7 ms·

Trading cards are cool again

116 points by jwithington 5y ago

stransky 5y ago
The only thing more boring that baseball is a baseball card.
pram 5y ago
Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  I think is the case that all the non speculative assets in producción (machines and labor(industrial employes)) are simply not worth, because is not individual problem the supply disruption, The investment and all that free money is simple put in speculative assets
- adam_arthur 5y ago
  Imagine if Elon Musk selling Tesla was the pin that pricked the everything bubble, hah. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-vzRkRwyjcHxYM1lYn3JA&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...
  - adventured 5y ago
    Or it's going to pop regardless and he readily senses the insanity of being worth ~$340b on paper as so many others also sense it ($315b gain in two years), and is using a ridiculous poll as a Musk-style ridiculous cover to finally secure some tangible wealth outside of the paper bubble valuation on Tesla (and to a lesser degree, SpaceX) and the large pile of debt-as-living ($6b and climbing) he's having to maintenance. Musk went from $100b to $340b in a year. He'd be a moron to not sell some of it, secure some safety capital, clear out his debts; if Tesla implodes, he can buy the stock all back; if Tesla's stock doesn't implode that just means he'll still be worth a zillion dollars, shareholders will be happy, and the sale won't have really mattered anyway. The only serious risk is that if the stock crashes shortly after he sells, he will never hear the end of it (and he'll have $20b in new cash to cry upon).
    - adam_arthur 5y ago
      Oh yeah, I absolutely think his intention was to sell from the start. His brother just sold a large chunk on Friday... totally not coincidental. He's also frequently made jokes about how overvalued the stock is... definitely knows it's totally mispriced/overvalued. Makes sense to diversify a bit either way. It may tank bigly before he can even sell though. I'm sure many will try to front run. But who knows, let's see.
  - xuki 5y ago
    1. Use bots to vote yes 2. Short TSLA 3. ??? 4. Profit
    - nly 5y ago
      Given how irrational TSLA is, he'll probably sell and the price will go up
      - jkhdigital 5y ago
        Yeah everyone will compete to be the one who bought Elon’s shares
- adventured 5y ago
  The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went up ten fold in less than two years, primarily during the pandemic bubble, and has now deflated by around 60-70% from the peak of the bubble. That card (and numerous others like it from other prominent players of the past 40-50 years) is unlikely to quickly reinflate back to the peak, it might take five or ten years to get back there. What isn't going to dramatically deflate, are the exceptional cards. The higher quality 1952 Mantle cards are not going to drop by 60-70%. The 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie in a PSA 10 is never going back to the days when it could be purchased for $10,000-$30,000. A high-end Lebron James rookie (seven figures) isn't likely to roll backwards by 70% from the peak. Those days are forever over. There is a lot of money willing to pay up for such cards. The high-end part of the card hobby is and will remain closer to behaving like the art market than like the mainstream cards-from-packs hobby. And the giant premiums that card companies can command for high-end boxes, they're not giving that up if they can avoid it, they have no interest in rolling that back to the old days. Granted, Fanatics and their new monopoly may screw everything up.
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    I don't know. How can you say "never" with such confidence? If we get a severe recession, it's hard to say that 25-year-old pieces of cardboard couldn't lose 70%.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    Yeah, the higher end is “different” because card grading is a gatekeeper into the market. There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.
  - leppr 5y ago
    Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      > Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).
      - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
        How is there more cheap consumer debt now than 20 years ago?
        jkhdigital 5y ago
        The answer to this question seems so self-evident that I’m not sure if you’re trolling or really just uninformed. To be fair, aggregate debt and interest rates don’t really tell the whole story, because credit providers are a lot more creative as well. Anecdotally, I routinely get offers for promotional low- or no-interest balances on unsecured credit (i.e. credit cards) that overlap such that I can fairly easily maintain a condition of “negative working capital” in excess of my annual income for maybe 2% APR.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
  Thing is everything feels frothy because people haven't reset their mental model on what the dollar is actually worth. Over the past year or so the Fed took every pre-pandemic dollar in your pocket and made it worth about 70-80 cents. PPIA (Post-Pandemic Inflation Adjusted) the values on a lot of things are just fine.
  - zdkl 5y ago
