Low-end and mid-end grading (submissions) market is dead, for now. Already graded stuff should see a spike up. It just won't be worth sending to another company to add 2x value for a 10. The risk just won't be worth the payoff. With PSA, they could go anywhere from 3-6x value for a 10. I just don't see that happening with any other grading company that may take a step forward during this time. Someday I'll tell my kids about the times I used to send 500-card bulk orders to PSA @ $5 per card.
Probably been discussed here already, but went to my LCS to get a 130 pt one touch for my Herbert card and they had hobby boxes of prizm basketball. $2k, holy crap. I can't believe people pay that
Three things to me are killing the fun of the hobby 1. The youtube breakers and people doing what they do. Rip open hundreds of boxes, get them them graded, sell and repeat while getting youtube money from views 2. Breakers. Buy up all the boxes in sight and make money breaking boxes that others can't get because they've bought them all. Drives up box prices as well. 3. The people who follow stockers around and buy all the boxes to immediately sell at a markup I dont mind too much people who play it like the stock market and buy guys they think will be good and flip the cards when value goes up.
I have legitimately walked in on the vendor restocking and I never got more than a few things. I have never bought anything with the intention of making a profit. I’ve sold some of what I’ve gotten but it’s to people I know and basically what I pay for it. Saw a guy who literally scooped up every good item put on the shelf simply bc he was first. Wish mob justice still played its part.
I've walked into a local target to find the vendor stocking the shelves maybe a handful of times. Of those times I think the most I ever came away with was 3 blasters of Bowman last summer. I will find the vendor but folks have already got all the good shit.
It's sad when you get there when they stock sometimes, almost an embarrassment to be there. Only happened to me twice. And once a "line" was forming and one lady showed up with stocker like she was following him and refused to join the line because she insisted she was there first with the stocker. Two groups in line were talking crap to each other about accusations of stealing stuff from people's carts and stuff. Really is the bottom of the barrel of the hobby there
My friend just sent me this site... https://gradingco.com/ 1. They grade cards without ever seeing them in person 2. They mail you their cases to encase the card yourself 3. They'll put ebay 1/1 on your case... 4. They are going to have celebrities grade cards and give custom cases designed by the celebrity. Hilarious to be honest
Just went to HGA and they are now limiting how many submissions they take a day, so I couldn't even do a submission with them
Pulled me a card today. Hadn’t seen anything retail for several weeks, found a lcs in a smaller town I was passing through and they 1) actually had a Chrome jumbo and 2) it was way less than online prices. Also Sheldon Neuse. That box had all of the Sheldon Neuse.
one of the Targets near me went to a one-per-UPC deal and it was honestly really nice. You still had to be there as they were stocking but I was pumped to get one blaster of Optic football to rip (until my best pull was a Swift RR) I really feel for kids today who want to get into the hobby but can't unless their family is wealthy
I live in Portland, and every place that sells puts a limit on how much you can buy (target 3 items, Fred Meyers 2) so that has helped finding stuff in retail, but it’s still pretty tough.
Funny I bought a box of chrome from my lcs when it came out and pulled the base version of that auto card and remember being disappointed because it was selling for literally $4 on ebay. Luckily thought it wasn't worth selling a rookie auto for $4 and it was put in a toploader and thrown in a box and sat a while until he got hot I knew I recognized the name. Its now in my psa voucher order I'm awaiting back. My other pull was Willi Castro who was also a less than $10 card but at least it was a tiger. But I thought I did awful. After a heck of a rookie year I think that castro sells about $40 now
The thing that gets me is retail was supposed to be fore the average collector and kids or the people who didn’t want to pay for the “Hobby prices”. Well now retail has become the hobby price and Hobby price is fucking crazy. I would just like to stroll into a store and grab 3-4 blasters every couple of weeks and rip them and see what I come up with. Then collect my PC and sell the rest in order to buy more. Well now everyone is buying to flip or grade and flip. I hardly ever run into a collector now they all just want The big names to try and flip. It’s just crazy out there what it takes to get a few boxes of cards. Maybe once the pandemic is over and all the extra unemployment runs out and people are forced to work again it will help.
