welcome back loyal listeners of the stacking slabs podcast network to season four episode ten of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin and i go by at cold bunch cards mostly on the instagram machine but on some other places around the internet as well and today's episode is a fun one i cannot wait to get into it last week we talked about twenty nineteen don russ and twenty twenty prism with the entrance of sabrina and this week we're getting into another big name we're gonna talk all about the caitlin clark effect there are moments in the hobby where things feel like tectonic plates are shifting and if you've been collecting wmba cards for a while now you can kinda feel that shake or maybe you felt it for a lot of collectors there was a before and an after and you know one of the common dividing lines is often twenty twenty four and what marked twenty twenty four as being so different was the caitlin clark effect it wasn't just about one player but it was about attention it's about how collector behavior changes when the spotlight shines brighter so far this season we've talked a lot about a slow and steady evolution of the game and the growth of women's basketball cards we talked about early experimentation the rittenhouse years panini's entrance sabrina's rookie moment the pandemic each of those chapters moved the hobby forward but this episode feels a little different and there's no better person to unpack it with than someone who has seen this market up close for years john is a longtime wnba card collector and dealer and and i think that you are uniquely positioned today to tell us what changed bc and ac before clark and after clark this is everything feels different now the caitlin clark effect i have john joining me today how are you doing doing great today how about yourself caitlin oh not too bad this is one of the first episodes we've recorded at nighttime and i kinda feel a different energy so i'm excited to get into it but before we kinda dive into the theme of today's episode which is all about the one and the only caitlin clark why don't you tell the audience if they're unfamiliar with you who you are why you're here just a little bit about yourself so my name is john brogi i've been in the card industry since actually the late seventies when i asked my dad to buy a bag of baseball cards at a flea market and basically didn't look back wnba came a little bit later but my love of women's basketball didn't begin too long after those the baseball cards were bought in the seventies incredible i i can't wait to hear more about those personal stories and kind of how the card hobby has grown alongside you but i guess i wanna start today's episode has so many layers to unpack you know i when i outlined the episode i was like where do we want to start and i figured a really good starting point is i met you for the first time at the national and i think a lot of people would recognize you from the national recently when you set up with a abundance of women's basketball cards but i wanna start by talking about the dealing perspective and the impact that caitlin clark has had on the card market i guess could you tell the audience what it was like attending the national pre clark so actually i've been to virtually every national since nineteen eighty four when we set up at the the parsippany national in new jersey in nineteen eighty four and my family has been involved in the national for years and years and my dad retired from the national in two thousand and twenty three so i decided hey we've got seniority at the show i can get a a booth why not jump into what i've been collecting and selling on the side for the last you know ten years or so so i decided hey you know what we're gonna do a hundred percent wnba booth which i know has never been done and twenty twenty four was a great year to start and we had a great time and i think we did a deal there for what was it an asia color blast i i remember that fondly i think i still have the photo of all the cards that i traded i think there were some page and juju in that deal there was asia yeah all the names that you wanted but damn i think about like i've only been to the national a few times imagining in my head what it used to look like in eighties the nineties the two thousands like could you tell me a little bit about what the like women's sports card presence was like in those sadly sadly very very very little little there there's nothing this i mean you had this scavenger and scound scrounge to look for stuff it was tough to find even as late as you know twenty twenty one twenty twenty two i mean at the show in in twenty twenty one i was excited because i found somebody had some boxes of prism you know that i could buy prism hobby that i could buy at the show but there there you'd find some stuff here some stuff there you really really really had to scatter it out and find it and that kinda brings me to our opening question of caitlin clark entered league what what changed can you summarize what changed in terms of either what whether it was as an attendee or behind the table experience in terms of women's basketball cards availability at the show well i'll i guess i'll start with twenty twenty four because that's where i can explain that you know that i you know saw stuff there there at that point there aside from panini instant there were no actual cards in twenty at the twenty twenty four national that were packed release cards of her yet i think actually the vip set had the first you know fever card of her you know which was a great card it was a great vip package for all the attendees i think that vip set circled around brink clark and angel reese were all in that set which you know would have been unheard of a year or two before