    There is (was) this concept of "cinema ticket based" inflation index that linked consumer level effective inflation to the price of one entry for a movie across the years. I wonder if anyone has published a somewhat large scale estimation of the "post pandemic inflation" adjustment from a collection of these (consumer level) frothy assets.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Even if there were a direct relationship between printing and inflation, this wouldn't make sense. Pokemon cards aren't up 25%, which is what you'd expect if dollars were worth 80% as much and everything rose to accommodate. Pokemon cards are up way way way more than 25%.
    - MrPatan 5y ago
      Why would that be the case? Inflation doesn't put 25% more dollars in the pockets of people willing to buy Pokemon cards. It's distributed differently. Plus the existence of high inflation makes people demand inflation hedges way more, so why wouldn't they go up in price faster than inflation?
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        Why not the opposite then? Why wouldn't 25% inflation fail to lead to higher trading card prices? Very quickly, this argument becomes fully disconnected from any principle when you say that any amount of inflation can lead to any arbitrary price change, as it lets us blame literally anything on inflation.
  - throaway46546 5y ago
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  > That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance. Even Limited Edition Warhammer books have been selling for absurd prices. Many books are selling for 10 to 20 times RRP. It’s been very odd to see
  - nly 5y ago
    I see this as the result of overall inequality. Only the wealthy with nothing better to spend a marginal % of their capital on, the middle class (good income) indebting themselves up the balls, and speculators looking to profit from the prior two categories, are buying these things at these crazy prices. Some poor folk might fall in to the speculator category, but they're taking huge personal risk on what they hope is a ticket to riches. Same goes for Bitcoin imho
kadabra9 5y ago
As someone who has been into cards and collectibles all my life, the past few years have been wild to say the least. What we saw in 2020/early 2021 was really a classic bubble - FOMO buying pushing prices to unsustainable levels. Then throw in the grading shutdown caused by backlog of new collectors and investors sending in millions of garbage base cards for grading, clogging up the grading companies, plus profit taking from the insane prices, and we get the pullback we saw in Q2. Like everything else, the collectible market comes down to supply and demand. Focus on rare cards - numbered cards, colored paralells, refractors etc…the supply is much lower and are generally safer bets because collectors are always chasing them.
- exdsq 5y ago
  Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? Seems like something I’d enjoy trying as a side-hustle but never really done before outside of Pokémon
  - kadabra9 5y ago
    Both. I have cards for certain players, teams or inserts that I buy to collect, if I can make money on them great, if not I enjoy having them in my personal collection (PC). Then there are cards I’ll buy anticipating a rise in value with the intention to sell in 6-12 months or longer. Typically this involves buying rare cards or good players of sports in off seasons when demand dries up, so for example I was buying a lot of big name football cards over the summer when the football news cycle was slow, and recently moved to buying basketball leading into the NBA season.
  - burntoutfire 5y ago
    > Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? I never got the idea of being a hobby collector in modern times. Nowadays, everything is available on the Internet for sale, so completing the collection is only a matter of coughing up enough money. How is that interesting or exciting? I can still understand collecting items which aren't mass produced for the purpose of being collected - things such as history/war memorabilia, rare books fro XIX century etc. There, every item can be unique and obtaining them can demand more from the collector than just typing in their credit card numbers.
lettergram 5y ago
My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Or cryptocurrencies. Picking on NFTs, at least I can frame and look at a baseball card, maybe show it to visitors. NFTs have even less utility.
  - jtsiskin 5y ago
    If this were true, counterfeit baseball cards should have the same value as “real” ones, and I would have a very profitable company producing beautiful Mickey Mantle cards. So where do you think the real value is?
- brianwawok 5y ago
  I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder. But hey, I could be wrong.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Not only can’t you hold it, but anyone can trivially get their own identical copy of it.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      I don't understand why they don't encode the image in base64, so it appears as a alphanumeric string instead of a .png in the DOM. You could still screenshot it, I guess.
    - jtsiskin 5y ago
      I can make a counterfeit baseball or Pokémon trading card which looks identical to the real thing, or even “better”. Yet those don’t sell for nearly as much. Why is that?
