what's going on everybody we are back the staging area with dc sports eighty seven we have few big topics we're gonna talk about the new release attention economy which feels like the right time to do it based on the internet and what we've been seeing for the release of tops chrome football it's it were it's it's the internet tory it's all of it so we're gonna talk about that we're gonna talk about a card that sold to dc sports eighty seven and also the ebay cancellation policy of it all and your perspective for that your this is the world you play in so without further ado man welcome how are you thanks i'm good yeah we got some some good topics and given ebay is our world and our hobby ecosystem and our life here that'll be fun to dive into we've gotten i think the feedback was overwhelmingly positive but there's always the you know there's there's the haters and there's there's still some cons out there so we can have a very honest conversation about that and yeah no better time to talk new release economy than twenty four hours after tops chrome release and you know i feel like in the last week i saw fanatics introduce a new hobby oriented credit card and then launch a product that sells for a thousand dollars a hobby box what could go wrong for any of the married couples out there so yeah plenty plenty for us to dive into today i restraint and self discipline are the things that i'm thinking a lot about when i saw the credit card news but yeah we're we're in a new era that's for sure let's let's we're i wanna start with the cancellation policy or the buyer cancellation policy and what ebay changed but before we dive into like the update had that impacted you at dc sports eighty seven negatively in the past was this something you were dealing with before the change yeah yeah for sure you know it it's one of those tricky things and this is i think gonna be part of the the conversation here is you can make rules and it's twenty twenty six and we got a lot of desperate people or people who don't always have the highest integrity in their transactions and behavior so even with rules there's gonna be people who find ways around it or still don't pay we get that like we're aware enough to know that but we have had a lot of issues you know you and i have jokes before and i've just been too busy to ever do it like i need the compilation of like the best hits of ebay messages on dc sports and if i'm talking to people in the hobby which we are in this podcast you guys are no stranger to these messages i'm sure you've heard them seen them shared on social media but you know my my dog took my phone and dropped it in my toddler's crib and i meant to bid ninety nine dollars and i had it queued up but my toddler added two extra nines and i bid nine thousand nine hundred nine like we've all seen those messages and so we will get plenty of times that it's hey i didn't mean to do that i didn't wanna win this for what i want it for please cancel we will get hey i found one cheaper i didn't shop around enough i wanna cancel we will get some people who are actually honest i'll give them credit like hey i i paid too much for this i don't have the money like i need to get back out of the sale and so ebay making any step towards look if you make the choice to bid on something and win an auction we're gonna hold you to following through that purchase or make our best effort to do so is huge for us because from our standpoint you know a seller at at scale it's not only trying to reduce cancellations it's not having to deal with all the messages you know not having to deal with cancellations requested dozens of times a day sometimes hundreds of times a day and just having to navigate that and explain to people it's not our policy and we're doing this freaking assignment and we gotta follow through on sales so yeah absolutely has been a pain point for us definitely a step in the right direction and you know we can get us in the weeds with the you know what and how and why as we want to but yeah we're very very happy to see it so you're sitting in between the the buyer and the seller and you just mentioned the messages that you get and we've all seen those reposted on instagram when people get them and it makes us laugh and then we feel they're playing a little bit but you not only do you have to deal with the you had to deal with the communication from the individuals wanting to cancel but then on the flip side there's probably an explanation to the individual who's sending their cards to d c sports a seven who wants wants some clarification on what's going on so that's even more time yeah no it is and you know there's a lot of frustration there with people you know we try to pride ourselves on saying hey we we offer at least several services like our express and our premium where you get your items listed really quick we pride ourselves on the second the buyer pays on ebay funds are available to you we offer twenty four seven real time ach like we do all this stuff but look if the buyer doesn't pay in the first place that all kinds of falls on deaf ears because you're not getting your money so it it is huge i think if you just look at what ebay sent out i know some users out there got the email some didn't if you haven't it's on our instagram d c sports eighty seven you can go see it there and i'm sure it's been shared all over social media at this point by various people but you know the funny thing is i actually have it so i was gonna read it it it's kind of like a couple captain obvious statements but i think people have to appreciate what's happening here so you know the first thing in the why we're making this change auctions on ebay work best when winning bidders follow through and pay now i know some people are gonna laugh at that because it's like well it's an auction i sold my item of course they should pay but the headline of this was protecting auction integrity on ebay and i think just we have to step back and we can all say hey there's things that still aren't perfect things not working but ebay over the last couple years they've introduced autopay that has helped us reduce unpaid items they're now saying we're gonna eliminate buyer initiated cancels that's going to help us reduce canceled orders and so just seeing something like improving auction integrity on ebay and knowing that that team is making that like a top priority this year it it's really encouraging and so as much as we can say