As soon as things started picking up at the beginning of 2020, there was immediate speculation on what could be causing the meteoric rise in card values as the pandemic kicked into high gear. That same narrative was immediately accompanied by talk of a bubble, and of course, when it would burst. Just like no one could have ever predicted that a worldwide pandemic would contribute to one of the largest collectible booms in history, no one could have ever predicted it would last as long as it has.

According to CardLadder’s indexing, the hobby seems to be on a downward trend over the last few months, with growth heading in the direction of -8% for the quarter. Despite ups and down, the larger graph still shows pretty flat, which depending on your thought process could be both good or bad. For most of 2021, the incline was a steep upward trajectory that allowed many collectors and investors to throw chips anywhere on the table and come up with a win. Now that things have been much more flat, some of those same people are starting to wonder if the honeymoon is really over.

There are some major contributing factors overall, and ill do my best to give my take on a few of them, especially as social media seems to run with their own agendas and narratives. For the most part there is a split between people holding out for the start of the NFL season, and those that believe this is the sign of the end times. Im somewhere in the middle, and hope I can outline some of the ways I see the hobby trending from a disinterested third party point of view.

The Junk Slab Era

Earlier this week, PSA tweeted out that they were holding 3.6 million cards in backlog, waiting to be graded. This is after A) suspending submissions B) raising prices and C) making better grades seemingly more difficult to achieve. Because grading is a conflict of interest laden business model, making business decisions on the flow of their submissions speaks to a larger issue with the hobby as a whole.

Right now, the hobby ebbs and flows based on the way graded cards are valued across the different corners of the collecting universe. The problem is, there are so many graded cards out there, that the way the public perceives them has changed dramatically over the last 2 years. The hyper mint marketing ploy that each of the 19373 grading companies have employed has started to backfire, especially as more “Gem Mint” cards drop in value overall.

For the last 2 years, collectors have employed a “GRADE ALL THE THINGS!” approach to their collection, sending in everything from worthless base cards to high dollar investment pieces, all with the hopes of gaining more value and equity in their PCs. As a result, the junk slab era has come to be a major factor, with so many investors seeing dips in readily available cards drawing less value on the secondary market.

With the backlog of grading showcasing that there are an insane amount of cards still to enter the market, this flood has massive implications on the supply vs demand economics of the hobby. For so long, the promise of increased value in graded cards had driven keen collectors to take advantage of the situation, but that secret has been transformed into a wave of (no longer scarce) cards being put on the block and selling for less and less. The scariest thing, is that the tidal wave hasnt even reached the mainland, because as we see, a ton more cards are still waiting to be processed.

The End of the Pandemic Era

For most in the world, life is relatively back to normal, with only a few reminders that Covid is still raging as a major factor in the lives of many. Now that people are out and about, taking vacations, eating at restaurants, and living their existence to the fullest again, disposable income is starting to be applied to other areas of budgets.

I stand by the fact that the lack of opportunity to spend money is what kicked off the collectible boom, and now that those options are back, many more people have to balance their spending. Similarly, because of more people being out from isolation, gas prices spiked, and world conflicts made those situations 10 times worse. This has also led to massive inflation, alongside a lack of stimulus payments that gave many collectors the money to buy cards they wouldnt normally buy.

Right now, this is a perfect storm of contributing environmental factors, and I havent even begun to go through the crypto crash that has impacted a ton of source funds that some investors were using to invest in cards.

Increased Supply without Increased Demand

The value of cards as an asset is something that can be traced almost directly to two things – supply and demand. Basic economics at play. For the beginning of this boom, the demand for cards was insatiable, with many collectors seeing their access to wax and singles stripped away as more and more people entered the market.

As expected, the manufacturers immediately tried to match the demand with more supply, but due to pandemic worker shortages and material issues, most could not keep up in any real way. Now that we are going into the summer of 2022, some of that has normalized, with supply finally catching up as a result of increased production runs combined with all the factors listed above. Demand has cooled on certain things, and collector revolts against high prices in the lower classes of spending have led to major shifts in both the primary and secondary markets.

Certain things have been holding stable, but the areas seeing the most problems are the areas with the most supply. High run flagship sets with large retail configurations have seen cooling, as well as some of the top high end products. These offerings, whose prices have risen above the prospects of the tent pole hits have seen breakers move away from trying to fill their lists. Flawless Basketball had risen to over 20k per box before the hunt for the triple logoman card ended. F1 Dynasty released yesterday at $18k per case, which only contains 5 cards. The appetite for super premium releases seems to have shrunk, but its all about which of those products really feels the pain.

So far, the singles market at the top levels seem to be holding, with big sales still going down regularly at many of the big auction houses. If you go back to my posts on this topic from earlier, this is some of the ways I expected the end of the boom to go down. We will have to see if this quarterly downturn is temporary or if this slow decline leads to something more drastic.