I have one of his base autos that I screwed around and didn’t send in before grading prices went bonkers. Don’t think I have an option on this one, just hand my lcs guy some money and tell him to send it in fast.
Not the highest-end card ever but I'm pretty excited about this Immaculate Collegiate Tyler Johnson RPA/10 I picked up off eBay the other day. Patch is of the Outback logo from the Gophers Outback Bowl win two years ago which is one of the recent higher points of the program. He's wearing the jersey in the picture too which I like.
i know with target going to 8 am on fridays and meijer doing 3 pm on fridays, people with jobs are going to have a very tough time finding stuff.
Girlfriend bought me a retail box off Amazon thinking it was a hobby. I've kinda gotten her into ripping packs with me so it was fun regardless. Nothing too spectacular aside from this, a /99 vintage stock, and a /2021 gold base.
Tried to do an HGA sub today, they now make you log on at 8:45 and anyone logged on at 9 pm gets assigned a random number and they only taking 2750 new subs a day. I was spot 5446 in line...
I would be interested in seeing the numbers on how many cards were graded from the inception of PSA/Becket vs how many cards have been graded/submitted since this craze took off. My guess is it’s close to even.
They've been doing this for a few weeks now on Thursday and Friday. 5 card limit. If you arent less than 600 in the queue you don't have a chance. They want to try and get to 10,000 cards per week by mid Summer.
Picked up a box of 1989 Topps Traded off of Ebay for $40. I guess this around the time that Topps started to go downhill for football cards with Score coming out with theirs. The Score cards are worth more. The main cards are rookies for Barry Sanders, Aikman, and Deion.
I bought one of those Barry for like $5 a few months ago. Came in spectacular condition and actually sent it in with my recent psa voucher order. Pretty sure it will be a 10. Not crazy money, but that is for my PC
I was gonna suggest getting them grading but that's almost near impossible to do now. They look like they are in fantastic condition.
Yea cards like that not worth grading anymore with cost of grading. I sent mine in with a voucher that costed like $15 a card to grade. Would not have sent under current prices
Finally came across a target that had some 2021 topps fat packs left over from the bum rush. Limited to 3 items per person. First time I've seen them in the wild. And that was only because of a local Instagram sports card account giving the heads up. A few Kyle Lewis and luis robert cards but nothing too exciting. Refusing to do the constant checking of local targets this year or online flippers.
I found some in Target the other day. I bought the last 2 hangers they had. Have absolutely no clue if I got anything good because I don’t know baseball. I only got them because it’s the first packs I’ve found in 2 months and wanted to open anything.
https://www.paniniamerica.net/21-rated-rookie-retro-base.html 1990 Donruss Basketball Retro Rated Rookie sets are available right now on Panini's website for the next 2 days-ish. The football set has been going for $100+ on ebay. I would have loved to gotten one at $60 but had no idea it was even a thing.
Right now? Yes until we hit that point of saturation where we had 30 different products and you could get the hot rookie with ease. I don’t know if there is really a answer on when the craze will die down but I think we are hitting that tipping point where people are tired of buying blasters for $100 bucks and getting nothing out of them. Prizm hoops is going for crazy money and so far I haven’t seen many people getting a decent return on it. Until the masses quit paying $300 for a base Prizm rookie the craze will continue.
Upper Deck would be back to their old fuckery that cost them their licenses so maybe not as bad as one would think
The short version – Upper Deck found that a 620-case limited run of French-language hockey cards for sale in Canada had skyrocketed on the secondary market. The $409 wholesale cases of cards were going for as much as $10,000. So under McWilliam’s direction, they printed a small fortune in cards for company insiders – except that the 960 new cases ($9.6 million worth of essentially fraudulent new cards) crashed the market overnight, instantly screwing themselves and everyone who bought cases of cards on the good faith that the company wouldn’t do anything so patently unethical. And they didn't pay player royalties, causing them to lose their licenses around 2009
I’m sure there are other guys on here that are good with baseball too, but I’m willing to help with anything mlb you find that you have questions about. Just send me a dm if you want and I’ll help with any rookies or inserts you find.
I’m more interested in Topps(Bowman) getting rights to football and basketball again than UD returning.