what's going on everybody welcome back to stacking slabs this is your hobby content alternative appreciate you being here hopefully you're enjoying checking out everything across the stacking slabs network in its universe there has been so much content there's been a lot of conversations in fact last week i launched hobby jobs for those of you who are listening who work in the industry or those who are listening that aspire to work in the industry that is a newsletter it is on substack there is a link in the show notes sharing operator insights sharing available jobs and a lot more great response for that can't stop won't stop of course we're focused on the collector always focused on the collector and that's what we do here on the flagship episode of stacking slabs i dig into something that is going on in my world look into it from a psychological perspective and hopefully by the end of these episodes you gain some value before we jump into today's topic which is discovery and discovery as an advantage i wanna thank inferno red technology they're the engineering team behind some of the biggest names in sports and collectibles like dc sports eighty seven commsi collectors upper deck and ebay from ai powered solutions for startups to full stack platforms for industry leaders their team can tackle your toughest technology challenge they build awesome software for the hobby for leagues and fans and for everyone in between see what they can build for you at inferno red dot com this conversation today was inspired by a chat that i made public last week and it was with my good friend max at putnam cards who started a podcast called hoops collectors now if you have not listened to that conversation yet i'd encourage you to do so i learned a lot from max and i bring on guests oftentimes because they are thinking about topics that i'm thinking about and i wanna expand that from my perspective and during our conversation we really got talking about undiscovered sets within panini in the basketball category and that more or less is the punchline for max's podcast and so i felt like because i still have a tremendous amount of energy for this topic that we can parlay it into today's flagship maybe we'll start here with a question when was the last time you found a card before the hobby told you it mattered i'm not talking about after the sale not after the post not after the screenshot got shared five hundred times i'm talking about before before the price moved before the herd arrived before the conversation got really loud the moment when you connect the dots and realize wait this is real that's discovery and discovery is one of the most underrated powers in collecting because it's not just how you find cards it's how you build a collection that actually feels like yours today i wanna unpack discovery as an edge the psychological edge the collecting edge and yes sometimes the upside edge too but i'm not here to sell you on some fantasy that discovery guarantees profit because it doesn't what what it does guarantee is something very important something that i'm very interested in something that i think about so much that i left my corporate job in technology for fifteen years i'm talking about control and discovery gives you control discovery is how you stop collecting the way the internet wants you to collect and start collecting like a person with taste intention and a point of view we'll start by talking about the environment we're collecting in right now we're living in a headline hobby a hobby where the loudest signal is here's what's sold for the most hottest or here's the card everyone's chasing and i get it it's fun it's entertaining it's easy but it's also very dangerous because it turns your collecting life into a reaction and here's the truth that most people don't want to admit most collectors don't choose from the whole hobby they choose from the tiny list of cards that caught their attention this week and that makes sense the hobby is infinite but it creates a massive problem when everyone is choosing from the same tiny list the market becomes a competition to be the last buyer and the last buyer is usually the one who pays the most in a hobby like ours attention does something brutal it turns visibility into value and if you don't have a discovery process you end up collecting someone else's menu i've said it from the first day that i started stacking slabs turn left when the market is going right discovery is the unlock and discovery is how you do that when i talked with max he was using discovery as the foundation for hoops collectors his new podcast what i loved in that conversation and what it made it perfect in the moment is the fact that he's not building content around the biggest sale of the week he's going the other direction down into the layers of the hobby most people ignore checklists oddball inserts forgotten years design based collecting finding off brand versions of what the market likes before the market decides it likes it and i realized something discovery isn't just a buying tactic discovery is a philosophy and it's a psychological unlock so i think it's important especially because we're spending this whole damn episode talking about a discovery is let's define discovery in a way that's useful discovery isn't guessing discovery is not being early as an identity discovery is not i found a cheap card and i'm going to pretend it's undervalued discovery is more specific than that discovery is a discipline of expanding your search set beyond the headlines than selecting with evidence and intention it's proactive it's you saying as a collector i'm going