noduerme 5y ago
I wonder if it's relevant that the golden age of trading cards, the 60s, was prelude to a decade of rampant inflation. A friend of mine said in late 2020, w/r/t the explosion of NFTs, that we'd look back on it from the great depression of 2028 as the moment when the dollar became worthless, although most people hadn't realized it yet.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Why would you say the 60s was a golden age of trading cards? The iconic cards were printed in the 50s (Boomers' childhood years). Prices didn't get crazy until the late 80s.
cletus 5y ago
From scanning this, it sounds like the author is specifically talking about sports trading cards, most characterized by baseball cards. This market certainly went crazy price-wise but then, as the author pointed out, tanked. It basically tanked because everyone started collecting the cards. Like any collectible market, it mainly took off to begin with because no one was collecting these things and keeping them in mint condition. The realization of that then created oversupply. I can't speak much for that market but in the past year Pokemon in particular has exploded, to the point where the the ratings companies where so inundated with submissions that they had to stop accepting them. The Pokemon market seems to have cooled but prices for mint condition first edition cards still seem to be pretty high. It's impossible to predict where this market will go just like any collectible market because it's so driven by market sentiment.
- nly 5y ago
  NFTs are collectables and subject to the same trajectory.
  - fny 5y ago
    I don't understand who can afford these with gas prices so high. NFTs aren't some typical trading card market. I think it's mostly tax evasion and some wealth posturing. You create an NFT sell it to yourself, the price tanks you deduct it from your taxes and then sit on a pile of USD coin in another wallet that no one knows about.
    - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
      I doubt there is any jurisdiction in which one could deduct losses on a collectible of any kind, let alone an NFT, let alone unrealized losses. The real use is, you have $X dollars that you acquired by doing crimes. You want to buy a yacht with that money, but you don't want the authorities asking questions. So you sell an NFT to yourself, attribute your crime money to getting lucky in crypto, pay taxes on it, and poof! You're on a boat.
- capableweb 5y ago
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Does anyone ask themselves why they collect? I collect everything. I don't have the room to be a Horder, but my compulsion to collect us strong, with the exception of money. I should be collecting money, but that has been too hard for myself. I started off collecting snails. I would put them on my Tonka Truck, and they were workers. The guys on the roof were the bosses. The others placed all around the truck bed had their own function. As a kid, I was lonely and the garden snails were my friends. (My mom made me put them back after playing.) I then went into marbles. Kindergarten through 1st grade I was crazy about marbles. I loved them all. The ceramic ones were my favorite because I imagined they were rare, or had a long history behind them. I imagined they were made in a magical exotic country. I then grew up, and life got in the way. My collecting days were put on hold. In my twenties, it was first edition books, and any old advertisements, or advertising. I then got into collecting watches. I never went crazy, but I knew I needed to stop. I stopped by learning Watchmaking. Even then--I went from collecting watches to collecting tooling. I'm now so depressed I don't collect anything due to a lot of reasons. I guess it was about the hunt? Then again, I still look at some of my old books and can't imagine someone mot seeing the value. Someone tossed a 1st edition of The Deep. It was not price clipped, and in mylar wrap. I am still astonished the original owner didn't see the value. I don't have a point. I just know I'm a Collector at heart. Maybe if I had a more full life, my addiction might be different. It was never a addiction. It was just a passion. I'm the guy at the beach looking for shiny rocks, even when I was physically passable, and should have been paying more attention to my girlfriend. I still remember Ingrid saying I came to the beach to be with you, and not collecting small pieces of agate.
- throaway46546 5y ago
  I just want to say you sound like a cool and interesting person. I have noticed a lot of similar patterns in my life including struggling with depression. I'm not really sure the point of my reply, but I felt compelled to make it. Reading your post made me actually smile. I don't know maybe it's just feeling like I'm not alone. Thank you.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  The book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari [1] explains the hunter-gatherer is deeply engrained in our cultural behaviour because it helped with our survival. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens
March_f6 5y ago
Recently parlayed all of my 1st edition Pokémon cards into Magic cards so I could play at local stores. Been a great way to meet new people in a safe way during the pandemic and to collect.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