Delays in Production

Even with more supply hitting the market, we are still seeing major production delays rippling through the calendar across each of the manufacturers. Its now into May, and we still havent seen 2021 Prizm Football, a product that usually hits before the beginning of the NFL season. With every manufacturer trying to cash in on the demand before it cools further, this is a direct result.

Most of the delays come from material shortages these days, but at the beginning of this, it was a combination of that plus lack of resources to put the products together once they were printed. At first this led to more demand for a decreased supply, but that situation has been turned on its head now that the hungry base of collectors is starting to move onto a ‘wait and see’ type of investment approach for many of the bottom 90% of the market.

Fear of Consolidation

As if things couldnt get more complicated, there is also a huge cloud hanging over the hobby coming sooner rather than later. Fanatics has acquired all the major licenses. Fanatics has also aquired Topps. This means that hobby consolidation is no longer a pipe dream, its a plan in its execution stage.

Even with the gigantic influence that Topps has had on cards for close to 100 years, collectors are starting to fear what could happen when Panini is removed from the equation. To date, Topps has found success in a lot of areas, but the investor crowd has entered this game when Panini owned the top two sports in the land.

Almost immediately after the boom began, many of the biggest sales went down in football and basketball, and focused on legacy sets that drive the Panini brand wagon. Although there are many theories that suggest those sets wont die due to further consolidation, its clear that there is a lot of trepidation around the future of investor friendly sets.

Honestly, this whole thing doesnt look like its set up for long term success. There are too many headwinds for the hobby to remain at an all time high. Now that doesnt mean its going to snap back to pre-boom prices, as that bell has already been rung. I also dont believe we are on the verge of a massive selloff, but its clear that the environment created by the factors described here could contribute to a drop that people might not be ready for. As always, that exit strategy needs to be in place, but I will close here by saying this isnt the time to pull every fire alarm. However, there is some smoke that will send people to the exits. Hopefully, things bounce back and this post looks more like chicken little and less like Nostradamus.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know my affinity for Topps Chrome. Ive mentioned it multiple times that it is my favorite product and my go to set for acquiring my target PC subjects. The brand loyalty I have to Chrome is deep rooted in my childhood, with the set driving many trips to the local shop when I was growing up. Its also been one of the things that has driven some of the largest purchases I have made in sports cards.

Chrome is a legacy brand for a number of reasons, but most of it stems from the longevity of the product’s brand within the hobby, and its hulking values that have driven enormous sales volumes and secondary market values for decades. Collectors know what they are getting with Chrome, each and every time. Its a landmark product that has spanned multiple sports, non-sport, WWE, MMA, and everything in between.

The pinnacle of the brand has always been the refractor, but within the last 15 years, the true top of the mountain has been the 1/1 parallel of those, labeled a SUPERFRACTOR early on by Topps. Being that its the most important parallel in all of cards, it features a similar stock pattern that has spread to almost every trading card company on the planet. Yes, the superfractors are such a big deal, Panini, Leaf, and all the others have used the “Small Engine Turn” stock and made their own 1/1 parallels. That’s when its clear that everyone wants a piece of the magic.

In terms of WWE, the Superfractor has been around for a while, but its history is a bit more complicated. Because the products were built around the ideas of baseball sets, but configured in their own way, the Superfractors werent always the same as they were in other sports. In fact, some of the original examples had a print run of 25 from the first Heritage Chrome WWE sets, making them some of the highest numbered supers ever produced. Like many of the other older WWE cards, the bigger names in this set have skyrocketed in value over the last year.

All that being said, nothing has prepared the market for what happened to the Superfractors in the first standalone Topps Chrome branded set, first released in 2014. Ive mentioned in previous posts that 2014 Topps Chrome WWE had a minuscule print run. One of the smallest hobby configurations produced in the history of Topps Chrome as a mainstream brand. As part of that set, Superfractor parallels of the base cards, numbered 1/1, were included for the first time ever. The set featured two of the top tier WWE targets of 2022, with Roman Reigns and the Rock both having mega cards as part of the checklist. If I had to predict a six figure sale in WWE, I talked about one of the candidates yesterday in the Rock’s 1/1 Prizm black. The other candidate is the Rock’s 2014 Superfractor.

Back at the end of 2021, leading into 2022, a group of major sports collectors joined the WWE card niche ahead of the announcement of Panini obtaining the WWE license. Immediately, sets like 2014 and 2015 Topps Chrome became targets for them – more specifically the sister cards to the Prizm parallels that had dominated the hobby boom coming out of 2020. The gold refractors /50 and the Superfractor 1/1s exploded in value, with some $10 dollar pickups from months earlier becoming $1000 cards overnight. Remember, no supply and high demand kicks basic economics into high gear.