to learn my way into an advantage and the advantage isn't just price it's scarcity awareness it's design awareness it's context awareness it's the ability to spot a card that fits your collection before the crowd assigns it meaning now why does discovery feel so good it feels so good because there's psychology behind it discovery feels powerful because it activates the same internal system that makes learning addictive in the best possible way curiosity curiosity happens when your attention locks onto a gap something like i know some of this but something is missing that gap creates a kind of mental tension that pushes you as a collector to resolve it and when you resolve it your brain rewards you it's not metaphorical there's evidence that when people are curious reward related circuits in the brain are activated and memory improves not only for the thing that they're curious about but for information encountered around it so when you're deep in a checklist deep in a parallel hierarchy deep in a pop report you're not just researching you're training your brain to build a richer map of the hobby that's why collectors who do discovery work often develop faster pattern recognition they spot relationships between design language and scarcity between communities and overlooked sets between grading behavior and true availability and this matters because discovery makes learning part of the reward so the process itself becomes enjoyable i think that's huge because it makes you as a collector resilient you're not dependent on winning auctions or buying the right card you're participating in the hobby every time you explore it there's another psychological layer discovery satisfies core needs self determinant self determination theory argues that autonomy competence and relatedness support intrinsic motivation and mental health that's good i'm an advocate of mental health building awareness around that i think about it often in terms of collecting in the hobby and discovery gives you autonomy because it off allows you to choose discovery builds competence because you master and discovery builds relatedness because you connect by sharing your niche and i'll add something collectors understand instinctively the thing you had to work for often means more there's classic evidence that when people go through a more severe initiation they rate the group more highly afterward partly to make the effort feel worth it discovery works like that too the card you found through your process is not just a card it's a proof you have taste it's a proof you have discipline proof you've earned it and once you own it the endowment effect kicks in people tend to value things more once they possess it i know i feel this way i am in this mode right now where i am buying cards that i truly love that feel less discovered and are more affordable and i have a lot of conviction around them and if those cards never go up in value it's okay because they're cards that i love and they satisfy discovery process for me so discovery doesn't just improve your results it deepens your connection to your collection that's why a discovery built collection typically feels more like satisfying more satisfying than a height built collection now i'm gonna say something that might step on some of your toes a lot of modern collecting is low grade anxiety disguised as entertainment the constant scroll of look at what's sold or look at what hit or look at what you missed that's not neutral there's evidence that exposure to upward comparison targets on social media is associated on average with negative effects on self evaluation and emotions and when collecting becomes a keeping up with the joneses or keeping up with other collectors you'll lose you lose autonomy you lose peace you lose the joy of your own collection discovery is how you exit the game because discovery turns the hobby back into an exploration instead of comparison this is where i think the the idea of turning left when the market is going right really hits here's what the market going right looks like we're gonna play this out in real time to give you an illustration of how i'm seeing it a new product drops and suddenly everyone is chasing the same parallels the same rookies the same short prints there's a really good example and that's tops returning to license nba cards and the hobby buzzing around it that kind of moment especially when the manufacturer like fanatics slash topps is pouring money energy and resource into getting us to be aware and exposed to their new product it's the kind of moment that is attention gasoline and attention creates a herd and a herd creates informational cascades people infer knowledge from the crowd and follow the crowd turning left doesn't mean being contrarian for ego it means when attention narrows the hobby into a tiny spotlight you explore the rest of the room don't get crowded in the corner be an explorer because the rest of the room is where you can find aesthetic value that isn't fully priced scarcity that isn't fully understood and the stories that have haven't been told yet and discovery is turning left with a flashlight in my opinion so let's get practical on this if discovery is the engine these are your tools and we talked about this during the conversation with max checklists checklists are so underrated i before i buy almost any card that is not a cohesive and consistent piece of a broader collection i'm building i'm looking at the checklist every time i don't know how people buy cards without looking at checklists checklists give so much information they not only validate and verify the cards placed within the