trading cards have always been cool as far as I know... I just sold one of my kid's pokemon card for ~$100... he has better plans for that money
exogeny 5y ago
If I'm Goldin, there is absolutely no way I'd be openly promoting the fact that Deshaun Watson invested in us.
hgibbs 5y ago
At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to play with my friend, as well as introduce the game to other friends. It's a lot of fun and I've only scratched the surface of the game; as an example we have only been playing with preconstructed decks, while most people will design a deck and purchase the required cards. I think the game design really lends itself to being enjoyed by programmers: building a deck is about looking for combos/synergy between cards, high level play requires knowing the exact way that turns resolve and how/when you can respond to other players actions. I think there has been a lot of stigma around tcg for a while, but the truth is it is just fun. As an aside, my gf has been collecting Pokemon cards. The high premium for a Charizard is known as 'the lizard tax' by the community, which I think is hilarious.
- dimator 5y ago
  Ah I wish I had a friend like you. I wanted badly to get into the game, and I tried to get people into it without success. My spouse tried once but it was most definitely not her thing. I went to a little tcg bootstrapping event at my local game store (way before covid), and that was fun, but everyone else there was such a pro that I felt really intimidated and out of place. Anyway now I have a little pile of cards in a drawer :(
  - curryst 5y ago
    It's not quite as fun, but you can play MTG: Arena on a phone or laptop to learn the game enough to keep up. It's free, and made by the same company. You only have to pay if you don't want to play enough to earn cards, or want to build decks with a lot of rare cards (which are not common to see in Quickplay). There are also online platforms that let you use real cards to play online. It's like Zoom, but with health counters and you aim your webcam at your board. Or, if you go to an event, tell people you're new and ask if they want to play a jank game. Jank decks are basically decks that people like for reasons other than it being effective, i.e. a deck of cards they just like the art on, or that uses an effect that's fun but not very good. That should bring the power level down to where you can actually compete. Also, don't be afraid to ask people to break something down. I've never seen anyone be upset about that. The Magic rules are 400 something pages long, and most cards have had online rule clarifications added to them individually. No one is expecting you to just "know" how everything works. It's a fun game, I wish you luck in finding a group! I think Reddit has an active MTG community, you could look there.
DeathArrow 5y ago
I would rather collect something that is valuable than something that is "cool".
- iamacyborg 5y ago
  Collectibles being “cool” is how they become valuable
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    Neither stamps nor paintings are cool. And yet they are valuable.
    - iamacyborg 5y ago
      Stamps, sure, but paintings from certain artists are definitely considered "cool".
mro_name 5y ago
My kid couldn't agree more. The topic, however, sadly changes 2x per year from pokemon to ninjago and back.
dools 5y ago
Anything that is based purely on speculation will swing wildly. Crypto, baseball cards, beanie babies, sneakers, Magic the gathering, etc.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(
- gambiting 5y ago
  Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff). Find a Facebook group local to you and ask. You can just say you're looking to get rid of the entire collection if someone is willing to price it up for you, if you don't want to go through the effort yourself. That's how I see people selling their cards usually.
  - bilbo991 5y ago
    > Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff) Make sure to ask the store employees if this is okay first. I know my store at least has a "trade only" policy on the property. I am not sure how common this is however.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Either prepare to sell the whole thing for much less than 5k, or sell individually (which takes a lot of effort). I put my collection on eBay and ended up trading them for a bunch of SGI machines. This was back in 2003 or so. I had a lot more pleasure from these machines than the cards (worth much more, I est 3k EUR back then), but financially it wasn't a good trade. I am going to give away my Star Wars collection (cards from 4 to 6 only) to a Star Wars fanatic who is fan of 4 to 6. Its also why I knew spending money on World of Warcraft was not worth it (you can sell your entire B.net account only), same with Hearthstone. These are CCG but not tradeable. NFT are even more worthless. They give you nothing.
dmurray 5y ago
Off topic, but I quite like the choice of using a domain name for a single blog post. Who needs IPFS - we already have real content-based addressing here.
asimovfan 5y ago
you know whats cool now? hearthstone's battlegrounds. its a mix of poker and pokemon.

