welcome back to another episode of card ladder confidential here on the stacking slabs network it's that time of the month where i talk about the analytical and emotional side of collecting with josh johnson and chris mcgill from the card ladder team there is a topic that i have been circling when it comes to my content and i know josh and chris have thoughts and opinions when it comes to this topic but the topic i'm digging into today with chris and josh is what the market cannot price i think it is so easy to look at all of the sales that are going on and manufacture our thoughts on what we should chase what we should collect what we should buy because the market is moving in one direction but oftentimes it is our conviction our confidence in our own collection which keeps us here and keeps us making decisions that are likely better than what the market is telling us and most certainly give us more satisfaction so we're talking about that today with chris and josh we appreciate you being here if you're not already make sure you're using card ladder it is the only app i use when it comes to tracking my collection looking at recent sales and keeping a pulse on what's going on so make sure you're signed up for card ladder if you're not already what are you doing if you wanna show your support for stacking slabs and the broader network hit the follow button tell a damn friend run on over the patreon group it is card ladder confidential it is episode twenty three it is here for you we're back card ladder confidential episode number twenty three which is significant based on the collections of chris and josh i joked before that we are going to spend the entire time debating jordan and lebron we're not actually gonna do that because that would be very generic and we don't do that here we bring topics that are unique or i hope are unique and are interesting and we're gonna be talking about what the market cannot price today probably a lot of theoretical and philosophical thinking i'm assuming that is gonna come from this but we start things off with a cold open question when we do these and i'm sure there's many but i want to know what is one card in each of your collections that you likely value more than the current market value i'll start with josh josh what is the card that you think you value more than the market does right now in your collection well probably most of them otherwise i wouldn't have bought them but i have a i have what i think is the best answer for this and it's my twenty fifteen prizm black pulsar todd gurley todd gurley is obviously my favorite football player i pc him i have lots of his cards that came up for auction i was like i am going to win this card and i put in a mega bid of a mega bid i think i bid like twenty seven thousand dollars and i got it for four thousand so i think you can kinda get there's like your story of how much i overvalued it based on everyone else what is it about that card itself obviously you've got a pretty substantial girly collection when that card came up you wanted it but to have that big of a mega bed and what was it about that card specifically that you were attracted one so it's like i just have to get this card there's i just have to i based on everything else i've invested into girlie both financially personally emotionally i just have to win this card so if his like finest super factor came up or like his topps chrome super i probably wouldn't go as crazy but those are two other ones where i've just you know i've gotten this far i gotta get them chris what is your response to this question yeah i love the prism black polestar twenty fifteen callout because it just becomes more appealing to me every as the years roll by because it was the only year they did it and it stood in for the finite so i happen to like the black pulsar more and more as time goes on my answer is you have no brett if i gave you a thousand guesses you wouldn't even you wouldn't even be able to guess the the player you wouldn't even i don't even think you'd be able to guess the sport oh i would get it right yeah i think josh does here's my answer alright it is a wayne gretzky card that i own and it's from nineteen ninety eight topps gold label so gretzky's first one of one cards began in nineteen ninety eight so this is from the first year of gretzky one of ones and it's actually the class three red label one of one which pairs with my ninety eight patent nicely and you know the class three is a really interesting card because there's just two versions of it there's the one of one and there's the base which has twenty five copies so the gretzky red out of twenty five base sells once in a while i think last time i sold it was years ago but i was able to swoop in and get this one of one which is twenty five times as rare for about three times the price of the red twenty five so that's just like using the undercard comparison where it's like well the lower version has twenty five copies this one has one mine costs about three times as much as the lower version costs so that feels like great value but also there's this whole other story which is like that card doesn't even need to be sandboxed together with the red three base because it's the first year of gretzky one of one cards so it has this whole other arc to it that makes it really special too and then the topps connection topps' first hockey one of ones so you know and you have the topps lineage going back to the gretzky topps rookie and everything so that would be my answer i i've never even shown this card i was gonna say i i feel like i just was granted a private screening of the hosh cast that hasn't come out yet so thank you for sharing that with the stacking slabs audience gurley gretzky good place to start so this conversation i think is going to hopefully kinda bring up some of these questions that we are all trying to acquire cards right now and a lot of the times they're not cards that are on a marketplace they're in private collections and i've been thinking about this a lot and just the value that people place on cards especially the value when it's maybe not easily available from today's price perspective in card ladder so we're gonna get into that we're gonna start with the owner's price and i wanna question i wanna kinda kick things off with is what do you think creates value for the owner that cannot be seen in a comparable sale and this i think the question can open up a lot of doors for this conversation and i'm very very interested in hearing both your perspectives and since i started with josh maybe chris will start with you with this question yeah i think the gresky is a great example because you know the seller had one price in mind and you know they had a certain number they wanted to see and then i had a totally different approach or maybe a similar approach i don't really know what the seller had in mind but for me there were several things that added value to this that you might not see if you just look at a market price like pairing it with the patent that was a big part of my excitement to get this card is that you know i have peyton's ninety eight topps gold label class three red one of one now i have the exact same version of that card but for gretzky so the pairing made it a little more valuable to me probably than