to have women's basketball players in a vip set that panini or any other manufacturer would have given away at the show which obviously speaks to speaks volumes to where she has brought the hobby absolutely i remember seeing those cards because those were the vip packs where you it was like in a cellophane almost like you could see through and clark was on the top and i remember getting my my little drawstring bag that had the pack in it and people were selling those at the show for decent money and it felt like it felt different which i i guess could you talk a little bit about when you kind of felt that shift happen was it the national was it when those packs came out what what was the shift for you you know what the shift was is i had a wnba search on ebay it just it was under cards wnba that's all it said and when panini instant card started hitting i i would literally check that be before caitlin before caitlin i would check that twice a day and you'd see forty cards sixty cards like twice a day you'd see you know there would never be over a hundred cards that you'd see as new listings that would show up there i had to get to the point where i had wnba minus caitlyn instant because i didn't wanna see you know all these caitlyn instant cards that people were listing on there so it was just kind of a a volume it it just became crazy volume obviously you see those numbers i think every one of those sets was over eleven thousand cards printed on and some of them you know as high as sixty thousand which is just unheard of because if if listeners have been listening to the show we talk a lot about print run-in different eras and the entrance of caitlin clark into the league exploded print run beyond what was once a wnba card collector's imagination and i guess that brings me to you know you talk about setting up at the national you know for many many years but then in twenty twenty four deciding to make it a women's basketball only showcase or or booth of some kind did the entrance and i don't know proliferation i guess of caitlin clark's popularity change how you looked at inventory or stocking cards did did did the did the approach change at all well it was my first time doing wnba cards at a show aside from like a couple of small shows i did leading up to the international but obviously you know everybody ask do you have the first question you know for that first year was do you have any caitlin clark do you have any caitlin clark and yes i did have caitlin clark and yes i did sell out a caitlin clark and yes one of the great stories of the twenty twenty four national is i was walking into my hotel thursday night after a really good you know day and a half at the show and some i'm walking through and somebody hey you wanna come down to trade night tonight at in the hotel it was a smaller hotel and i was like well i only really do the women's sports cards he said well i have some caitlin clark i was okay well maybe i'll come down later at like nine o'clock rolls around i decide hey you know what i'll just walk down there and i bought a huge clark collection that night i was shocked absolutely shocked there were autographs it was all it was all bowman first it was all it it it was all that stuff he said hey it was chase and wendy but i got a ton of clarks too and i really don't have a lot to do with him so i i bought everything he had every caitlin clark card he had and probably sold resold rebought resold three times over the weekend in twenty twenty four what was kind of the if i can ask what was kind of the thought process when somebody presents you with looking back hindsight's twenty twenty obviously you're gonna them like it seems like a a good play from a profit perspective but what was kinda going through your head was it i have so much demand from people coming up asking for caitlin clark so this is just natural or was there was there some sort of did you have some intrinsic belief about her momentum into the card market did was there some sort of that well i knew her momentum was gonna carry us through the weekend so i wasn't really worried about selling or not selling them and obviously i you know seeing you know her market go up tick down tick up tick down tick back up even when she's injured so i mean i i mean even you know overproduced base prism cards have almost doubled in the last year raw yeah so i mean you could buy caitlin clark raw you know number twenty two and one forty fives for ten bucks each a year ago they're twenty twenty five now you know with you know without having a problem yeah ugh there was such a shift i feel like like this entire episode is called everything feels different now and i guess i wanna ask you i know you've only had the women's booth for a couple years now but i wanna ask the type of collector that's coming up to the booth bc before clark and after clark do you think that archetype changed at all over time yeah yeah definitely i remember at twenty twenty four you'd see like kids walk up to the booth and look down and see women's basketball cards and like turn their head away and walk away it it it it'd be like they're like embarrassed to look at women's basketball cards but you know what last year at the national i had tons of kids that were buying selling trading doing whatever you know with with clark cards and you know not just clark but you know angel reese and chicago has a chicago has a good women's basketball following i and i told a ton of other than caitlin stuff last year and i expect to do the same this year hopefully do you think that most of the collectors that approached the table were first time buyers were they speculators are i mean i i know it's a mix obviously it's the biggest card show in the country but like the people that are buying