the fringe or a smart diversification?
I’ll be breaking from the recent format of sharing all the stuff I bought since the last post for a few reasons:
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:
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.
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.
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.