some others who would be in the markets and then i also have this understanding and appreciation for firsts so that being the first year that gretzky had one of one cards and that being part of sort of that whole early era of the one of one in general added a lot of value to me too that maybe other market participants didn't see or didn't care about so there's there's that card i think is a good jumping off point it is a great jumping off point and josh i maybe i will hit the pairings topic with you on this question because just thinking about your lebron collection over the years like you have so many pieces that are interconnected based on the runs runs of like tops chrome gold runs and just different exquisite pieces and meant talk about the gurley collection maybe it can be associated with gurley but like when you think about the value you have in cards in your collection like how important or how much more valuable are those cards to you when they're paired with something else that is similar adjacent well i've kinda deviated away from the tufts chrome and exquisite and moved more obviously into the one zero one stuff i've started to like slowly unveil some of those lebrons and like my football pc is literally all one of ones so the pairing is probably more so of like pairing players that i like from different eras or teams or whatever and and less so on like runs of of things but i do try to get like all the optic vinyls for a given player i try to pair the finites together i try to pair gurley's pulsar with his finite from his second and third year so there's like some bit of pairing but at this point i'm just like after any one of one of a player i like and just gobbling them up vacuuming them in so the way you you've collected in the past and just with a player as popular as lebron and getting these high profile cards and even though there's not just one copy in many cases there's fifty copies but the demand on these cards are crazy because everyone wants like gold lebronze or exquisite lebronze for instance now that you're moving into this world of one of one of ones i wanna maybe talk about like replacement difficulty i think when we get into this one of one train we buy the cards because they're unique no one else can have them but us but sometimes like there's time to sell these cards or maybe we don't wanna sell the cards but someone comes to us with an offer you can't replace a one of one so like how do you think about the way you have thought selling cards if you're pursuing another card in the past as you're building this entire collection that's essentially probably gonna reach this point where it's all one of ones like how do you think about that josh well now i basically treat it as like i have five cdlam plinites i can probably survive with three so if i have to chop something it's like maybe where that would be my range of duplication but in general like i just if they're all one on ones i'll just i'll just like keep them all i just don't even care anymore i'm learning out of things to like trade and sell that aren't one on ones to your point so i would have to like make some tough decisions on you know this is a one on one i have to sell it for example if i need to get money for something else then i'm i really am like making the decision to never get this thing back but yeah it's like probably just like sell the rookie of something one on one where i've got maybe like his second and third years and i'm okay with not having all of the cards and then just getting the money replenished from the rookie which is way more valuable than the other ones i don't know so this is my mind was going to several episodes ago when you were talking about the selling deandre hopkins rookie and keeping the other one i think this is interesting because like the default for many collectors would be like okay i'm gonna keep the rookie and sell all the other ones but like in these examples cady lamb and hopkins it's different is it is that like a you just like the other cards better is it i know i can create more value for myself if i sell the rookie like how do you think about kinda making those decisions when it comes down to everything's a one of one and i'm just breaking up this run it's probably more like i'm self aware that cidi lamb and deandre hopkins aren't going to have like the long term high end appeal of certain people and i can only really garner up enough interest if it is the rookie to sell it and then the other pieces that aren't rookies are just kinda more for me like i just like having him on my pc and i'm not looking to like invest in these players for example like cidi lamb justin jefferson i like those guys but if i'm competing over their one on one rookies it's basically like i'm competing with like investors and like speculators whereas like gurley it's just it's just me versus some other collector and i'm i'm okay like just getting only the rookies for hopkins i don't know like he's not like my favorite player of all time i just felt like i'd rather have two non rookies than one rookie this is such a a fun topic and chris you're the perfect person to volley this through too because i feel like you have built your collection around players that you have watched and really enjoy and obviously michael jordan being at the top of that list you mentioned a a gretzky card which i think is probably news to many people listening that you you own and i think like as you mature as a collector like one of the things that i have thought a lot about is like if i'm spending this kind of money i want it to be something that satisfies me as a collector but also in the future i it's of a subject or a profile of card that i think has broader market demand than just like me and my little niche interest because i think obviously like at some point like many of these cards will be sold and you don't wanna end up buying something for you know thousands of dollars that nobody wants down the road so like when you think about this in your own collection and just like replacing something like are you considering not just like your own personal affinity and conviction for the subject and the card itself but like do you think about like the broader market interest in that card down the road at some point yeah i do but that's very rarely the reason why i will miss a card you know like if i made the decision to exit a card most times it's because it's a combination of i need resources but also i feel like this card at least from where i'm sitting is mature or even beyond maturity even overvalued in my mind so you know if it continues to go up i'm you know i'm perfectly content with the decision i made like i thought about that in advance but the place where i do get the pangs of regret is when i let a card go that i didn't fully understand at the time because i hadn't fully developed the collecting philosophy surrounding that card or that lane which happens all the time and it'll still happen to things now like i'll i'll understand and know more things five years from now than i do today then i'll look back probably on some things and and feel it again but i have a really precise example of this where i either it's because i didn't understand the card or just because i was acting under a thesis that i just no longer really subscribe