women's basketball cards are not the same type of people buying everything else so do you think if you had to like kinda classify the the type of buyer was it a peer collector somebody that's you know just trying to figure out what they like first time buyers speculators flippers what what what kind of people are walking up to the table d all of the above i in twenty twenty four obviously the big question is actually do you have any caitlin clark people didn't know what they're buying they didn't know what they're looking for there wasn't a heck of a lot out there first of all and i probably over the course of the weekend sold a hundred hundred and fifty raw bowman first caitlin clark cards to somebody who says just have to have one caitlin clark card well said if you're gonna have to have one get this one this is the one that's out right now at least since yeah there weren't any you know pro uni cards out there yet i wish we could go back and see that stack of a hundred and fifty clark cards well it was probably never a hundred fifty at once it was ten here i'd buy ten more ten here i'd buy ten more or five more or whatever showed up to my booth because i was buying whatever they had i got to the point where i was just putting you know i had a sign you know buying caitlin clark which i i had never done before and it worked and it worked okay so that's kinda like kinda wraps up our first segment about that i wanted to kinda pick your brain on the national and one of the segments that's become recurring throughout this season is kind of laying the the background or the foundation of okay we talk a little bit about cards talk a little bit about who you are but let's talk about the league the the thing that brought us all together not only is cards but it's the wnba we talk about the context and the state of the league so i wanna zoom out for this segment and ask you what was kind of the baseline entering twenty twenty four both in the league and in the hobby i guess when i think about it i think about momentum but how would you characterize it there's no question there was momentum there it's unfortunate that a lot of people that are new to the game didn't understand or see that and they view it as just one thing it's not just one thing it was a lot of things leading up to that and that one thing just lit it on fire that's that's a good way of of putting it i suppose for for folks that you know i'd assume that a lot of our audience knows this but maybe they don't what are those kind of factors that built up that momentum that really led to clark being the fire starter of like a massive wildfire in women's basketball courts well i mean viewership had gone up we'd seen consistent viewership going up from twenty nineteen and on new star players entering a league old star players kind of entering the end of their career and the excitement over you know being able to watch you know super finalize her career being able to watch dt finalize her career and things like that and it was know it's it's it's been just a constant growth period in the wm base since i would say twenty nineteen and twenty twenty that's just the card side of things but the you know the view the viewership side of things and the excitement about players i i completely agree i think in last week's episode we talked about twenty nineteen kinda feeling like the inflection point or the acceleration point and i guess that leads me to my next question which is do you think that the hobby itself was like ready for caitlin clark or do you think it caught people off guard her entrance and her really like heating up like a broader spectrum of the hobby like people that are just entering wnba yeah area yeah they're always ready for something those those people that are you know regular nba or nfl or mlb collectors that are ready to jump on to the new hot thing i think it caught the wnba collector base by not by surprise because it it was expected that she was going to be big she was going to be huge i don't think it was expected to jump to the level that it has and and did at that point why do you why do you think that like why do you think people didn't because i feel the same way i was sitting there watching caitlin clark at iowa or even hearing about her before iowa just because of her rankings in in high school and i was like okay she's good she's she's gonna be really good she's gonna be good for the wnba but i don't think anybody could have predicted the ascension that she had and the elevation she brought to the game i guess do you think that why do you think she surpassed our expectations in the wnba card collecting space because the viewership that she brought to the college game and she wasn't the only one that brought the viewership but the way that the fans grabbed onto her yeah and the way the fans you know basically you know she had players around her but she didn't have the players around her that you know paige had or stewie had or anybody had because they they were huge recruiter and kate martin's a great player don't get me wrong but caitlin clark was the hundred percent star of that team the storyline aspect of all of this is kind of like the through point for me it's like really good college career momentum is building she's got all the traits that are easy to market the league is growing the hobby is growing i guess i wanna pick your brain on your thoughts since you were there on the fact that her demand showed up before she did i suppose at least at least in the broader hobby what are your thoughts on that i don't know i'll tell you i remember before the injury people were team page before before you know caitlyn's junior and senior team page they were like i can't wait till paige beckers has cards can't wait till paige beckers has cards