well what about this what about that knowing that that on their road map is as critical as some of the other growth things they're working on it's just huge for us so just you know very happy to see it i i've been honest and blunt in the past about things i don't like ebay doing or frustrations we have but this really is great to see i as a buyer i've been a fan of the autopay more more or less like i it's just one less thing i have to worry about and i look down and it's in my purchase items and then it'll get shipped to me it just it's it's more streamlined i can't necessarily think about what a world would be like as an individual who bids on something and doesn't pay because if i'm bidding on something i want it but you're seeing probably more of that sort of activity than ever before because this change is being implemented by ebay obviously like more people will get paid out there'll be less of this back and forth but what do you do you think like what do you think the impact will be on cards at auction individuals placing bids like do you think this changes anything about the individuals that who are are bidding on cards or is this just going to eliminate a small group of people who probably shouldn't be bidding on cards anyway yeah i i think it's the latter i think if you just think logistically through the way ebay works as a seller i can't say hey i'm gonna block every account with a zero feedback score and i know that's still one of the sore spots that a lot of people have i know that is also something ebay is actively working on is getting better validation of buyer accounts so it's not just saying what's the account behavior are they following through and paying it's saying is this a real person who only has one account who isn't setting up a burner who isn't you know manipulating anything and so that's i think the next phase of this but what we get a lot of is someone who's probably not going to pay trying to do this cancel process immediately whether it's i didn't mean to bid i found another one whatever excuse they wanna come up with and it can put us as the seller in an awkward spot because what you end up with is a choice of saying somebody reached out to us and said hey i'm not paying for this my dog did well i have two options i can wait for the week plus window of time to run out to get a strike against their account so that i can inch them closer to being able to block them in the future the the most sensitive setting that ebay allows currently is if you have more than one unpaid item that gets canceled for that reason in i think it's six months it might be twelve months now or it is we can go twelve months so it's basically saying you have to have failed to pay for more than one item in the last year i can block you from bidding on our stuff so where we get caught and this is where it's awkward is let's say you win something but you would never do this you have more integrity than this i know you just said that say you win something and you message us an hour after the auction saying hey not gonna pay for this bid too much can't do it my choices are make our customer wait over a week to get that strike against you log it as unpaid realist the item go from there or cancel immediately where i now can't give you a strike because because of the timing i haven't allowed enough time for you to pay but i know your intent is to not pay for me to expedite the realist and so i look at this kind of like i look at the autopay where with autopay the pro was we had a lot fewer unpaid items the only negative was a lot of people just let autopay do everything for them now so instead of going on and paying a day later they might know hey i got it on three day autopay five day seven day and they just know once a week it's just gonna hit you know charge my credit card for everything and i'm good so sometimes we wait a couple extra days but we see more things get paid i think what we see in this scenario is immediately they can't ask for those cancels anymore because they can't request them because ebay is gonna block that on auctions so it might be a few more times that we have to relist things in the first sixty to ninety days say but knowing we're gonna log a lot more strikes against buyer accounts who are culprits of this kind of behavior and in doing so protect protect our auctions performance down the road by having more people blocked and filtered out from not being able to bid on our auctions so i think you just kinda have to zoom out sometimes and say there's the there's the flow and you know obviously for us you know i don't mind sharing the number it's it's unfortunate but we run you know we've talked numbers before we we run ninety to a hundred thousand auctions a week right now and we deal with about a thousand getting canceled every week so it's one percent you know just north of that unfortunately i can say that and say hey we're at ninety nine percent plus paid and that feels great that also means there's a thousand items where our buyer our customer is having a poor experience but not getting paid for them and so i think that over the mid to long term we'll see that number whittle down and that's what makes us happy but you know you just kinda have to think through think through all those steps in cases like this every time there's a little policy change very insightful i think that's why i enjoy hearing from you we hear these updates and you're living it so net net this is a this is a positive update for leasing up in the company absolutely yep yeah i think autopay was big i think this is gonna help a lot and you know once we have ebay taking that final step of like whether they're asking for you to provide identification you know i know if if you go on you know some of these big auction houses and things you have to really vet your identity to even be provided a buying limit and things like that i think that's kind of the next evolution of this but yeah all the changes today great steps in the right direction alright we are gonna be talking about the attention economy here in our great hobby but before we do that we gotta talk about a card that's sold through dc sports eighty seven and i saw this one this one served as a pattern interrupt as i was scrolling through the thousands and thousands of sales that are coming through your shop but this is a twenty twenty two top sterling hank aaron one of one batknob and this card just stood out to me this is cool this