to as much and so for me it's it's the mccaffrey consolidation that comes right to my mind anytime i i think about this like i have very few transactions that i regret but that is one and it has nothing to do with the market although the market it twists the knife a little bit more but it it has everything to do with the fact that you know this was like five or maybe four years ago now or something like that like around five or six years ago i just had this idea because this was like during a different market peak and i was like man i can just collect all these awesome looking mccaffrey one of ones for like a hundred bucks two hundred bucks and maybe even up to like five hundred bucks if they're like rookies and so i just gobbled those up and i built up like a pile of maybe like a hundred or more mccaffrey one of ones not all of those were rookies like they were scattered across all of his different seasons but i had a really nice pile of those but i had this thesis always in the back of my mind that like well these are placeholders and when like the real holy grail surface like the card that i consolidated into which is the true shield autograph one of one from twenty seventeen national treasures as rookie year i was like well when something like that comes up then i'm gonna i don't need a hundred mccafferty cards you know i'm gonna turn all those into the big one and i'm i'm glad i have that card i absolutely love that card but i really wish i had found some other way to keep especially the first one of one so like some of the cards that i had for example i had his twenty seventeen donrus elite base set one of one and now that card vortexed for a little while and then it ended up with andy buy buy baby card now he has it and then it was like a few months ago when i realized that brock purdey's first nfl licensed one of one came from donrus elite and i have that i have i have his purdey donruss elite base at one of one and i was like man this would be such a great card to pair with the mccaffrey donruss elite one of one like this is and then andy did some research i think he might have even figured out that don rosselli might be the first nfl licensed one of one for mccaffrey too i i don't remember what the conclusion of that was but but so like that was a painful card that i let go for a couple hundred bucks and i think it ended up selling for maybe like a thousand or so later on so that was a pain another one i had was a twenty seventeen phoenix blue one of one rookie of mccaffrey like i i mean i actually like after cooper kupp had that great catch in that opening game the seahawks against the patriots i went on ebay and was looking for cooper kupp cards and i saw that i could get his twenty seventeen phoenix blue rookie one of one for a few hundred bucks so i bought it and i was like man i had this card of mccaffrey i had this and i let it go for a few hundred bucks that i could consolidate into the shield and like i just i didn't you know i can forgive myself i didn't fully understand what these cards were at the time i didn't have the right perspective to lend the proper level of appreciation towards them that i have now but those are really the ones that sting where it's like man those would have fit so nicely in what i'm building and i could have looked back on them and really enjoyed that and and sort of enjoyed that i happened into these cards but now i fully understand them so those are the ones that really stick with me well collections evolve certainly and the things that made sense at the time of acquisition don't make sense later on based on the evolution and i certainly deal with that would you reverse that whole process if you could do that now yeah i would i mean i would like i that's not to take away from the shield i love it i love that card i mean i that card is so important to what i was always building towards with mccaffrey which was putting together the prism black finite rookie with the nt platinum one of one shield autograph rookie with the contender super bowl ticket one of one rookie like my favorite of his base set nonautograph nonmembrilia cards my favorite of his patch autograph cards and my favorite of his on card autograph cards but you know that was the thesis at that time and now i have so much more appreciation for these much much cheaper much much more affordable but very very interesting beautiful cards that i would probably take back the pile but hopefully i but you know the real thing would be i would just you know find a way to to own both you know i would find a way to buy that shield and keep at least i'm plenty of those from the pile that i let go i'm fine with like one was like the twenty nineteen chronicles vertex one of one psa ten sweet looking card but i don't need that card i could let that go to consolidate but like the rookie one of ones like the donner's elite and the phoenix blue like those are the ones where it's like man yeah i want i i'd love to get those back but i don't i don't even know where the phoenix blue is and the other one's tied up sure one other subtopic i wanna hit on this one is ownership premium and i was gonna ask from this perspective of like selling and like the premium we put on ownership of the card from a value perspective but i kinda wanna reverse it a little bit based on the way we've started in this conversation josh you alluded to you've started posting lebron one of ones you picked up i don't know where you've gotten those whether they've been marketplace or private deals but it can be the lebron one of one track or it can be a different one of one track when you approach individuals with these cards that you want there's always some sort of premium that the owner if you can get them to put a price on it that they put a price on it how do you navigate that like how do you navigate it especially if it's a card that doesn't have any data in card ladder or maybe transacted once and it was like six years ago like based on your process obviously you want the card but like how do you decide like whether you are going to pay the premium that the current owner has on the card especially if it's a one zero one well on the lebron one zero one side i've mostly approached it as i'm trading cards that aren't one on ones that others value very highly like the exquisite and gold chrome stuff people really value that stuff as they showed their great cards so those are a little bit easier to trade because they're just in such high demand like you mentioned earlier on the football side and maybe like other private one zero one deals honestly the trick is just like take whatever the first number they say is or the first like number we come around i just don't even i i don't even like go back and forth much it's like i could get them down a thousand bucks or something i could get them down five hundred probably but i feel like i gained a decent amount of goodwill with a an individual by just like taking their first offer the like a lot of my one on ones have come from you know let's say i have like fifty football one on ones like high profile ones it's probably from like twenty five sellers twenty sellers you know a lot of these cards come through like the same avenues the same people are able to find these cards so like they know they could just come to me give me