the injury comes in and then obviously caitlyn goes to the moon do you do you view i feel like this is also uniquely women's basketball maybe i'm getting a little off track here this is not in our like outline but like this is uniquely women's basketball phenomenon in my opinion is that only one of these people can be the ultimate you know like prospect or the ultimate chase it can only be one whereas like i feel like in other sports particularly in like the men's equivalent there's always multiple store stars that are competing against each other and they're held in these conversations of yeah you can think so and so is the goat and you can think so or you can think so and so is the goat in women's basketball it feels like you kinda have to put all your eggs into one basket and that happened with caitlin clark or with paige and i just think it's so interesting the the differences that you can see between between categories i guess it is definitely interesting i i i don't i i think page's cards at this point are undervalued i think page's cards are undervalued john don't say that too loud because i completely agree and and page has always been meeting or exceeding expectations so we'll we'll see how that goes i guess this this is my last question for the segment about context and state of the league and how we got here do you think that the demand and attention of caitlin clark was purely basketball or do you think it was a little bit more cultural momentum storylines spilling over into the hobby a hundred percent the the the latter one hundred percent the i mean i mean there are you know there are new people to not just the wnba or women's basketball game there's new people to sports altogether that follow caitlin clark that wouldn't have never you know been to a wnba game tuned into tv to watch her play they they are just grasping into somebody who knows how to handle themselves off the court somebody who knows how to you know the the how the how the fan base reacts to her and has you know grasp her as not just a player but as a person one hundred percent as an icon already she's she's only been in the league for a couple years and has hardly played in one of her seasons and she is undoubtedly unquestionably considered an icon of the women's basketball game and that kinda brings me to our next segment which is all about cards in demand and i have like a personal anecdote which is that i remember back i don't know whenever the bowman u came out of clark i remember buying her bowman u first auto for ninety dollars and being like oh i spent like a good amount of money on a women's basketball card and everybody's like why are you buying that and then i sold it for like two hundred dollars and i was like holy shit like i made a lot of money this is really cool and now it's worth you know at i mean at least a thousand dollars i'm sure if if it's graded correctly i wanna get your thoughts on how quickly prices kind of moved for caitlin because i think a lot of people weren't there in that you could buy her bowman u first for ninety bucks they came after so how quick did did you see that shift happen let's see i'm trying to remember when bowman u came out i think it was february of twenty three sure within a year she had you know she had broken kelsey's record and at that point i remember her autos going for about six hundred bucks at that time this is a reminder take my true you're good okay so so prices were moving within twelve months at an unprecedented rate like on no question no question like at least ten x in under a year yep and by the national they've they probably went up another fifty percent okay so was there any sort of spillover effect into other parts of the hobby so what i mean by that is whether it's wax prices like sealed boxes grading volume other players like what was the the spillover effect from that i mean what what did we see after after prism came out caitlin was a top five player graded on with on psa at one point i mean i can't even explain what that means i can't even explain that she's in the same breath as jordan same breath as ohtani as far as graded volume i it's it's so interesting to me because when you think about those players the the words that like come to mind are longevity winners huge fan bases right like they're kind of these pillars of the hobby community that usually takes a long time to build up you even see that with guys like shohei who had those kind of low periods where the hobby was sleeping on them for a few years or however long it may be it felt to me like caitlin never had like she had a whisper of opportunity of like she's super cheap and nobody knows what what what we're buying here but the demand just skyrocketed i guess do you think that there was any sort of spillover to different players as a result of the caitlin clark effect or do you think it was hyper concentrated and i kinda wanna get your thoughts if i may complete like just overload you with another question your thoughts on the spillover effect for lower end women's basketball cards versus like what we consider now higher end women's basketball cards the physical like cards or players either i mean take it however you want so i would you know the the the theory that you know a rising tide lifts all boats and things like that didn't occur to the level that i expected to i'd i'd i've really expected to see you know bird and stewie and candace parker you know autographs go from forty fifty dollars to eighty ninety a hundred dollars for like a basic autograph and it didn't happen and it doesn't hasn't happened and i think a lot of recency bias you know plays into that with the collector base that has you know joined the the the you know the wnba area how would you characterize the kind of new