card sold for six thousand six hundred and sixty six dollars and i have a lot that i wanna talk about i have a lot of questions about this and getting your perspective as a baseball guy well maybe we'll just start with hank aaron first i think hank aaron obviously is a iconic figure do you like when you think about all of the all time greats and what their cards sell for like do you think hank aaron is properly placed a little underrated a little overrated in terms of like his hobby status like how do you view hank aaron i i think properly placed i mean aaron's stuff sells incredibly well you know his fifty four tops rookie is definitely one of the most iconic cards of the you know postwar but old vintage era and it's just somebody where i think you look at him and he's got other cards that i love his fifty eight tops with him and mickey mantle world series batting foes awesome card but he is somebody who did it over an extremely long career and i think if you look at when he played and you look at the kinda like landscape of baseball he wasn't like the buzz of a mickey mantle and so there were things there but obviously what he achieved you know in his career you know what he sells for makes a ton of sense to me but yeah you know which while we're talking his career then it gets interesting as you get into like the is he still the real home run king or not and you know you can get all your your barry bonds and hank aaron people to go fight each other i i'm still going bond steroids or not but but yeah awesome card of definitely you know easily one of the top you know ten most i think collectible vintage you know older era of baseball guys out there man the as you're talking through that i'm thinking about the parallels of the steroid era versus everything that came came before and it's got me already thinking about what we're talking about next where it's it feels very much like the industry is on steroids and is being manufactured by a lot of different elements and we'll save that but but yeah that's a that's a good call out though because i tell you if you look at some stat lines from like the mid nine mid to late nineties is a good era look at like especially some of the guys who played in colorado look at like the dante bischettes and andres coloragas and all these guys you will no joke see seasons and not just on the rockies of all teams where it's okay this guy hit three thirty five with forty two homers a hundred and thirty seven rbis and all this and finished eleventh in mvp voting and it's just like wild numbers that today would just run away with things didn't happen then and so yes definitely some parallels to you know a product that comes out when we go hey look what's in it look what it costs and yeah but yeah i i am curious too i know you're not as much of a baseball guy as me but yep if you had a baseball player that you were collecting that knob or that barrel which do you prefer just like the look of more i think it i think the i think the knob i think i'm okay i'm slowly not i i'm slowly more interested in the knobs and i just and i think it's an aesthetic thing but what is your preference so so i i have a very weird very more specific than you want answer i'm gonna say bat barrels and i collect them i have a ton of them because i like the look of the relic itself more because on bat barrels you can get the whole louisville slugger you sometimes get the player's name there's just more going on on barrels it's often there's some very plain ones or there's ones like this where you get the jersey number and you usually don't get much more there's some out there where you get like initials on it or something but i also really don't like horizontal cards and i prefer the look of vertical cards so i generally like the look of a vertical card more but as far as the relic itself i'm just you know i'm a sucker for the barrel and i like that way more than the bat knot piece so i guess it's it depends kinda half of each answer what's what's the market say like which ones obviously i'm sure the product plays a role the player plays a role but but just market wise what is more desired yeah i i don't see a huge difference in price if you just kinda like average everything out but to kind of the point you just made it's so hard because since pretty much every nowadays all barrels and knobs are pretty much one on ones if you go back to like the early two thousands there were a lot of upper deck sets where you would get them numbered out of three or seven or nine or six i have like a cal ripken and a rod dual barrel and it's numbered to nine and of course nowadays that would be a one zero one card no no thought so it was a little different but when you're dealing with generally the premier names in the game and dealing with one on ones it's like you'll expect them to suffer the same but then two guys decide to battle over winning the same auction and things get kinda weird so it can it can fluctuate all over the place but yeah overall i think they're pretty comparable with the software i i wanna see a i wanna see a relic with a baseball villain and i want a a a corked bat relic like they they need to do that if they haven't already because i'm i'm interested in that so so you're looking for like a relic set that's only controversy so you're looking for like george brett with pine tar off the bat you're looking for sammy sosa relic of the corked barrel and you need a jose canseco which is a little piece of the syringe embedded in a lumber somewhere and you you know hey maybe you're onto something there you know give give the guys at fanatics a call and saw that you got a new idea i don't i don't think fanatics needs any more ideas at this point they've probably got that one in the pipeline but yeah so is like the history of the barrels and the knobs like how how long have these relics been in cards it could from from an outsider looking at it feels like the knobs have gotten a lot more attention recently because i don't remember you know three to five years ago i don't remember them being as part of the conversation as they are right now yeah i think they it definitely started with barrel so if you go back you know the first years i remember are probably like o two o three two thousand two two thousand three and that's those upper deck sets i was talking about where you had a handful of them back in the days of like ultimate and all the different upper deck sets they were doing