checklist but you begin to understand the parallel structure is the card i'm looking at really a variation and it's not the first card in the set i think looking at checklists is so underrated you can't discover what you don't know exists you want resources that help map back to the product max talked a lot about trading card database in that archive that's searchable by year manufacturer player and team he talked about cardboard connection which publishes set reviews checklists and layout parallels inserts configurations and overall structure checklists matter pop reports matter that's another one pop reports are not perfect but they're they're a crucial lens psa's pop report is a staple in almost every purchase i've made if it is a psa graded card right pop reports help you answer questions like is this card actually scarce in the grade people want is the market pricing a pop story that's real or imagined but you must remember pop reports aren't only what's being graded by the company and the numbers can be influenced by crossovers and resubmission like that's really important think the third thing is sales data and obviously cardladder is a great resource for this if checklists tell you what exists and pop reports tell you how grading has distributed supply sales data tells you what the market actually paid and how often this is where cardladder is a powerhouse it aggregates historical sales updates daily and positions itself as a vetted dataset that also accounts for issues like chill bidding and relisted sales and i like the fact that they're explicit vetting requires judgment and there are sales that are sent to purgatory for verification number four marketplaces you can go do all the theory in the world but discovery becomes the real value when you're in the habit of sourcing marketplaces using search on ebay using filter filters using save searches using alerts even just disciplined browsing on ebay can allow you to surface things you didn't know exist if your search behavior is in fact strategic now let's connect this psychology back to outcomes outcomes discovery works because it changes your timing and competition headlines compress demand onto a small set subset of cards discovery spreads your attention across wider surface area meaning you find cards with fewer bidders you find cards with fewer comps you find cards with aesthetics aesthetics and scarcities that isn't fully priced and the key point i think is a lot of big price collecting is not collecting it's status competition it's fine if someone wants to play that game but most people can't afford it and even if they can it's not usually why they fell in love with the hobby discovery recenters the hobby on what people actually do build taste build knowledge and build their own lane i took almost an entire year away from buying wrestling cards and there was a specific reason for it i went through a process where i had a collection of rare and scarce roman rain rains cards that blew up in value at the same time a lot of cards that i had dreamt about became available so i repurposed some of those roman reigns cards into some of the other cards that i cherish that i'll never get rid of in my collection it was the decision i made at that time and i knew because i love wrestling cards i would be back into wrestling cards buying wrestling cards collecting wrestling cards but i wanted to kinda take this new approach moving from a player collector to maybe a more widespread version of myself as a wrestling card collector and i think during this year that i kind of sat on the sidelines it was a year of transition it was a year of transition from panini to topps the topps cards that were being released chrome were just extraordinary in value they they went gangbusters i didn't really care too much about the design of it it wasn't the first year of tops chrome in wwe it was just the return i didn't like the fact that there were multiple super fractures on the primary checklist it was endless so i knew the attention was upfront and so what i decided to do was look back and when i came back i leaned into discovery as a weapon not to outsmart anyone because it's really hard right now the wrestling card market and the interest is at an all time high if you're interested in learning more we've got a podcast here on the stacking slabs network with my good friends adam and ryan booked to last make sure you check it out but i wanted to stop letting attention dictate my my targets i used rules i've built for my own discovery process and it led me to one of my favorite acquisitions and that is a card by the time this episode goes live hopefully i will have it in hand and that's the twenty twenty three revolution john cena kaleido one of one and what makes this story perfect is the card wasn't inevitable the hobby didn't have to hand it to me i had to be in the right place mentally and be proactive not reactive and i had to be in the right place informationally knowing the product the structure and where the scarcity really lives the lesson isn't to go out and find a one on one the lesson is if you build discovery rules you can create more opportunities to acquire cards that feel special because you're not standing in the same line as everyone else and i do feel fortunate about for laying in that card just check and save search and it popped up it popped up for a thousand dollars best offer and i saw the card and i i didn't even think twice about an offer because to me and what i was willing to pay that that price was more than fair i in fact i would have paid much more for that card the reason why i pay much more for that card is