collector base that entered the the wnba market here i mean i'm i wouldn't build out percentages i would are they i i don't wanna use the word collector on a lot of them okay interesting it's it's investor on seventy percent of it i would say i i really expected to see a little bit more of a collector going back and you know trying to buy older type stuff and i do think that some you know higher dollar value written house stuff has definitely risen but the the more mainstream i'm not gonna say like a gold card from prism it's virtually unchanged and in some cases lower now than it was in twenty twenty two do you think go ahead which is frustrating as a true you know wnba fan because i mean super top five player all time yeah and there's no doubt that more collectors and more money have funneled into the wnba and into this segment of the hobby since say the twenty twenty two prism gold there is no reason why it should not appreciate let alone depreciate like that it doesn't make sense and i wanna pick your brain on kind of this idea of the market still catching up and how the caitlin clark effect has kind of this this is how i like to visualize it is you have caitlin clark at the center of the effect and then you kind of take a radius and you can see that each of those little rings that surround her so let's say the fever or the iowa hawkeyes those cards get valued at you know an unprecedented rate then you go one ring outside to say i don't know whoever she's playing against then you go another ring and another ring and it feels like the further you get away from caitlin clark the less of the effect is is kind of like being materialized i wanna get your take on if you agree with that if you think that's a real thing or if you think it's just proximity to caitlin in terms of proximity to caitlin is a hundred percent a real thing there's there's no question i mean i mean you can get me to talk for days about you know lexi hall and sophie coming cunningham values and why they should not be anywhere near they are and why kelsey mitchell should be higher please like i this is the stuff i want to hear is like what do you think about the fact that collectors are gravitating to players that maybe don't have the stats the accolades the experience the wins what are your thoughts on that well my my thoughts on that is you know a lot of player a lot of collectors or investors or buyers in this market are not a hundred percent concerned with aside from caitlin with playing ability and just some other aspects of you know a player it's so uniquely women's basketball once again in my opinion you know you're concerned you don't see that in the mlb you don't see that in the nba as much you don't see that in the nfl nobody's like oh this player is just so cool and good looking i have to have their card it just doesn't happen this is a unique effect that has been exemplified by caitlin clark's entrance to the league with all the new eyes that she brought in i think to ignore that would be to you know completely ignore an entire segment of the hobby that has now appeared in a lane that you know both you and i and the listeners are passionate about and it's just such an interesting phenomenon i i don't know do you think that this i gotta get away from that because i'll just go on for days about those specifically those players but i wanna ask you about long term collectors people that have been been in this since before clark do you think the entrance of clark has forced them to behave differently collecting wise they i'll tell you i've had to collect differently than i do collected before i mean i used to buy a couple of cases of prism and break it and have fun and sell what i didn't want and trade it for what i did want and you know be able to build my pc through that i haven't bought a hobby box of product since i got a cheap ish case of twenty twenty three twenty twenty four origins in the beginning of last year when i was appalled that i had to pay thirty five hundred dollars for a case of of wnba cards which and that's zero zero caitlin clark cards in the entire case oh of course because why why would you and and and nowadays when we flash forward to present day thirty five hundred can get you two boxes of some of these cards that are coming out it's genuinely the explosion of price has completely changed in my opinion the way that long term veteran collectors of wnba cards need to think about the financial aspect of collecting what was once an affordable lane with almost an unlimited possibility despite i mean removing the rarity and scarcity aspect of like availability of the cards you could buy the best of the best right nowadays i think that's the biggest change from the caitlin clark effect is that we're faced with a financial constraint that didn't used to exist would you agree with that a hundred percent a hundred percent and i i've found over the course of the last few years that my lane for cards and selling cards is sub one thousand dollar cards i i'm not i'm not somebody who you know jumps in and you know sells five thousand six thousand dollar caitlin clark autograph cards that's that's not my lane that's not where i live and part of you know the good thing is recognizing what you can do well and specialize in and what you can't yeah so are there gonna be people with you know at the national this year with you know showcase upon showcase full of one on one caitlin clark autographs and paige becker's autographs and impeccable type stuff yeah it's not gonna be me that's not that's not where where my expertise and where my you know at this point it it's it's a gambling game and i don't wanna be in that because you lose every the house wins every time couldn't agree more i'll underscore that comment a million times over