where you would get those and that's when they weren't always one on ones but they were really cool cards barrels definitely or sorry knobs definitely came along later it is you know it all progressed you know like the first jersey cards were in ninety seven upper deck that's when you see like the famous griffey which was the first really like game use relic we ever saw on a card what's interesting to me is just the like being way too logical and caring way more about it than most people probably do is like if you just think about it you can produce a lot more bat barrel cards than you can produce bat knob cards if you hand me a bat i can make one bat knob card that's all i can do there but if you look at some of the old especially the older barrels now they're pretty selective and they really grab that middle piece but look at like some of the tier one limited lumber the sets out of sterling and you know any other tribute high end sets now sometimes the barrels you can tell there's more than one because you'll get kinda like the name on one block of the wood and you'll get the manufacturer whether it's mizuno or you know louisville slugger or it's victus or whoever on on another piece and some are even just like it's a it's a great big game use relic but it's just kinda like off the barrel of the bat but it doesn't have like distinct markings and things and so it also just makes me wonder in the future especially with somebody like hank aaron's a good example we're not getting more bats used by hank aaron and yet we are producing more bat barrel and bat knob cards and so it's kind of this at what point does that dry up and do we ever worry about like the ethical argument of are we really gonna chop up every bat we have left that hank used just to keep producing cards so we'll see you know what happens over time but yeah i i agree with the take knobs are more prevalent in recent years whereas barrels were kind of the beginning of of these kind of one zero one cards i love it how we can spend time talking about a wooden object being that's right card the last one i wanna hit before we move on to the main topic is the the relics like this in the conversation around post playing day cards i know some people say like i draw a hard and fast line like no post playing day cards but the technology and the way cards existed when hank aaron played didn't afford opportunities for cards like this so do you find that with knobs or barrels and you know all time greats like hank aaron kind of i mean six six thousand six hundred and sixty six dollars is a is a huge chunk of change i'd imagine there's obviously demand for this but oh yeah do you do you think some collectors like throw that out the door to pursue a card like this because even though it's post playing days it's about getting hank aaron's bad is that like the mindset for these prices i i think so and i think just the fact that there are such a limited supply of them and whether he's a guy upc or you just think it's an investment piece there's just not that many and so if you really wanna own one you've gotta be motivated you have to spend up to do it and with guys like this you're kind of overlapping the two you're you're obviously not buying a hard produced during his playing days but because these you know i don't think in the fifties and sixties and early seventies it was like today where you had guys going to rookie photo shoots and wearing forty seven jerseys just to rip them off and cut them off and so like it is game used stuff and so being able to have the game used connection to his playing time even if the card itself isn't it definitely kinda bridges the you know the old era and the new era of collecting and i think it works as i was we were talking through this i don't know why this came up in my head maybe a previous episode we have done around this guy but mcelroy rory winning his second masters yeah last year it was like the story of the year and to me it's almost like i haven't seen much about it and you know obviously we're recording this a few days removed from that but i thought like you know there's been only three guys to win back to back master or now there's four but like what what do you think that does for for rory just in terms of like i know there's a a niche collecting community around golf cards but like what do you think this does to his collectibles yeah i mean i've seen some of the numbers like i i you know i couldn't give you the the hard data like i know his stuff shot up right after it'll be interesting to see like you said i think it's a a small but passionate fan base and collector base so we'll have to see kind of how it goes i will say i i get got so many times ever since you know he finished because i'll be like watching some clip and it's rory getting his second green jacket or a crucial you know putt or that the amazing chip where he you know chipped it in from off the green and then like in comes tiger's suv just like flying because ai can be way too much these days but yeah it's you know nobody's ever gonna top tiger i don't think in collectability in golf but i think when you look at that next tier and what rory's accomplished and the fact that he's still got time left to keep playing he's definitely in that you know that very next level down as far as the golf collecting community goes yeah i thought it was such a obviously like the first one is the coolest story but i thought the back to back is a really cool story and i maybe i'm just not looking in the right places i've i've it felt like i know there's a lot going on but it felt like it should have gotten maybe a little more discourse after it happened since it's there's only it's only happened a few times but yeah i felt like hey there there's some golf listeners out there let's throw in some golf chatter yeah yeah for sure alright let's dig into the main topic and that's the the re new release attention economy tori i just wanna i just wanna like let you cook for a minute because i know you've got a lot of thoughts but this tops chrome football just dropped yesterday at the time of this recording i mean it's taken over everything it's taken over breaks it's taken over instagram it's taken over hobby shops and that's the intention of fanatics and they are masters at going to market with brand new product yep and so this feels extra juiced up you've got tom brady involved it's it's this is like how this is the new world and we're living