the number and i'll just probably accept it for the most part unless i just like don't have the cash ready to go at the moment but for the most part you know these are one on ones you know what am i gonna do like oh check out this other comp of this michael thomas gold like what am i gonna do just argue with them i i just feel like i just don't even really like think about the value per se the money it's more it's mostly like how much money do i have to spend and like what am i what am i comfortable buying with that i want for myself like that's the whole point of the one on one thing to me and i was gonna bring this up earlier is that this one on one thing to me is the delineation between collecting and like investing and flipping mhmm because now these cards literally are like art pieces they're one of ones now we're actually in the part of like i'm collecting all of these cards i can't see other comps with them because i own them they are with me i cannot see another comp no one else will sell this card there is no market there is no stock tracker of these cards i literally own them all you can't see the market that's exactly how paintings work so you wanna buy these cards you have to come to me and there is no market we're following there's we're just making up numbers as we go and we can kind of use similar players we can use other sets etcetera there is like a way to do it but in general like if you want cooper kupp's black finite rookie i you know you have to pay the price that i tell you you can't just think oh i've i've looked at his fifth year and it sold for this and his ratio like i don't care about any of that i have cooper kupp's black fine at rookie i'm deciding what it's worth you know oh baby we're cooking with gas i love this chris josh said something that immediately i thought of your approach and what you've done over the last several years and it's it's as simple as like you have these incredible jordans that are on cajun's hierarchy and people are saying these are the jordan cards that are we have always been grails and you have taken these cards and you have sold them traded them to get these kind of one of ones that no one has talked about previously like that is an interesting way to approach getting cards that you probably love more because you're moving in this direction but that takes a lot of like thinking plotting negotiating finding the right people like i know you've talked about this over and over again on through your content but like when you think about like getting to where you are today with the collection that you have like how did you kind of get over the hump mentally that these jordans that you had in your collection that everyone told you were the best jordans weren't the best jordans for you because you'd rather have this other stuff yeah it's funny that i'm sort of a face of this because i'm one of the most cautious and late arriving people to parties like these even as a kid i you know but there's they would always have a joke about me that like i would look three times before i would cross the street and if one of my friends would try to be like wait wait wait let's just make let's really make sure it's safe before we go out there so you know i'm i'm very methodical and slow and there and i like clearly there are people who owned all these cars before i did and there are people who saw this years decades before i paid attention to it but you know it's never it's funny like hearing even the word negotiation negotiations do take place but it never feels like work there's always this energy inside of me this excitement that is just like the work to me would be not doing this that would be the labor having to drudge through every day knowing what i know and not allowing myself to do it that would be the work the play the fun is like once i've seen something once i've bought into it once like i have the conviction for it the hard part is not pursuing it the easy part is doing it like if i see one of these show if i see a card that i really want like an early michael jordan one hundred and one show up on some forum post from thirteen years ago like the hard part would be okay don't pursue this don't think about it don't try no the easy part is okay i'm gonna find out who this user is i'm going to try and trace their social media imprints i'm gonna try and find if they have twitter or instagram or if they have an email address that's floating somewhere or i'm gonna ask all my network to see if anybody happens to know this person so that i can connect to them and then if they have moved on from the car then i'm gonna see if they can refer me to the person who i belong to next like that stuff is instinctual that's something that like i just do and i it doesn't feel like it's consuming any energy it feels like it's just energizing me further just giving me more things to do but the real turning point was informational and intellectual it was when i came to understand the full offering and like that cajun's hierarchy is important because he brought as a legal mind would structure and a system he brought a set of guidelines that can help make a you know sort of a decision tree and then what i added to it was you know so cajun has tier one tier two tier three tier four very neatly laid out very clean boundaries you know he tells you like if you go back and watch those original videos he's like i'm not including autographs because those aren't of particular interest to me at this time you know i'm not i'm not including one of ones those are of particular interest to me he tells you exactly what the sandbox is that he's building he completely refines it into the domain of cards that he wants to focus on then he commissions people who he felt like had expertise to help him make the list then he consulted market history to make sure that things were lining up with common sense intuition and then he issued the tier one all the way down to tier four what did i do i found tier zero i went and i found a tier that really spoke to me once i was able to look at the whole menu and once that became obvious to me then the hard part was not doing it the hard part would have been and i did i did fight it for a while but eventually you know discipline patience waiting for the right opportunity but then when the opportunity shows up making the move that's the easy part for me the part that i want you to add some more color commentary on and i would love to hear this from you josh and this is something that i was thinking about as you were describing that is sometimes when we find out where the card is and that we've been dreaming about there is this nervousness that many of us collectors get because there's fear of the price like what is this going to cost me so you sat you basically have framed it up as saying like i'll do i'll do all this work and investigate and i'll find out where this card is like how do you go into that say everything lined up like username converts into on a forum converts into a active username that you have gathered information on instagram and then you go through the digging of their page and the card is sitting there and so you message them and they say yes i still have the card and then you do your song and dance and you know how much and maybe they won't give a price then maybe