it's really interesting to hear about kind of these price ranges that we put people in it it reminds me we talked to mike k on the aj wilson episode about how when he entered the aj wilson market the best the best that he could find was four hundred bucks you know or we talked to kyle collects he talks about you know like the pizza price i think is how he referred it to which is like twenty to thirty dollar wnba cards there's different categories financially that wnba collectors operate in and when the entrance of caitlin clark happened it brought over folks that were used to operating in in the thousands and tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollar market that it feels so foreign at least to me to be operating in that space and that's definitely a a pressure that i felt since she joined kind of the league and joined the hobby there are they're definitely collector names that i remember from a couple years ago that i don't see anymore right which is which is sad which is really sad because i think i think it it it's priced them out and kinda kinda turned them off yeah yeah i understand completely and a lot of what we've talked about you know on this season is the fact that those pockets still exist it's just identifying them and and and actually being able to find the cards is so difficult these days that yeah it just feels like our hobby is simultaneously growing and shrinking and it's just like a weird a weird state to be a part of anyways that kinda that kinda brings me to one of my favorite segments that we talk about that comes up on each week which is about era significance and impact so we've been talking a lot about you know caitlin clark obviously that's the episode today but if we zoom out and we think about the full arc of wnba cards you know we we started this season talking about the thirties and the forties we got to the nineties two thousands you know so on and so forth where do you think that twenty twenty four stands in terms of a point do you think it's a inflection point do you think it it's an acceleration point or do you think when we look back it's gonna be an abnormality that we see i think it's a combination of the the second two i i i mean i don't think that we're going to see the price of cards that we saw in twenty twenty four going forward unless there's you know and and page should be right on there but you know we're seeing we're we're seeing the the price of twenty twenty five product mean just ex as experienced by the last two products that panini released you could still buy one on one on their website you could buy impeccable for two and a half months after release and it's gone now who knows how that all got eaten up we'll you know we'll probably see you know chunks of it appear elsewhere but that wouldn't have been heard of in twenty twenty four with caitlin clark you hit the website it was gone yeah well those two products are extremely pricey yeah but still you know those deep pockets ten thousand dollar you know card customers you know were were there last year in full force and they're still there this year right now that is an interesting point it does kinda feel like the i don't wanna say the dust has settled because that's not what i mean to say but it feels like the folks that set those comps or really set the market on caitlin clark have camped out on caitlin clark not not a lot of movement into younger prospects or to be like okay i'm gonna gamble again it feels like people think that caitlin clark is the ultimate prospect and the ultimate cash kind of maker and i don't know i i kind of agree with you that i think that that means players like page or you know whoever else are still undervalued and that's that's an interesting way to kind of frame it but i wanna ask you about caitlin clark's effect on what we call quote unquote the market do you think that she herself changed the market or do you think she just changed how collectors kind of do you think she was kinda like the glass ceiling that that was broken like changed how collectors looked at the market they definitely she definitely changed how collectors look at the market because obviously there's people in this space now that i'm pretty sure were trolling espn women's sports twitter feeds you know for the last five years and but now they're you know got a you know a six figure caitlin clark collection under their belt speak on it john i i agree i agree completely i think that there there's definitely a tectonic plate shift individually and at the macro level from the market perspective okay here's my next question for you do you think that prices rising so quickly altered the emotional tone of the hobby whether that be increased excitement increased pressure or increased speculation how about increased frustration please expand on that john i'm dying to hear it let it out so i mean obviously it you know the the caitlin clark brought the the prices to an insane level something that even two years ago we couldn't have even come close to predicting the price levels but i i kind of compare the space to i mean i went to see green day and nirvana at a club in the early nineties and where their where their where they went after that and obviously what green day has become now it's it used to be our small thing it used to be something that you know we can enjoy as a smaller group but now it's something that is accepted by the masses which is cool i i like that but small things like that were sometimes more fun it definitely felt a little bit more special a little bit more niche this is not one of the questions that i prepared for you but i am curious how do you strike a balance of that i mean you've got you've got all the different parts of the spectrum here you've got you who who's a collector