in it yeah yeah what's your feedback and reaction you know twenty four hours removed from release day yeah i mean i you know i think it's like a lot of products these days it's just you know not to keep this trend going on steroids we're just talking about this with baseball players but it's like there's so much buzz behind the release and and look i'm excited because i grew up collecting in the nineties to early two thousands and so i lived in like the initial heyday of when tops chrome came out in nineteen ninety six finest came out in ninety three and just like that first decade of yeah those refractors were just gorgeous and the chrome technology on cards really changed everything so you know in twenty fifteen we had our last year of tops chrome football and then it left so we've been eleven years without it it is super exciting to have it back and i think the set is gorgeous i think i've seen the refractors they look great granted these days we have ninety three different parallels of every card instead of the one or two we had back then i just think the price point is wild you know i am seeing boxes move and get snapbought on facebook and other places at a thousand a box eleven hundred a box and it's one of those where it just makes me really wonder you know are we the people who are buying these are is it a i'm gonna hold this sealed product because it's the year fanatics brought tops chrome back and that's gonna be meaningful down the road the same way that ninety three finest you know baseball for example is i think worth more seal than it is open because it's just such a iconic like kinda historic set in the hobby or other years you know look at eighty nine upper deck look at ninety three sp like a lot of these first years of products prism in two thousand twelve when that came out you know there's a lot of examples of this but i just see these breaks happen and it's cool but it's you know you'll see a couple refractors couple rookies you see three or four numbered cards and you see an auto and you'd i'm just trying to do the math to get to a thousand and it's just it's really hard to get there and so for people who kinda love that like gambling through all the chase i get it because i see the prices these tech mobile inserts are doing and i know there's the brady stuff's on fire and your jackson darts and you know the big rookie names are taken off the sps are there so there's a lot of stuff in there where you're gonna have positive roi on it but just you know your average box at that price it's just a it's a whole other world that i feel like we didn't have before you know i remember not that long ago like it didn't cost that much to get a box of flawless or nt of even like basketball or football so yeah it's just it's just interesting and i think when you try to weigh the the value offered in the product and the quality of the product which i think both are great but then you put that through the lens of what the entry price is on buying it sealed and it's just it's out there i mean you know just some of the sales and offerings but then just to give one example saw on like release day i saw jackson dart refractor rookies doing four four hundred and fifty dollars then i saw three hundred dollar sales then i saw two hundred fifty dollar sales now i'm seeing two hundred dollar sales and so i think it's just one of those cases where yeah this is exactly the topic i know you're kinda leading us into here but it's like how do we measure and project that out where you know it's gonna take off day one and you know it's gonna peak day one and you don't really know where the top or the bottom is like are there new inserts and perilous we haven't seen before that may gain popularity and skyrocket and are there basic stuff that there were only a few of available to buy day one so they were sky high and are they gonna be ten percent of that price within a couple weeks and that's the that's the the the game of risk and analysis and all that you're playing when you get into this i on release day and i sent the screenshots to some friends but somebody had a jackson dart yellow refractor auto out of two seventy five now i'll say the yellow refractor looks more gold than some of the older years of of so what like i'm like i hope people are seeing the serial number but it was in a deal or no deal group they just put it up there and they said deal or no and i'm like this is like get my popcorn out like what is there's two hundred and seventy five of these like what what the last time i looked there was an offer for two thousand dollars and i just was like what what sort of world are we living in so there there's that happening yep in facebook groups but then you talked about the wax prices and i don't know like i don't think a lot of people like really dig in to think about these prices are the prices because it's not just consumers buying these boxes but moreover it's businesses buying these boxes where then are breaking it much like the paul skeens patch wasn't bought by an individual it baby patch it was bought by a business so i don't know like we could probably go down that thread forever but i think we as like collectors in the space need to take like ten steps back sometimes and just like evaluate what we have seen and what we have learned and what is happening in front of us yeah before we decide that we're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on or thousands of doll tens of thousands of dollars on sports cards right when it gets released yeah and and and the thing is like i'm not knocking tops chrome at all and i and i know you aren't either like nope i think it's a sharp looking product i think they did really well with it this year i think the autos look great autos are on card obviously with tops we haven't really had the time with them to have the license yet where there's not the established like okay i'm going after downtown kaboom color blast it's we're still kind of trying to get traction with helix and ultraviolet and so you know maybe there's a little difference there but you know it's not just tops chrome yeah i think tops cosmic is an awesome product like and i love baseball cards i think tops cosmic baseball is awesome look at twenty twenty five cosmic i think it's like eight hundred dollars a box now and same kind of thing you're not even guaranteed an auto you get a handful of short prints and some parallels and cool color and things like that but it's