116 points by jwithington 5y ago

The only thing more boring that baseball is a baseball card.

pram 5y ago

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

imachine1980_ 5y ago
I think is the case that all the non speculative assets in producción (machines and labor(industrial employes)) are simply not worth, because is not individual problem the supply disruption, The investment and all that free money is simple put in speculative assets
adam_arthur 5y ago
Imagine if Elon Musk selling Tesla was the pin that pricked the everything bubble, hah. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-vzRkRwyjcHxYM1lYn3JA&s=19 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...
- adventured 5y ago
  Or it's going to pop regardless and he readily senses the insanity of being worth ~$340b on paper as so many others also sense it ($315b gain in two years), and is using a ridiculous poll as a Musk-style ridiculous cover to finally secure some tangible wealth outside of the paper bubble valuation on Tesla (and to a lesser degree, SpaceX) and the large pile of debt-as-living ($6b and climbing) he's having to maintenance. Musk went from $100b to $340b in a year. He'd be a moron to not sell some of it, secure some safety capital, clear out his debts; if Tesla implodes, he can buy the stock all back; if Tesla's stock doesn't implode that just means he'll still be worth a zillion dollars, shareholders will be happy, and the sale won't have really mattered anyway. The only serious risk is that if the stock crashes shortly after he sells, he will never hear the end of it (and he'll have $20b in new cash to cry upon).
  - adam_arthur 5y ago
    Oh yeah, I absolutely think his intention was to sell from the start. His brother just sold a large chunk on Friday... totally not coincidental. He's also frequently made jokes about how overvalued the stock is... definitely knows it's totally mispriced/overvalued. Makes sense to diversify a bit either way. It may tank bigly before he can even sell though. I'm sure many will try to front run. But who knows, let's see.
- xuki 5y ago
  1. Use bots to vote yes 2. Short TSLA 3. ??? 4. Profit
  - nly 5y ago
    Given how irrational TSLA is, he'll probably sell and the price will go up
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      Yeah everyone will compete to be the one who bought Elon’s shares
adventured 5y ago
The higher-end of the card collecting hobby has changed permanently. The card companies are putting a lot of effort and money into producing unique or otherwise limited cards (autographs, relics, rare prints, etc). That's not going to stop. For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went up ten fold in less than two years, primarily during the pandemic bubble, and has now deflated by around 60-70% from the peak of the bubble. That card (and numerous others like it from other prominent players of the past 40-50 years) is unlikely to quickly reinflate back to the peak, it might take five or ten years to get back there. What isn't going to dramatically deflate, are the exceptional cards. The higher quality 1952 Mantle cards are not going to drop by 60-70%. The 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie in a PSA 10 is never going back to the days when it could be purchased for $10,000-$30,000. A high-end Lebron James rookie (seven figures) isn't likely to roll backwards by 70% from the peak. Those days are forever over. There is a lot of money willing to pay up for such cards. The high-end part of the card hobby is and will remain closer to behaving like the art market than like the mainstream cards-from-packs hobby. And the giant premiums that card companies can command for high-end boxes, they're not giving that up if they can avoid it, they have no interest in rolling that back to the old days. Granted, Fanatics and their new monopoly may screw everything up.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  I don't know. How can you say "never" with such confidence? If we get a severe recession, it's hard to say that 25-year-old pieces of cardboard couldn't lose 70%.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Yeah, the higher end is “different” because card grading is a gatekeeper into the market. There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.
whatshisface 5y ago
It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.
- leppr 5y ago
  Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling. Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    > Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).
    - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
      How is there more cheap consumer debt now than 20 years ago?
      - jkhdigital 5y ago
        The answer to this question seems so self-evident that I’m not sure if you’re trolling or really just uninformed. To be fair, aggregate debt and interest rates don’t really tell the whole story, because credit providers are a lot more creative as well. Anecdotally, I routinely get offers for promotional low- or no-interest balances on unsecured credit (i.e. credit cards) that overlap such that I can fairly easily maintain a condition of “negative working capital” in excess of my annual income for maybe 2% APR.
dQw4w9WgXcQ 5y ago
Thing is everything feels frothy because people haven't reset their mental model on what the dollar is actually worth. Over the past year or so the Fed took every pre-pandemic dollar in your pocket and made it worth about 70-80 cents. PPIA (Post-Pandemic Inflation Adjusted) the values on a lot of things are just fine.
- zdkl 5y ago
  There is (was) this concept of "cinema ticket based" inflation index that linked consumer level effective inflation to the price of one entry for a movie across the years. I wonder if anyone has published a somewhat large scale estimation of the "post pandemic inflation" adjustment from a collection of these (consumer level) frothy assets.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Even if there were a direct relationship between printing and inflation, this wouldn't make sense. Pokemon cards aren't up 25%, which is what you'd expect if dollars were worth 80% as much and everything rose to accommodate. Pokemon cards are up way way way more than 25%.
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    Why would that be the case? Inflation doesn't put 25% more dollars in the pockets of people willing to buy Pokemon cards. It's distributed differently. Plus the existence of high inflation makes people demand inflation hedges way more, so why wouldn't they go up in price faster than inflation?
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Why not the opposite then? Why wouldn't 25% inflation fail to lead to higher trading card prices? Very quickly, this argument becomes fully disconnected from any principle when you say that any amount of inflation can lead to any arbitrary price change, as it lets us blame literally anything on inflation.
- throaway46546 5y ago
iamacyborg 5y ago
> That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance. Even Limited Edition Warhammer books have been selling for absurd prices. Many books are selling for 10 to 20 times RRP. It’s been very odd to see
- nly 5y ago
  I see this as the result of overall inequality. Only the wealthy with nothing better to spend a marginal % of their capital on, the middle class (good income) indebting themselves up the balls, and speculators looking to profit from the prior two categories, are buying these things at these crazy prices. Some poor folk might fall in to the speculator category, but they're taking huge personal risk on what they hope is a ticket to riches. Same goes for Bitcoin imho