eventually they do give the price like you've done all the work you go through this but like the price is a mystery especially on the stuff that i'm sure you're trying to acquire like how do you get to that point when the price is shared and be able to take it to the next level especially when it's the priced at a level that is very very high and you might have to make moves on like how do you process all those things when you get to that point of like this is the price and this is what you're gonna have to pay me is this for me sorry i wanna hear both of your approach on this but yeah let's let's go with you josh man that's so tough how do i it's like how do you get the number out of them that you're comfortable with i don't know like i i guess maybe i just like don't take every deal you know like i do have a a line i would say like it has to be reasonable but the other thing is we've been like so i'll use the word lucky we've been very like blessed and lucky in this space that if you started collecting pre like twenty eighteen let's say you like you just have like a lot of equity built up in other cards that have skyrocketed in value so i'm very comfortable just like using that equity from other stuff and and overpaying or whatever because i feel like i just have i'm playing with house money in a lot of the cases like i just have other cards that i'm comfortable overpaying and so like i will just kinda say a number that's like i feel like this number is probably ridiculous to everybody else but it's gonna get the attention of the other person and a lot of times like you know they could probably get more out of me or whatever like they could probably auction it like you know but like because it's this one on one they and it is a lot of money like a lot of times they'll just it'll get their interest and it'll at least get the discussion going but a lot of them like i said it's the same like twenty five people so like i kinda like have a feel for where they're gonna be at anyways or i know i've done past deals and we're sort of like in the same ballpark already and i don't have to worry about it but there's always gonna be like you know this isn't like a drake might hear this and be like what the heck why isn't this working for me you guys just go and buy cars i'm all you know there's a lot of cases where i run into it just like the same way that drake does where they want ten x what it's worth and i'm just not even gonna negotiate it's not even worth the time you know for sure chris do you use your tenure in your in the hobby as an advantage or like network of people you're working with like josh i feel like whenever i hear a recent pickup it's coming from like asia or something how are you able to land all these at a price that is reasonable to you it's more so i think a fluency in social media and taking the time which is it's not a chore it's something i enjoy to like look at facebook groups look at instagram i follow like two or three new instagram accounts every day and i usually like look at the whole post offering and i try to look at everything they have and you know or you know digging around on twitter you know one of the michael jordan one of ones i landed this year that i love came to me because i tweet tweeted a few times about some of my michael jordan collecting and a collector on twitter noticed that and then when somebody happened to post a michael jordan one one to twitter that i didn't see he tagged me and he said hey this looks like it's right up your alley and then i immediately reached out made an offer we did the deal i drove to the guy's shop the next day and everything was done within like forty eight hours so like putting yourself out there is certainly a way to have like connections being formed in your behalf that you don't even you're not even aware is happening just because you're willing to stand up and raise your hand and say i'm interested in this and telegraph it and you know sometimes it actually works better if i'm not direct like if i just was posting every day looking for this like people might just be like gosh this guy but if i'm indirect and more genuine and like more authentic where it's just like i'm just sharing that i collect these it seems like that's a better magnet to organically attract people who will want to refer things to you yes i couldn't agree more i wanna dig into when important cards stop trading i think a lot of these examples that we've been talking about is like the acquisition of one of one so like when you buy your one of one it enters your collection and it's gonna stop trading i've been a longtime listener of both of your content and one of the topics that has come up over years is just like the frustration of like you own a copy of a card let's say it's the lebron rookie patch auto and then it continues to sell month over month in these auctions and you know that what happens when a card continues to sell over time it just continues to go down until no one sells it for a while and then then it goes up all of a sudden so i think there's frustration with collectors and cards that they buy when there's repeated sales but i wanna kinda ask what happens to price discovery when these category defining cards enter long term collections like how should we view the value when these cards are kinda buried away whether it's in your collections or somebody else's collections when they go unseen for a while like what do you make of just like what those cards are worth over time is it always kind of worth the same do you view like the market changes like what's your perspective on just like cards that get stashed away and what they're valued at chris well like josh said it's an art to price cards like these but i do have a more of a a scientific approach but this is very risky and i don't advocate it partially because we just don't have the tools right now for this information to be widely accessible like this information is only accessible to the most diligent and careful researchers of which there are many but i think and i've thought this now for a while that price is clearly downstream from a hierarchical ranking of cards so in other words step one is for me to actually survey the landscape of all cards i should be able to envision on a table in front of me every card ever made in its quantity so a pile of a million eighty nine upper deck griffey's is right over here and then a pile of ten charles woodson twenty twelve prism golds is right here and then tom brady's twenty thirteen prism black finite is just this one card pile right here but i should be able to envision that entire thing without knowing all the contents but i should be able to conceive of that as like a table that could potentially sit in front of me and then like i can snap my finger and say i only want to look at christian mccaffrey's cards so all the other cards vanish and now i just have the pile so there's the big pile of his prism base cards and there's a pile of his like optic golds to ten stacked here and then i say okay now i'm going to undertake to rank these based on my preference and so a very natural ranking sequence would combine something like rarity and aesthetics and so i'll start organizing all the cards that are on the table accordingly so maybe i would put like all the one of ones over here