you know you're going after like i hope i hit low numbered big auto or like you've got a handful of things you're chasing and it's just kind of become that where to your point too you have people with more disposable income or higher budgets in the hobby that are comfortable ripping at that price but more often i think what you're seeing is it's gonna be people who can maybe break in on a whatnot or a fanatics live rebate live or anywhere who they can buy a box for eleven hundred dollars because if you turn around and do a thirty team forty five a spot random team for one box now you're selling it for thirteen fifty you've got your margin there the entry price to get into the tops chrome hype is brought down from eleven hundred to forty five which expands the number of people who can participate and and that's all great but at the same time you know thirty teams aren't getting forty five dollars worth of value out of one box and that's never the case you know again this is not just tops chrome it's just you know seeing single auto thousand dollar plus hobby boxes it's just usually we have a wild rookie class we have a wild chase and the twenty twenty five football rookie class like not great it's kinda you know i would much rather you know twenty four i get it twenty four is wild you know then you're daniels nicks may caleb williams martin harrison junior handful of other guys and there's just you know that's gonna be the case every year where that that goes up and down but it just feels like this would be your major product coming out for the first time with licensing with major sps we're all chasing with a premier rookie class and it's like it just doesn't have all of that so i'm not sold on the price even though i am sold on the product and that's you know i guess that's my overall sentiment towards tops chrome a a whole whopping as of recording this twenty four hours into it being live yeah i'd say just like the most positive thing i would say in comparative my comparative analysis between tops chrome basketball and football is i think the photography on the football side is way better than what i've seen on the basketball side so that's a good trend but when you i'm curious on we can shelf tops chrome i mean i'm sure it'll infiltrate the conversation more but we'll shelve it and just talk about new releases generally you're at this central point where people who are buying the brakes get cards and likely want either they take a card for their collection or they wanna keep the same motion and so they send their cards to dc sports eighty seven like new releases are great for your business i would imagine because it's more people selling cards but how do you kind of assess and i i it doesn't need to be anything scientific but how do you assess whether something new is performing well or not does more cards over to you mean that it's you think it's performing better or does that not mean that it's performed better like how do you assess that yeah and it's gonna be really hard with tops chrome because we haven't had licensed tops chrome football in so long that it's you don't really have something to compare it to you know usually what we would be looking at is okay what are release week sales especially you know we get a lot of people who rip it on release day overnight it here pay for premium say i only want a three day auction like they're trying to get right up there on the first few days of sales and so a lot of times it's we get those we get the first handful of sales and it's okay i know roughly what you know the big name silver prism rookies were doing last year how they're doing this year and sometimes that's just understanding how the market has appreciated and trended up or it's that specific player just gives me an idea of okay this guy or this set is performing phenomenally especially with things when they're introduced newly like new parallels we haven't seen before or a new short printed insert and try to see how does that trend up over time because maybe people don't know how how hot it's gonna get and what the demand's gonna be yeah it's really it's hard to be at all scientific or or even get much of a read with a new product because you just don't really know until we get a little more of a sample size and so you know for us we already got a bunch of tops chrome in today a bunch hit in ebay and i know that will be the case for the next couple weeks here and so the big things that we'll be looking at is what do like the premier autograph names sell for for both rookies and vets what do the mid tier guys sell like what do the lower tier guys sell like on the refractors and the parallels those yellows at two seventy five how are those performing for a peyton manning and tom brady and guys like that how are they performing for jackson dart and the rookies and just kinda doing that general value map of all the things i just said i mean they're gonna be proven kinda right or really wrong and just saying is the value justified of what wax is costing given how the secondary market on singles performs and then the second thing we're always looking for is okay start stop give it thirty days and then look where are the auctions closing now versus where they were at release week and kinda what does that trend look like knowing that come you know we'll see football kinda trend back up as we lead into the season and just kinda understand how does seasonality and hype of the new release play off it so there's a lot of stuff to watch i will say as i've always said before if you're selling cards sell them right when it comes out because that's when you're gonna get the most and if you're buying cards wait and i realize i'm kinda contradicting myself or saying different people are doing things right and wrong but it it pretty much always is the smart move you know even if we're talking about that daniel jones card you were talking about like even if it's a pc thing like i just let the let the you know let things calm down a little bit and then and then go chase those cards i i get an angle of hey just came out and i wanna grab some of the big singles because i'm gonna grade them and be the first to market with slabs or i have no buyers for these and i think i can make some money in the middle but if you're just sitting on to hold up for your own collection i really feel like you gotta have patience here i'm gonna put you a little bit on the spot i'm just curious based on like mega