because there's only three years of panini wwe cards and there's only so many sets when you dig in to the date and you look across those three years across those sets there's john cena has only about twenty four base set one of ones in in multiple years you're getting like eight one of ones especially in twenty two from select so you think about that think about twenty two select you've got a black gold one of one you've got a black one of one you've got four different levels so if all of them to me that dilutes the the the power of the one of one in the select product but then you look at year one of revolution twenty twenty two there's no base set one of one parallel and then the second year there's only two years the twenty twenty three there is one base set parallel it's the first and only and it's the kaleido and it was staring at me in the face so based on my research discovery process based on john cena being the babe ruth of professional wrestling never seen seventeen time champ recently retired which i have a ton of nostalgia foreseen at this point watching last year watching his retirement tour and him being away he's one of the most important wrestlers in the history of wrestling he's on my mount rushmore of greatest professional wrestlers of all time longevity longevity spotlight everything he does as a performer and a human being resonates with me and i got an opportunity right there to get in my opinion one of his best cards of the panini era for a thousand dollars i'm gonna take advantage of that but i wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that if it wasn't for discovery here's our here are the rules i wanna leave you all with today and i'm gonna be very blunt if you don't have rules you don't have discovery you just have vibes and vibes are how you become exit liquidity for this headline crowd so here's a discovery system you can actually run rule one define your sandbox before you open a pop report before you open sales data define what you're exploring one set one player one year one parallel one sport one aesthetic theme your sandbox is what keeps discovery from turning into endless wondering and this is where psychology matters curiosity needs a specific gap to resolve and a sandbox creates the gap checklist map you're not allowed to discover anything until you know where it exists that's where checklist source sources matter your goal is to identify the parallels that matter the inserts that matter the weird stuff people ignore the parts of the product that align with your taste rule three validate scarcity and don't assume it scarcity can be print run scarcity poll rate scarcity grading scarcity market availability scarcity pop reports help when grading with grading scarcity but they're partial and can be distorted sales data helps with market available market available scarcity rule four use sales data to build price discipline the market is not your enemy it's a data source and a tool like cardladder frames itself as a way to centralize historical sales and vet them for accuracy issues like shills and relisted sales discovery without price discipline becomes justification rule five separate i like it from i need it this is where discovery can evolve into compulsion if you are not careful one of the best psychological protections in this hobby is autonomy choosing because you want it not because you are afraid so ask if nobody posted this card would i still want it if the answer is yes go for it if no you're chasing attention not discovery rule six track your discoveries keep a living discovery board not a buying list not a learning list cards you found sets you map parallels you want to understand price points you've seen because curiosity improves learning and memory when you are in an active state tracking turns curiosity into competence rule seven make your collection a story not a scoreboard this is the part most people skip but it's the part that makes collecting sustainable collecting behavior research emphasizes the role of collector identity and motivations and how collecting behaviors reinforce the identity if your collection is just a scoreboard you're always behind if collection is a story you can never lose and the deeper you go the more meaning it can have and nostalgia research shows that nostalgia can enhance meaning and connectedness it's going to end with a lot of work a mindset shift but i would say like if you're if you're if this is resonating with you like test it out pick a sandbox map a checklist look at scarcity look at sales history do all those things and you don't have to buy anything that's the best part because discovery isn't buying it's learning and learning is what makes us as collectors feel something we'll close this out by going back to the question for which we started when was the last time you found a card that the hobby told you it mattered the moment is available to you not because you're lucky because you're disciplined and discovery is the choice to be proactive to build your own lane to turn left when the market is turning right and if you build a discovery process you don't have to find better cards you become a better collector because you stop chasing the hobby and you start exploring it if this hit tell a damn friend appreciate you tuning in supporting stacking slabs your hobby content alternative the flagship in all the shows on the stacking slabs network i love doing this i can't tell you how excited i am each and every day to explore stuff like this and hopefully it's helpful for you share it on instagram share it on x do it share it wherever you can appreciate it talk soon take care