Within a few weeks, a 2014 Roman Reigns Superfractor Auto 1/1 had sold for $15,000, setting a record for modern WWE in the process. To that point, no public sale of a modern WWE card had ever broken the 5 figure mark, with only another Superfractor coming close. That card was from 2021 Transcendent WWE, which featured 1/1 autographed supers for the first time and last time in the product. Like others from previous Chrome sets, huge values were expected and received for the major 1 per box hits, leading to some of the largest sales in WWE card history.

To me, the Transcendent superfractor autos were the next step in the evolutionary process for the WWE market and remain my favorite wrestling cards Topps produced in their 20 year run with the license. They continue to be highly sought after by many WWE and non-WWE collectors, a chase that has been exacerbated by the increase in value for the 2014, 2015, 2020 and 2021 Chrome sets overall. Adding in 2020 and 2021 Finest, WWE has a treasure trove of shiny gold cards that have increased wax to dizzying heights on the products, with the older boxes capping out at 1200-1500 a box now. Collectors have seen this new market evolve into a monster, with most of the Chrome color reaching heights considered laughable only a few months ago.

Now that Prizm has entered the fold, more shiny goodness has brought huge prices to the market, and has fueled a continued spike for the shiny Topps products all around. Even the lowest tier superfractors available on the market cannot be had for less than a few hundred dollars, something that is driving many supercollectors insane. For those of us who were lucky enough to get our hands on some of the major examples early on in the Chrome lifecycle, those prices seem like we were paying for sticks of chewing gum by comparison.

I wholeheartedly believe there is no more safe harbor for anyone looking to add some of these gems to their PC. The secret of the WWE niche is out, and now that the dark corner has been illuminated, the major hits will start to climb to the values that are exemplified in the major sports. I fully believe a six figure WWE card is on the horizon, especially with insane auction results for people like Lewis Hamilton and other alternative cards. Hopefully we all get to flourish in the light of the flames, billowing from the market on fire with interest.

Ive been around this hobby since I was 6 years old, buying some of my favorite Twins players as a kid, biking to my local card shop and opening cards with my brother and dad. Im now a month away from 40, and Im still here, with some breaks in between, trying to figure out my place in an ecosystem that is enjoying a boom that I could have only dreamed about. In addition to participating in the hobby, Ive written enough about sports cards since 2007 to fill multiple books. Since 2007, multiple things I have done have required public responses from card manufacturers and entities, including my extensive work on fakes and forgeries. Although my reach was small in the grand scheme of the hobby, I was featured on ESPN, Deadspin, and other sites multiple times. In the most marginal sense of the word, you could say I was one of the original card influencers – before that was a thing, and before it was important.

Today, my influence is small enough to fit on the tip of a needle, as my work and multiple kids has forced me into a place where my love of writing was trumped by a need to live my life. All the fun we used to have on twitter and youtube has been replaced with mega influencers and investors changing the conversation to a focus on money and what they are buying and selling. My focus in the hobby media was always talking about the cards and how they were presented. The new dialogue is all about the deals – buying and selling cards that have become the hottest investment piece since Beanie Babies in the 90s. With the gigantic trajectory of value and interest, a new culture of content and business has been created to match the demand of the population. As people have seen this take place, a divide amongst the previous inhabitants has also risen.

You know what’s interesting though? I enjoy a lot of the content. I love economics, I love cards, and putting them together strikes a chord with me that I never expected. The problem is, most of the biggest voices in the hobby have seen their content explode in popularity to a similar degree as the cards themselves. Tens of thousands of people are hungry to consume sports card content, especially well produced content. As expected, with that attention comes two very specific elements that have made this newfound landscape so problematic in nature.

The first is power. If you have reach and an audience, you have power. Power to change people’s minds, power to move a population, and the power to form an agenda. The thing about agendas, is that they are rarely done for the good of the audience you are influencing. Most of the time, its to further the growth of power one has over their audience, or demean and belittle those who disagree with it. Most influencers will need a steady growth of audience to maintain their production and revenue, and without creating a cult like response to their content, its hard to do that. Therefore, the agenda becomes the content, and its clear that most collectors will have a very dynamic reaction to that – either they love it or they hate it. There are very few indifferent people. Oddly enough, this is the goal, as people who love the agenda will surround themselves with it, and people who hate the agenda will similarly consume the content just to trigger their own emotional responses of hatred. Its a vicious circle that leads to a culture shift, one that has taken over the lexicon we use every day.