releases over the last few years is there a is can you remember and i know there's a lot of cards that come through your door but when like a moment happens where you've got a a massive release that has a lot of attention is there any specific card like in the history of new releases and that card getting pulled and ending up with dc sports eighty seven that you like recall and remember if you're thinking about like a topic like this my memory is far too short for this question it it's funny because we you and i have tried talking to us before like i joke with everybody like if i tell anybody what i do or if we have visitors to the office like without fail they're gonna ask what's the most expensive card you ever sold of course i i don't know the answer what's the most expensive card you sold recently i don't know the answer like it's just when you're dealing with four or five hundred thousand auctions a month like there's not really the stop and smell the roses time in there for us anymore you know i know that we've had that happen we'll have the you know the guy who hits a a super or a gold vinyl or a big kaboom when it first comes out and they're always torn because they're saying hey i really wanna do buy it now because i know it's worth a ton and i and i'm worried i'm not gonna sell it for enough but you know at the same time i don't wanna miss miss the boat i'm all the stuff's hot and you know i always tell people auction i i really you know you can say it's selfish or self serving but like we'll list it either way for you i just think if people get such big eyes and get so urged to hit that max out number and the market's gonna take care of you like there's enough people in the hobby these days but i really don't like i i'm even trying to think i know we've had like you know bowman releases where we'll get a red refractor of one of the top two guys here the day after the product comes out you know tops chrome releases or more recently things like prism where i know we had like a shadur sanders gold prism rookie like the day after release and we've already talked about that one on here but like there there's there's a handful of cards like that where i remember the cards what i don't have enough room in my head to remember is what did it sell for and watch the market and where was it at a month or two or three months later but yeah it it happens every time i'm sure we'll see some monsters from topscript football here in the next few days i want i wanna hit maybe just like compression of time and what it looks like now when new releases happen and those cards you just mentioned like you have top scrum football cards at your location getting ready to get listed like how has that changed over the last like several years and like what is response i'm sure it's gotten quicker but like what is responsible for that yeah i mean i think it is just more and more people getting into the hobby but people in the hobby getting more educated and you know i think there was a time years ago when not everybody really appreciated or understood the urgency in the hobby and maybe it wasn't as widespread and so things would hit ebay and you know people would jump on that first single because they hadn't seen it before and it was hey it's the first refractor in this guy the first auto the first silver prism whatever and so prices would skyrocket because there are tons of people who want that card but so few available and i think as there are more platforms out there there's a lot of live selling happening in the place we talked about the whatnot fanatics and ebay and everything else there's the facebook deal or no deal transactions you were talking about there's people selling privately to their local shops or the dealers they know there's you know people at card shows like there's there's all kind there's just so many environments to sell in that i think the difference is you used to kinda have like say a week of hey if i can get it up in that first week i'm gonna be one of the early guys and i'm gonna really get that premium and now it's like you better be in like the first forty eight to seventy two hours and so that's why we you know through our specific business lens see so many people dropping off in person the day of release or shipping it overnight to be here the day after release paying premium to pay five extra dollars a card with us to know it goes up within twenty four hours asking for a three day auction to be one of the first to end just like everything else in the hobby just buzz and urgency drives things more than ever did before and as a result we just see the behavior of the way people sell just falling right in line with that i wanna hit breaking i wanna talk about just like obviously breaking is a central force in the attention economy and i was thinking about this and wanted to get your opinion as someone who is who's born in the same era as me and has consumed cards in a similar way over it's another old hobby person i just heard i tried not to say it but yes but you said it about yourself too so it's okay we can both just be self aware and be okay with it fair but i think about like the fact that this product just came out and it's being it's breaking everywhere across multiple platforms multiple companies they're all clipped gets distributed on social everyone sees all the big hits everywhere and that drives up momentum excitement but i think about like this old world we used to live in where we we hadn't we didn't like have the internet we had no idea where what cards got pulled where they were at and so it was mysterious in a way i i i think about like this long term or short term just like value and the attention on these cards obviously like breaking is a big reason why this industry is moving at the rate that it is right now yep but do you think this is like short term or do you think the fact that breaking exists is good for the long term growth and health of the hobby and i'm not the the intention isn't to to position you for or against breaking but it's just more or less get your perspective based on it it's it's inevitable position right no i am one hundred percent for breaking i don't think there is any sound logical argument against breaking how breaking happens what the cost of products being broken are there's things you can talk about but breaking is a good thing breaking encourages and promotes a lot of these social community aspects of the hobby you go into