kadabra9 5y ago

As someone who has been into cards and collectibles all my life, the past few years have been wild to say the least. What we saw in 2020/early 2021 was really a classic bubble - FOMO buying pushing prices to unsustainable levels. Then throw in the grading shutdown caused by backlog of new collectors and investors sending in millions of garbage base cards for grading, clogging up the grading companies, plus profit taking from the insane prices, and we get the pullback we saw in Q2. Like everything else, the collectible market comes down to supply and demand. Focus on rare cards - numbered cards, colored paralells, refractors etc…the supply is much lower and are generally safer bets because collectors are always chasing them.

exdsq 5y ago
Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? Seems like something I’d enjoy trying as a side-hustle but never really done before outside of Pokémon
- kadabra9 5y ago
  Both. I have cards for certain players, teams or inserts that I buy to collect, if I can make money on them great, if not I enjoy having them in my personal collection (PC). Then there are cards I’ll buy anticipating a rise in value with the intention to sell in 6-12 months or longer. Typically this involves buying rare cards or good players of sports in off seasons when demand dries up, so for example I was buying a lot of big name football cards over the summer when the football news cycle was slow, and recently moved to buying basketball leading into the NBA season.
- burntoutfire 5y ago
  > Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? I never got the idea of being a hobby collector in modern times. Nowadays, everything is available on the Internet for sale, so completing the collection is only a matter of coughing up enough money. How is that interesting or exciting? I can still understand collecting items which aren't mass produced for the purpose of being collected - things such as history/war memorabilia, rare books fro XIX century etc. There, every item can be unique and obtaining them can demand more from the collector than just typing in their credit card numbers.

lettergram 5y ago

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

dehrmann 5y ago
Or cryptocurrencies. Picking on NFTs, at least I can frame and look at a baseball card, maybe show it to visitors. NFTs have even less utility.
- jtsiskin 5y ago
  If this were true, counterfeit baseball cards should have the same value as “real” ones, and I would have a very profitable company producing beautiful Mickey Mantle cards. So where do you think the real value is?
brianwawok 5y ago
I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder. But hey, I could be wrong.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Not only can’t you hold it, but anyone can trivially get their own identical copy of it.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I don't understand why they don't encode the image in base64, so it appears as a alphanumeric string instead of a .png in the DOM. You could still screenshot it, I guess.
  - jtsiskin 5y ago
    I can make a counterfeit baseball or Pokémon trading card which looks identical to the real thing, or even “better”. Yet those don’t sell for nearly as much. Why is that?