all the out of fives here all the out of tens here and then i would start organizing within those categories well i think this is the most attractive one of one to me and then other factors come in like lineage like well you know i really like the prism black finite it's also beautiful it's only got one copy and you know it goes all the way back to twenty twelve prism how many other of mccaffrey's cards have a lineage that at least that long then i look at select and i say well select man that's pretty cool too and even though the product has sort of jumped around from manufacturers and changed configurations a lot it actually has a history that goes back to the nineties so i kind of like the historical roots that exist there and then i look at optic and i say but wait a minute don russ has a history that goes back to the eighties so there's something there too so you know i have to figure out what i think is important i have to figure out how much that history matters to me how much rarity matters to me how much aesthetics matter to me but ultimately i have to make a list that in my mind i can tell myself when the opportunity arises of where each card in mccavering's catalog sits on my hierarchy my personal ranking and so even if there are cards of his that have no sales ever but i can look at the ones on the list that do have sales and if i have a card that's like a hundred positions higher on my list than a different card that sold for a thousand bucks to me i can comfortably say well i think this card is better and if my reasoning is good and if other people if they took the same approach would come to the same conclusion or a similar conclusion then i probably made a cogent judgment here the friction point would be how many other people have ever done this thought experiment how many other people have ever looked at the full menu very few so then that's why it's risky that's why i'm not advocating this that's why i'm not saying that other people should adopt this but this is genuinely how i can explain how i value certain cards is because i have taken the time the many hours to look at the full catalog of the player to rank it internally in my mind not rigidly but a rough idea of where things rank and if i notice something that's just way out of whack with how i rank it and i can get access to some price information of cards that are much lower on the hierarchy than the one that i'm currently looking at i do find that to be useful information now it's yet to be seen if will the market agree with my opinion or not you know that's part of the excitement that's part of the fun oh man i love that outline and i think this approach while takes some technique is a lot more i think fun is a word i would use it's a lot more fun than just like following what everyone else is doing from a price perspective and just saying oh because this one sold for this one last tuesday then that's what i owe plus ten percent so appreciate you walking through that josh i'm curious just based on like your new endeavor into this lebron james one of one rabbit hole you know i i i saw a couple posts you made and you know you kinda zeroed in saying you know i've always kinda collected his early cavs stuff so like this is kinda my area of focus right out of the gates and i'm curious like based on like those qualifiers that chris described with talking about you know look and feel aesthetics design being part of the conversation like like are you able to at this point like make those sorts of judgment or is it more how does that like compete with like the access and availability of these cards like talk to us through like you're starting something new like how are you going about it does it start with a this card is available and is a one of one and he's early on the cavs so i'm interested how do all the other factors pile on to it as you're kinda navigating this for the first time it's just it's so much different with lebron versus football you know there's a couple big differences one lebron started playing in two thousand three and a lot of the football era guys that i enjoy it's like twenty ten and after i am like dabbling in some of the mid two thousand's football guys as well shawn alexander and random guys like that but with lebron he's just like so much more expensive that i have to really get more creative and i really have to like hone in i would love to have he's played for twenty three years you know am i really feasibly able to collect his like prism blacks and his like earlier rookies and some of no so i have to like get more selective and picky like chris would tell you something similar he would love to have like every one of one ever but he's he's like literally just there's not infinite resources so i have to get a little bit more piggy and with like the panini and the top scrum stuff it's just like there's so much focus on that for lebron like just look at some of the accounts like bob emtrack basically has all the panini one zero one so i you know i'd have to like ride them away from him i'd have to go out to the exquisite collector you know a lot of the stuff is already entrenched the topps chrome stuff the new like the twenty twenty five stuff i feel is like wildly overvalued it's his twenty third year people are excited that it's back i generally don't like to participate in new like very fresh releases like that i feel like it's overvalued and eventually it'll come down so i've just taken all that into account gone after like the early years would i rather have his third year two thousand seven topps like some variation one on one or like a twenty third year topps chrome variation super fracture to me the answer is simple i'd rather go back to two thousand seven like the early years of the his offerings from topps it's to me seem more appealing it's five percent of the cost you know there's all these different considerations to consider so that's how i think about lebron with football it's just so much cheaper that i'm like i'm just gonna get my favorite looking ones of my favorite players of the earliest years possible and just buy them all i don't even care like give me cooper kupp's black fine i would that would be chris bought his like a cheaper one which is fine but like that for cooper kupp that just like wouldn't excite me because i could have his i could have like six of his black finites you know so for football it's a little bit different but i am like dabbling in more i i have like a select black todd gurley now i will like take in more one on ones because if i understand the earlier catalog it makes more sense i'm just rambling at this point no i think i i think this is actually really good and as you're talking through it it something we talk about in life a lot is situational awareness and i think just for listeners it's important when we are consuming content from collectors it's good to understand the situational awareness of the individuals kind of talking about cards in their approach and i just love the breakdown of like the football world and the lebron world because i think that context matters when people are trying to understand some of the theories we use as collectors i wanna talk about prestige identity and recognition and chris i wanna start with you with this one because i feel like you you have alluded