any break room and you see that it's people who know each other there's friendships there there's interaction engagement with the breaker like there's a lot of cool stuff there there are not there are a ton of people in this hobby who can't afford a hobby box of of anything and and that's not a a knock or anything but like wax is outrageous these days you know we've got like flagship tops baseball products coming out at you know a hundred and fifty bucks for a hobby box or something and so there are a lot of people who just wanna chase their team or chase their guy it's great that you can go and say like i'm an orioles fan we've had our expensive years and our cheap years but there's a lot of years where i could go and say okay i'll pay fifty bucks for the orioles in a case of something so i might get a cool pc card i can hold on to and it actually helps you reduce your spending because you're not buying outrageous amounts and chasing so i think that's good i think when a premium product like this comes out which really tops chrome is not i don't think like a premium high end product but right now it certainly is with all the buzz of it coming back with the license it's accessible at a price point people can get in more so than it would be if their options were only by sealed products so breaking's a great thing agreed with your points that in the past there was more mystery to it where nowadays it's like the day after tops chrome update comes out there's an mlb debut patch tracker on every social media and i can know who hit what with what breaker and what state they live in in like five minutes it's wild but i do think just that stuff making the rounds on social circulating it there's so many impressions there it's putting the hobby in front of so many eyes like it it is a good thing it's not a good thing when breakers try to overprice things it's not a good thing if we say we're gonna do random teams on a wheel and then we cut the break after the first couple big teams go we don't like what money we're getting it's not a good thing if you have a bad experience with a breaker a breaker's dry i hate when breakers overhype things like if it's a vet refractor of a big name and it's worth two dollars you don't need to be hyping that like there's there's reasonable lines of let's get excited for people and let's not just pump everything so don't get me wrong there's a lot of mistakes out there in breaking but if you find a good high integrity breaker who's fair with their prices breaking is a good thing it's not going anywhere and it never will there's plenty of those out there that's for sure let's close it out i've learned this from doing these shows with you you're very big on self accountability and being responsible for your actions i feel like we align there i'm the same way in this attention driven hobby that we are in this economy where so much is coming at us you've got manufacturer positioning messaging you got breakers you got big hits like how do you how does the collector navigate like what is your what is your feedback on like how you are able to navigate this new terrain we're in in this space and not lose your butt but actually create an experience that you're gonna enjoy yeah i mean i think you and i have had this conversation before i'm here but like just do your homework it it blows my mind that you you know i think fanatics live to me is currently the premier place for breaking like i love ebay ebay live has really putting a lot of work into bringing that along but right now it's fanatics live go on fanatics pick any product and go on fanatics live and just someday like if you're a break person out there do yourself this favor like pick a team pick a product on a release day when you everybody's breaking it and go browse all the prices you will be shocked at the range of prices you're gonna see and i think people make too many assumptions take too many things for granted and don't wanna do homework so it's k you're i'm not much of a football guy you're a colts fan right so it'd be like if you just open fanatics live and said i'm gonna go buy the first breaker who has the colts in a pyt case of delight top scrum and you just pay the price yeah there are breakers who are gonna charge i mean say a team cost a hundred on average i'm not kidding if you don't know this there are breakers who are gonna charge two hundred and breakers are gonna charge sixty like go find them like all most of these apps have ways you can search do a search take mental note of which breakers have good prices go back to those guys mhmm same as you know if you're gonna buy sealed wax go you know beckett cardladder ebay there's all kinds of resources out there what are the odds in a box what are you guaranteed to get hop on ebay look at completed auctions or the early days buy it nows what are they selling for do some very quick math of okay the worst case here i spend a thousand on a box to get a hundred back at least you know that if you're okay with it jump right in if you're not don't and i just think you know we talk about urgency and the information age and comps and all this stuff you you and i have talked about lately and i think everybody will say yeah they exist they're out there it's great and yet so many people don't use them and it's like just just do yourself the favor of using them and putting the time in because it really will save you a lot of money in the big picture it is very eye opening i perused everywhere for wwe tops chrome and that release was you know by the time this goes live two weeks ago but i was just interested like what in the disparity and i had to make sure like okay there's a delight case plus a hobby case i had to make sure there was a lot but it the the pricing discrepancy not only in the same platform but just across all platforms is is wild so yeah you gotta be an owner you gotta think responsibly and make your decisions wisely but hey i think this was a lot of fun hopefully we're not we're not here to save anyone but we're here to just shine a light on what's happening so yeah and we're not gonna we're not gonna name drop the breakers who are on those high and low ends of price even though we know who they are but let me just say once you identify them it tends to be a trend it's not gonna vary product to product so just yeah learn that way absolutely thank you everyone for checking out the staging area of dc sports eighty seven thanks what what's the what