noduerme 5y ago

I wonder if it's relevant that the golden age of trading cards, the 60s, was prelude to a decade of rampant inflation. A friend of mine said in late 2020, w/r/t the explosion of NFTs, that we'd look back on it from the great depression of 2028 as the moment when the dollar became worthless, although most people hadn't realized it yet.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago
Why would you say the 60s was a golden age of trading cards? The iconic cards were printed in the 50s (Boomers' childhood years). Prices didn't get crazy until the late 80s.

cletus 5y ago

From scanning this, it sounds like the author is specifically talking about sports trading cards, most characterized by baseball cards. This market certainly went crazy price-wise but then, as the author pointed out, tanked. It basically tanked because everyone started collecting the cards. Like any collectible market, it mainly took off to begin with because no one was collecting these things and keeping them in mint condition. The realization of that then created oversupply. I can't speak much for that market but in the past year Pokemon in particular has exploded, to the point where the the ratings companies where so inundated with submissions that they had to stop accepting them. The Pokemon market seems to have cooled but prices for mint condition first edition cards still seem to be pretty high. It's impossible to predict where this market will go just like any collectible market because it's so driven by market sentiment.

nly 5y ago
NFTs are collectables and subject to the same trajectory.
- fny 5y ago
  I don't understand who can afford these with gas prices so high. NFTs aren't some typical trading card market. I think it's mostly tax evasion and some wealth posturing. You create an NFT sell it to yourself, the price tanks you deduct it from your taxes and then sit on a pile of USD coin in another wallet that no one knows about.
  - ProjectArcturis 5y ago
    I doubt there is any jurisdiction in which one could deduct losses on a collectible of any kind, let alone an NFT, let alone unrealized losses. The real use is, you have $X dollars that you acquired by doing crimes. You want to buy a yacht with that money, but you don't want the authorities asking questions. So you sell an NFT to yourself, attribute your crime money to getting lucky in crypto, pay taxes on it, and poof! You're on a boat.
capableweb 5y ago

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Does anyone ask themselves why they collect? I collect everything. I don't have the room to be a Horder, but my compulsion to collect us strong, with the exception of money. I should be collecting money, but that has been too hard for myself. I started off collecting snails. I would put them on my Tonka Truck, and they were workers. The guys on the roof were the bosses. The others placed all around the truck bed had their own function. As a kid, I was lonely and the garden snails were my friends. (My mom made me put them back after playing.) I then went into marbles. Kindergarten through 1st grade I was crazy about marbles. I loved them all. The ceramic ones were my favorite because I imagined they were rare, or had a long history behind them. I imagined they were made in a magical exotic country. I then grew up, and life got in the way. My collecting days were put on hold. In my twenties, it was first edition books, and any old advertisements, or advertising. I then got into collecting watches. I never went crazy, but I knew I needed to stop. I stopped by learning Watchmaking. Even then--I went from collecting watches to collecting tooling. I'm now so depressed I don't collect anything due to a lot of reasons. I guess it was about the hunt? Then again, I still look at some of my old books and can't imagine someone mot seeing the value. Someone tossed a 1st edition of The Deep. It was not price clipped, and in mylar wrap. I am still astonished the original owner didn't see the value. I don't have a point. I just know I'm a Collector at heart. Maybe if I had a more full life, my addiction might be different. It was never a addiction. It was just a passion. I'm the guy at the beach looking for shiny rocks, even when I was physically passable, and should have been paying more attention to my girlfriend. I still remember Ingrid saying I came to the beach to be with you, and not collecting small pieces of agate.

throaway46546 5y ago
I just want to say you sound like a cool and interesting person. I have noticed a lot of similar patterns in my life including struggling with depression. I'm not really sure the point of my reply, but I felt compelled to make it. Reading your post made me actually smile. I don't know maybe it's just feeling like I'm not alone. Thank you.
Fnoord 5y ago
The book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari [1] explains the hunter-gatherer is deeply engrained in our cultural behaviour because it helped with our survival. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens

March_f6 5y ago

Recently parlayed all of my 1st edition Pokémon cards into Magic cards so I could play at local stores. Been a great way to meet new people in a safe way during the pandemic and to collect.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

trading cards have always been cool as far as I know... I just sold one of my kid's pokemon card for ~$100... he has better plans for that money

exogeny 5y ago

If I'm Goldin, there is absolutely no way I'd be openly promoting the fact that Deshaun Watson invested in us.