to the fact that like you really enjoy the dirty work like you enjoy kind of the navigating and going through the process and this is what excites you i'm curious like i feel like it's the research but i could be wrong but like what gives the card prestige when it's the importance of it is like personal to you rather than kinda supported by like what's in card ladder like when you lock into a card what makes it prestigious to you especially if it's a card that like you've never seen before or is doesn't have a rich sales history yeah i think there's two very different answers i can give the answer of kind of like what the markets and what the community consensus sort of thinks prestigious means right now and i can kind of give the answer of what i think gives prestige and right now a lot of prestige is just conferred by price and like there's a line of thinking that supports that like there's in an adjacent field there's the efficient markets hypothesis which suggests that the price of an asset like a stock is perfectly efficiently representing total knowledge of that stock and so it can be tempting to borrow that theoretical framework and apply it to a card and say the price of a card perfectly represents total knowledge by all market participants of that card and so i think like there's a natural flow state from like people who participate in markets that assume that price is accurately capturing all relevant information and transfer that over to cards so i think price is one of the big ways that prestige is conferred there's other ways that we all sort of agree prestige can be conferred too which is difficult or well curated collections that either somebody has procured cards that were very difficult to track down even if the price isn't exorbitantly high or they've managed to manicure a collection presentation that is just like very impressive to look at like super collecting where somebody just acquires such a quantity that thinking about how difficult that would be and how much knowledge you have to have how much patience you have to have and how much discipline you have to have to stick to the plan of like continuously checking off the next thing and the next thing that has always conferred a lot of prestige too now but for me personally the prestige of a card has to be completely and independently verifiable and validated by a historical inquiry into that card's significance it has to be and the more that i go down that road and the more that i inquire into different cards and what are the different stories that a given card can tell the more i find that the prestige that the market confers on cards through price is not commensurate with the prestige that a true historical investigation into a card reveals but that and this seems like it's a question of human psychology like it's a question of our preferences and our tastes and it is but it's really not that is a second or a third order effect the first order effect the real essence of this question is about platforms and infrastructure this question is all about what information is available how easy is it to access it how credible is it given the flow of decisions that participants in this sports card market make and then how much access do we have to it and do we give to it and how much do we enjoy it so like the two big platforminfrastructure pieces that are guiding and shaping all of this right now are social media and price histories so like social media is obvious we can think of like the instagram situation where you know one of the impacts of social media that i've seen this arc take place over the last ten years is that at first there were very few collectors on instagram there was a strong hobby instagram ten years ago but it was just a drop in the bucket of what it is today and so like you could go on hobby instagram and if you saw a football pmg red that has one hundred and thirty five copies you felt like you were seeing really a ghost card you know you might have never seen that card before because where would you right like maybe you could see it as an ebay listing ebay is also a very important part of this infrastructure but maybe you could see it you know on an ebay listing or maybe you see like somebody shows up with it and that actually mattered that really shaped our psychology so our psychology didn't come out of thin air our psychology came out of like what do we actually have access to and it was improved access from twenty years before that which is where the only cards you ever see are what makes the pages of the becca magazine or what shows up in your local card shop or what shows up at your local card show which was even much more unlimited but as more collectors flowed into instagram and facebook and now we have these collector facebook groups with hundreds of thousands of people which just would have been unthinkable to somebody when they came back if you told me in twenty sixteen that hey eventually these facebook groups are gonna have half a million people in them talking about cards and buying and selling and trading i would have been in disbelief i would have said how this has five thousand people right now and it feels crowded and i can't imagine how that many people even exist who want to do this so as like the quantity of participants just ramped up on social media and i would say instagram now has a hundred fold more people than it did ten years ago maybe even more who are participating in the hobby now you know back then i saw one pmg red out of one thirty five of marshall faulk now i see ten or twenty you know i see one get posted every other month and so what felt scarce ten years ago doesn't feel scarce anymore so the platformification of this shapes our psychology it shapes what feels rare it shapes what feels scarce it also shapes like what gets plaudits what gets likes what gets comments what gets reshares what are the people most excited to post and what sort of flies under the radar like so it works in that way too and then the price history is the other piece of infrastructure that's very important price is so important price is the power to reshape your collection when you want to which has kind of been an underlying theme of this whole episode price is such an important tool but you know it's as much an output as it is an input in fact it's almost circular it's almost become circular at this point where the price of a card determines what the card is worth and that that doesn't make any sense the price should be downstream from an independent assessment of the card's attributes the price can't just be well it's a number on a screen and i'm just you know i'm gonna pay ten percent more than the last one infinitely although that is how it works right now but eventually we reach the upper limit of budgets but it's not because like we chose it to be this way so much as it's because this is what the infrastructure has developed to be at this point in time this is how the community has organized and interpreted and leveraged those tools and this is the byproduct of a systematic effect the system and the and the available resources shaped it and made it form this way and then of course us human nature we engaged with it and we in turn shaped and stuff but it's very much a byproduct of what tools we have available what resources