1,033 words, 5 minutes read time.
Everything you read online about football cards is so… anecdotal. Like bad gamblers, everyone only shares the extreme bad beats, or the crazy good luck.
“Downtowns are impossible to find!” shouts one. “I pulled a Kaboom! from a $2 pack I got at the hardware store,” claims another. People spend tons of money on wax, then turn around and advise others to just go buy singles if they want to get in the hobby – and then direct those same newbies to their own singles that they are selling. It’s disingenuous in some cases, many cases, at times.
So for this reason, much of what you read online you have to take with a full pinch, maybe even a pound of salt. Never mind just a grain.
One of the things I’ve read a lot is if you pull a big rookie, the move is simple – you should sell it *immediately* while the supply is low and the pricing is volatile. The grand slam move is you rip the top rookie QB(s) on the first day any given product is available, get it expedited to PSA to see if you can get it to Gem MINT 10, and try to set the market for it as high as you can.
For that to make sense, you would need to make the following, rather wild, leaps of judgement.
- You’d have to assume there are a negligible / low number of people doing this at the same time as you. Which would be irrational to assume, since this very idea is the communal suggestion what the best practice is. Which would then no longer be the best practice, if everyone was actually doing it.
- You’d have to assume that there is some magical buyer waiting to pay absolute top dollar for the privilege of buying a card at what would be, in this scenario, the highest price paid for a given card in the first couple of years until the market supposedly settles. That seems irrational from the buyer’s point of view when they could just wait, in this scenario, and get it for way less, later on.
- You’d have to agree with the prevailing wisdom that PSA 9s sell just as well or even slightly worse that nice looking raw (ungraded) cards, so it would make sense to, should you fail to get your PSA 10, crack open the slab and then sell it as a raw card. The assumption being here that someone would buy your card and gamble on grading it themselves.
It paints a crazy picture, when you stack it all together. There’s a term for this, it’s called the Greater Fool Theory. Click here for the the wikipedia link if you want to deep dive. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole in understanding why the buying/selling part of the hobby is so weird sometimes, you could also check out the following:
- Dunning / Krueger effect
- Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies
- Tulip Mania – one of the earliest and best documented cases of a speculation bubble
I saw a lot of this behaviour a couple of years ago when Bitcoin and Ethereum were blowing up. I actually got involved in crypto around that time. I bought and sold a little bit, largely to understand what the workflow was of buying and storing crypto in cold wallets and the ilk. I also read way more than my fair share of content on the stuff, and built a couple of crypto miner rigs.
There’s actual meat and content to be found in crypto, at the core of it. The premise really is revolutionary – it’s just hard to explain to the average person and it’s not marketed well.
I think sports cards are a bit like that as well.
Sometimes, we need to think about it better, and not get swept up in the poor marketing, the gamble, the get rich quick scheme. It’s only a hustle if the hustle is backed by passion. It’s just a grift if it’s all down to dollars and cents.
My litmus test is simple – if I rip or hit a big chase card, something great and universally valuable, and I’ve pulled some nice cards by now, I feel LUCKY. I feel like a winner, and I want to savor that feeling the same was I want to savor a blackjack at the casino. It’s fun! There’s nothing wrong with the gamble whatsoever, provided that’s not ALL you’re getting out of it.
Here’s one of our quick YouTube videos where I actually pulled the Macklin Celebrini Young Guns RC, and you’ll see what I mean:
By contrast, when I pull a card that *I* want to collect, I feel lucky, sure. But I also feel HAPPY.
Here’s a clip where I pulled a Sidney Crosby Young Guns Renewed:
My point is this – there’s a dozens of different ways to enjoy this hobby, but treating a sports card like a stock or a bitcoin or a tulip (if you read the article I linked above) and valuing it simply because you can sell it to someone else… I can’t imagine that is the best strategy.
Perhaps the greater fool, or even the greatest fool, is us? At times? When we get a little too carried away ‘flipping’ cards and forgetting that what we’re chasing here is the player we love watching, that we admire the character and the leadership and the amazing feats of athleticism each and every week.
I get it though, I see it both ways. The best rip is the next rip. Just don’t forget to ENJOY the hobby too!
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