and you who's a dealer you have you who wants more customers and you that wants less competition like how do you how do you balance that i keep buying what i wanna buy you know i and i try and find a way to buy stuff that i i think is gonna sell as well do i specialize in caitlin clark no do i specialize in angel reese maybe a little bit more than caitlin clark because i think her market has more room to grow that's an interesting way of putting it it's kind of that that delta between what you think and what you yeah and what it is okay this is always a question i like to tee up which is kind of this time horizon question so in five to ten years or beyond do you think that twenty twenty four will be remembered as the beginning of like a sustained mainstream legitimacy for wnba cards or a spike in the market i'm gonna chicken out on this one i would say both of them because obviously it's like i don't think i don't think i would love to say it can get back to what happened in twenty twenty four and consistently do the same thing year after year that's an anomaly that's an impossibility in all honesty but it has opened more collectors to the game it has opened more collectors to the players that have not gone unnoticed by us but have gone unnoticed in the mainstream for years and finally they're able to see you know how good angel reese is yeah how good asia wilson is how good jackie young is how good you know play amfisa collier is thank you that's inter that's such an interesting way of looking at it and i i completely agree i think i i do wanna pose another question to you which is if somebody breaks clark's record do you think their market could be clark or do you think clark is just the tip top it would depend upon the player i i really think it's player i think it's player based honestly yeah fair enough you know obviously kelsey mitchell beat kelsey plum's record and kelsey mitchell you know is a great player and but i think you know from a collector standpoint kelsey plung was still stronger than kelsey mitchell for year after year and i i didn't see kelsey mitchell's cards really get the appreciation until she was on a team with caitlin clark yep until she got to that inner ring of caitlin clark her cards were mass mass as a certified kelsey mitchell doubter which i self identify as she finally got the respect she deserved from the masses once caitlin clark showed up and for that i do thank caitlin clark but i also i'll keep my opinion to myself i'm kelsey well as fellow big ten basketball fans we can all bad mouth ohio state all we want yeah period john yes that is what i would like to hear okay my last question on era significance and influence on today is how does this moment when i say this moment i mean you know the caitlin clark effect help us understand how a singular player can shape attention or collector behavior in a developing hobby space say that again you lost how did how does caitlin clark's presence and her effect on the market help us understand how much weight like a single player can have like i don't think it's ever in any sport been as big an influence than than she has brought to it even you know even jordan in the eighties and nineties even tom brady in the two thousands and two thousand tens they were big big big big big players but they did not have the influence over viewership the influence over fan affinity that that we've seen with katelyn clark i completely agree and i love the comparison across sports there to just really accentuate how powerful her entrance was both to the league and to our hobby it it cannot be understated despite the fact that you know we we had a lot of points in this conversation where we talk about other players being undervalued other segments being undervalued about being priced out the truth of the matter is caitlin clark changed everything for us and for us i mean wnba card collectors it this podcast probably wouldn't have been established without this conversation wouldn't have happened if caitlin clark didn't bring these people that wanna hear about wnba cards being talked about in different collectors and for that i thank her but there is a lot of nuance that goes into this john i i really appreciate the nuance that you brought to today's conversation and at the kind of like end of each episode we've been doing this canon contribution which brings us to the mount rushmore so i ask each guest to come up with four cards or sets or whatever you wanna call that represent the era that we've been describing throughout and i wanna know john have you had a chance to think about these four i have yes and i own zero of these cards that is okay that is okay let's see i'm going to say the first one is an actual parallel set from twenty twenty four i think the black velocity are gorgeous cards they're numbered to thirty nine so they are within people's reach and not just you know not just a caitlyn or not just an angel or just a cameron brink but every one of those cards is is is gorgeous and i'm a set builder at heart so set building and you know over the course of the years i chose sets that i would build of every year like in twenty twenty one i built the entire oh i'm four card short of the w twenty five twenty fifth anniversary parallel set tough one and crazy thing is the four i need are all commons of course but i think that that that is an awesome parallel and gorgeous looking cards they just pop the the shine on those is amazing i always think that first appearances are really important like i'm a big proponent of that like like the w twenty five or the the first mojo that appeared or the first mosaic that appeared and to hear a card that recently came out with the black velocities be mentioned kinda in that same vein i really like that