we have available a lot of meat on that bone hell we could do a whole episode on reaction to everything you just said i wanna pull one piece from it and toss it over to josh you said that price is a main determining factor for prestige in this current hobby which i couldn't agree with more and i think about this topic a lot and just like how it's like flies to a light when something sells for a lot everyone thinks it's the best card of all time and people share the post and it gets into this whole thing and sometimes it's cool and exciting to build excitement and sometimes i just see it and i'm just like oh man i'll put my phone down for now josh like what do you think the ramifications are if price is a leading indicator of prestige in this space does that just mean more opportunity for independent thinkers and individual collectors or something else i guess it depends on what your goal is an individual if your goal is to have the most expensive collection then it's something you should you should really pay attention to and you should go on card letter and sort by price and just make that your checklist of cards that you're going after if your goal is to have the most unique collection or your goal is to have a collection that garners the most interest from your friends and family or people on instagram your peers other collectors etcetera then maybe you might wanna curate a little bit more specific list something a little bit more focused on creativity and something that speaks to you personally i think this again is like the delineation here is there's such a focus on price because a lot of people a good majority of people right now are coming into this space for the goal of making money so if your goal is to make money the easiest way to do that is ride the wave of stuff that's already expensive and just ride it up and people have seen incredible success with that just go look at pokemon you know there's like pop ten thousand cards that just continue to go up all you gotta do is it's not that hard you just go and buy one of those you can go grab them whenever you want current market value wait six months then now you've doubled your money and you're rich so there's a huge push from the gambling world the marketing ads we see you know collect is obviously very excited about these things fanatics and so there's just a big focus on price because of all that there's a big a big chance for people to come in and just make easy money and it's happening and and people are doing that but if so if that's your goal then price has to be at the top of real estate that's not your goal and this discussion that we're having today is more around like the collecting aspect we're trying to build the best collection quote unquote of a specific category or player well then you're gonna have to get more creative you're gonna have to explore the full offering of cards available you're gonna have to understand things like rarity you're gonna have to understand the years that things were released you're gonna have to understand the order they were released you'll have to understand the significance of the set how far it goes back there's so much more it's just way easier to go and sort by price and pick the highest valued pokemon card with a pop hunter and buy it and wait six months there's no skill required you just literally sort by price and card ladder we're a part of this we've pushed this it's just much easier all you gotta do is go on there take a picture of a slab buy it now you're rich whereas the collecting is much more difficult and it's something that challenges our brains more and we're more excited to spend an hour talking about it on a podcast so this is you know this is what we lean into and we're more excited to make this difficult on ourselves we like the friction of like okay this isn't as easy as sort of a price we need to have a million other attributes and let's spend the next ten years of our lives figuring it out and we're excited to do that that's awesome next card letter confidential we're gonna spend time talking about knowing when to keep and when to sell and i was gonna fly through that but chris' example on mccaffrey stuff i feel like we could just dig into that topic for an entire episode so we'll table that for next time and we've gotta close this out by talking about recent pickups so would love to give each of you the space to talk about a card you recently picked up and why you like it chris let's start with you yeah i threw this to my instagram story today yeah this is a twenty twenty four totally certified mirror black one of one of tj watt yesterday watts had three tackles for loss two sacks an interception and he returned that interception for a touchdown and he became the second player in nfl history to have over one hundred sacks and over ten interceptions so working on building up such a cool historical resume and just such a an exciting player to watch and that's my one tj watt card but maybe i'll have some more soon i will one thing that i love about that card and i love about some of the panini era cards is the etching on those cards and i'm not sure that we're gonna continue to get the etching in the topps era so if you like the etching i love those cards so i saw that on your instagram awesome card shout out to etching sick stuff josh how about you well it's football season so i have to go with football we're obviously very excited after yesterday's kickoff i have two actually breaking the rules sorry i heard you and pac talking about tight ends a few episodes ago and i bought this right around that time and i was very excited about that this is two thousand eight topps chrome super factor antonio gates i think you guys said this on the podcast but he actually has the most receiving touchdowns by a tight end all time which is an interesting stat because i think a lot of people rightfully so put gronk and tony gonzalez and travis kelce above him but he has the most touchdowns which is a fun stat mhmm and i love that i love the earlier tops scrums obviously and this guy he's in the news right now he had an interesting podcast come out so f it as they say aaron rodgers twenty fifteen topscrom super factor yes this is the worst year of topscrom like literally everybody i show says that and it's like great thank you for picking a crap on my cards i'm glad you i have the calvin and i now have the aaron rodgers there must be something in the air i feel like a lot of these conversations i'm getting into recently people are talking about aaron rodgers and buying us cards which is exciting because he's one of the best quarterbacks of all time so we'll just leave it at that always appreciate digging into all these sorts of topics with both of you appreciate everyone out there for listening we'll be back again with another one soon always appreciate chris and josh's perspective when it comes to collecting buying selling holding all of the things that we're thinking about on a regular basis make sure you are using card ladder to keep yourself up to speed with your own collection and what the market is doing appreciate all your support here appreciate you coming in each and every week with all the passion if you enjoyed this episode tell a damn friend until then we'll be back with another one very soon take care