The second thing is money. From what I can tell, many of the biggest influencers also have big portfolios of cards, something that in other markets is a required disclosure. Trading cards have only recently entered the national consciousness in terms of investment potential, and other investment assets have tons of content built around them as well. The difference is, the government regulates how those influencers are able to showcase assets they have a position in. If someone on TV is talking about a stock they own, they must disclose that publicly. For cards, the asset group hasnt reached a maturity level where that is required, despite some of them being seven figures in value. As a result, influencers in cards can pump up their owned assets without punitive responses about disclosure. This power has led to resentment from the base of audience they hope to target, but also that love / hate response they use to build new viewership.

Honestly, this is where the influencers and investors have become the new targets for hobby trolling, as people start to revolt against the way they have changed the market overall. The funny thing is, this happens in every market, and the response is not only expected, its the goal. Americans are some of the most emotion driven people on the planet. They want things to be so black and white, as to fuel the tribalism we see when there is a major point of view. The question is, for a hobby ive been around for 30 plus years, is this what I want to happen? That’s where Im not so sure.

This is where the second population of people, the investors, come in. If you ask some of the people that have joined the hobby over the last 2 years, many of them will likely believe that investors are a recent phenomenon within the market. This could not be further from the truth. Going back to the 1950s, people have placed value on trading cards, and if you have gone to a national convention before 2015, you saw the people who have invested in that value setting up year after year. Investors have always seen trading cards as an asset, to a point where we had a similar boom in the 1990s on the back of big sales of collectibles across the country. My dad bought boxes of junk wax that sit in our garage to this day, thinking they would be as valuable as the cards he collected as a kid.

The difference between the 1990s and today is clear, mainly due to the scale in which cards are invested in, but also the scale in which people have made and derived products and services around that part of the market. Today’s hobby has entire business models built around tools for investors, and beyond that, a dedicated community on social media to communicate with like minded individuals. For the first time in the history of hobby investing, the people who are the main players arent huddling in back rooms at big card shows, they are out in the open, sharing what they are doing. Not only that, but the content they create is really fucking interesting. There are even documentary films in the works that talk about how this all came to be.

I remember living in Los Angeles around the time I started writing about cards, and talking with some of the dealers who made a living investing in cards. I thought they were crazy, because the dialogue around cards was so small. I remember getting 2,000 hits a day on my blog posts and being proud of my accomplishments. Now, most of the content creators are driving 200 times that without putting in much effort to furthering any new conversation. For them, as mentioned, the conversation isnt about the cards, where there are limited topics to cover. The deals and money are center stage, where there is an unlimited amount of content to deliver. They have integrated sports commentary as well, given that production on the fields of play contribute so much to potential value.

With such a giant shift in the way people talk about cards, it shouldnt be a surprise that there is a negative reaction from people who hate that this is what the hobby has become. Even though most of the people who revolt against the new world order are very vocal about their feelings, most still operate with the assumptions in value that these influencers and investors have brought to their benefit. Because almost every collectors trades, buys and sells cards, the market value derived from the growth in the hobby does exist to the benefit of all collectors. The so called ‘haters’ will still sell, trade and buy their collection pieces the same way the investors due, while taking pot shots at their methods. Its very odd to witness.

Similarly, these individuals label themselves with a gatekeeping term that gives them a pass to do so. Because they are a ‘true collector’ they feel that their actions are justified to operate in the same manner as the people that they despise. Personally, nothing triggers an emotional response in me more than hearing someone volley ‘true collector’ status around like its actually a thing. Gatekeeping sucks, and as much as investors have drawn ire from the hobby, some of them have actually figured out how fun collecting can really be. Like there is no real way to classify what makes someone a ‘true collector’ versus any other type of hobby participant, there is no reason to make this a derogatory accusation either. I dont understand the desire to keep people out, especially when card value has become the primary thread in this hobby for almost 100 years. More people bringing demand to a market is a good thing, overall. Period.

Does this mean that we should not shine a flashlight on the misdeeds of people who seek to exploit the new found glory? Absolutely not, but the bitterness and resentment seems empty. Americans love celebrity culture, but loathe the way celebrities can spend their money in insane ways. I feel the same thing is true for celebrity card culture – a fascination with their hobby lives, while loathing the impact that investor spending has changed the market. Its so weird to see in action.

Overall, people seem to hate what they cant understand, and for a lot of reasons, there seems to be a general lack of understanding across the hobby that has perpetuated a negative view towards influencers and investors. Some of them absolutely deserve it for a lot of the reasons described above. They are either obviously pushing an agenda, furthering their own investment portfolio, or both. Others seem to be genuinely passionate about their hobby love. I think the discussion around both in the hobby is far from over, but its riveting to see people try to formulate a narrative that fits their own personalities. Some are very successful, others not as much. For me, the hobby is changed forever, and still as fun as it was back when I started writing in 2007. I dont think that will change anytime soon, either.