pick okay you might not like my second pick oh god i'm scared oh god because it is the select courtside gold or cool like low parallels of sabrina okay the night night sabrina card is one of the coolest cards in the set there aren't a lot of wnba cards that are like have a cool effect there aren't just somebody shooting somebody driving or what have you so and that's and that's one of them i think that's a gorgeous card i i i get i aim to get a gold parallel of that card whether it's the gold ice or the regular gold just for my pc and i don't pc sabrina at all but that's just a gorgeous card i have thought about paying my respects to sabrina through that exact card i completely understand why you picked it despite my love hate relationship with that woman that really exemplifies to me what good photography can do for a card you know the set itself is very important being select's first appearance but even more so i think the card photography showcasing a moment that was iconic dare i say i it's important those courtside cards do have cool photos so i will go back to that there are the i wasn't a huge fan of the twenty twenty two cards that had trophies on them but the courtside ones with the trophies are cool looking they're just they're like the angel the asia wilson they're just cool looking cards i agree my third card is not a wnba card it's a college card okay oh i was like what okay okay and it it's it's the caitlin bowman first auto no no caitlin bowman first auto there's caitlin clark autographs are not rare don't get by no means are caitlin clark autographs rare cards they're out there they're in collections they're tied up but i think if you're going to collect a caitlin clark card and you have you want one autograph card i think that is the one i'm not saying from a value standpoint i'm saying from the importance because the initial importance of caitlin clark was iowa the initial importance of caitlin clark was come her coming from iowa the iowa fan base you know grabbed onto her the college basketball fan base grabbed onto her and i i just think that card i did have one i saw the the national last year yeah well good pick that's a good pick and to round us off what's your fourth and final the caitlin myamore autograph from origins last year why that why that one why that one why that one who gets to be on a card with their hero who gets to be on a card with their hero that's amazing i like that pick both both personally obviously i'm biased with the maya but i think that that card also is just to to to have a dual auto like that in women's basketball cards they existed like they had a couple like the one i think of is is it lauren jackson and sue bird that have like a cool dual auto back in the day but it is not as common in wnba cards to have those duals or those triples until recently and to have two players of that caliber with both the you know greatness attached to it but also the storyline of like their relationship is i i completely agree john that one was even on my radar and i agree with you k alright that's a great four for the mount rushmore i want to leave today's conversation by opening up the space john if if you have any advice i suppose for people that you know we're now in the year of our lord twenty twenty six caitlin clark's been in the league she's not old news but she certainly isn't new news do you have any advice for people that are looking to collect her cards or or if they're looking to collect similar breakout players to caitlin clark well first of all i'll say it over and over again collect who you like collect who if you like caitlin clark collect caitlin clark if you like angel reese collect angel reese if you like kaleya cobber don't get all the one on ones because i want them but i would definitely say start slow if you're if you if you are new to this if you don't have any caitlin clark cards in you know and i would start slow buy a bowman first buy a prism buy a prism silver buy something that is affordable to you take it from me don't break wax yeah that's that's a good piece of advice to end with is to be within your means and to not gamble too much even though it's super fun john thank you so much for joining the podcast today where can people find you on the internet do you have any socials that they can reach out to you on or follow you on i think i'm at john a brogi on instagram i don't post a heck of a lot there just when i get a cool card i'll post it up that's about it i don't sell a lot on ebay anymore i've kind of streamed it all to card shows but i have a com commsi account under jabber seventy two and that's my ebay as well beautiful well thank you john for joining the podcast this episode was super cool to dive into what was one of the most talked about things in women's basketball history the caitlin clark effect i guess my final thoughts on the topic is that i think it's gonna be really easy for us to label this era as a boom or a spike or a turning point but for me living through it really still feels a little bit more complicated than that and i hope this episode kinda broke down that the caitlin clark effect didn't just raise prices but it rose visibility accessibility and it really exposed how quickly attention can reshape an entire category in our hobby i just think it's a really interesting period of time i feel like we will have different thoughts in a year on the caitlin clark effect we'll have different thoughts on the caitlin clark effect in ten years and so on and so forth but john thank you so much and next week we'll be talking all about the next one up which is page becker so stay stay tuned for that episode i'm excited to continue to bring you guys collector driven and community oriented content every single week thanks for being here