hgibbs 5y ago

At the beginning of the most recent lockdown in my city I had been introduced by a friend to magic (specifically commander), and I had played enough with him to have started to be annoyed at how often I was losing - so I went out and bought a couple of decks. My girlfriend and I were immediately hooked, and have been playing every other day since then (2-3 months now). Now that the lockdown has lifted I am able to play with my friend, as well as introduce the game to other friends. It's a lot of fun and I've only scratched the surface of the game; as an example we have only been playing with preconstructed decks, while most people will design a deck and purchase the required cards. I think the game design really lends itself to being enjoyed by programmers: building a deck is about looking for combos/synergy between cards, high level play requires knowing the exact way that turns resolve and how/when you can respond to other players actions. I think there has been a lot of stigma around tcg for a while, but the truth is it is just fun. As an aside, my gf has been collecting Pokemon cards. The high premium for a Charizard is known as 'the lizard tax' by the community, which I think is hilarious.

dimator 5y ago
Ah I wish I had a friend like you. I wanted badly to get into the game, and I tried to get people into it without success. My spouse tried once but it was most definitely not her thing. I went to a little tcg bootstrapping event at my local game store (way before covid), and that was fun, but everyone else there was such a pro that I felt really intimidated and out of place. Anyway now I have a little pile of cards in a drawer :(
- curryst 5y ago
  It's not quite as fun, but you can play MTG: Arena on a phone or laptop to learn the game enough to keep up. It's free, and made by the same company. You only have to pay if you don't want to play enough to earn cards, or want to build decks with a lot of rare cards (which are not common to see in Quickplay). There are also online platforms that let you use real cards to play online. It's like Zoom, but with health counters and you aim your webcam at your board. Or, if you go to an event, tell people you're new and ask if they want to play a jank game. Jank decks are basically decks that people like for reasons other than it being effective, i.e. a deck of cards they just like the art on, or that uses an effect that's fun but not very good. That should bring the power level down to where you can actually compete. Also, don't be afraid to ask people to break something down. I've never seen anyone be upset about that. The Magic rules are 400 something pages long, and most cards have had online rule clarifications added to them individually. No one is expecting you to just "know" how everything works. It's a fun game, I wish you luck in finding a group! I think Reddit has an active MTG community, you could look there.

DeathArrow 5y ago

I would rather collect something that is valuable than something that is "cool".

iamacyborg 5y ago
Collectibles being “cool” is how they become valuable
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  Neither stamps nor paintings are cool. And yet they are valuable.
  - iamacyborg 5y ago
    Stamps, sure, but paintings from certain artists are definitely considered "cool".

mro_name 5y ago

My kid couldn't agree more. The topic, however, sadly changes 2x per year from pokemon to ninjago and back.

dools 5y ago

Anything that is based purely on speculation will swing wildly. Crypto, baseball cards, beanie babies, sneakers, Magic the gathering, etc.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(

gambiting 5y ago
Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff). Find a Facebook group local to you and ask. You can just say you're looking to get rid of the entire collection if someone is willing to price it up for you, if you don't want to go through the effort yourself. That's how I see people selling their cards usually.
- bilbo991 5y ago
  > Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff) Make sure to ask the store employees if this is okay first. I know my store at least has a "trade only" policy on the property. I am not sure how common this is however.
Fnoord 5y ago
Either prepare to sell the whole thing for much less than 5k, or sell individually (which takes a lot of effort). I put my collection on eBay and ended up trading them for a bunch of SGI machines. This was back in 2003 or so. I had a lot more pleasure from these machines than the cards (worth much more, I est 3k EUR back then), but financially it wasn't a good trade. I am going to give away my Star Wars collection (cards from 4 to 6 only) to a Star Wars fanatic who is fan of 4 to 6. Its also why I knew spending money on World of Warcraft was not worth it (you can sell your entire B.net account only), same with Hearthstone. These are CCG but not tradeable. NFT are even more worthless. They give you nothing.

dmurray 5y ago

Off topic, but I quite like the choice of using a domain name for a single blog post. Who needs IPFS - we already have real content-based addressing here.

asimovfan 5y ago

you know whats cool now? hearthstone's battlegrounds. its a mix of poker and pokemon.