welcome back loyal listeners to the stacking slabs podcast to season five episode three of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin and i go by at cold lunch cards on the instagram machine but on other corners of the internet as well and for season five episode three we are covering one of the most popular franchises in sports in general today at least in my opinion and that would be the indiana fever last week we talked to a mercury collector all about the phoenix mercury and today we're going back to the midwest away from the west to the midwest and we're talking with mitch mitch is a die hard indiana fever fan and i am so so excited to bring you guys kinda like into the world of a fever collector it feels like a chaotic kind of like emerging space in the card collecting world and mitch i'm just so excited to have you here today how are you doing i'm great thank you for having me caitlin i appreciate it yeah of course and so before we kinda get into the hard hitting question of what it's like to be a fever collector and how you collect fever cards do you mind introducing yourself to the audience if they don't know who you are kind of where you operate both in the card space whether you have some socials and then what you do outside of cards what kind of makes mitch mitch well my name is mitch i appreciate you having me i'm based here in indianapolis i'm a lifelong hoosier here in indiana and i am in in commercial real estate brokerage and development and property management on a daily basis but i've been collecting sports cards off and on since about nineteen ninety three i am on on whatnot under mitch doner and then my instagram handle is almanac sports cards which is where i am most active so i've been a wnba fan since it was founded in ninety seven i've started out as a rebecca lobo and a houston comets fan okay once the fever were founded then i quickly abandoned both of those fandoms and became a a fever fan so i i've been collecting wnba cards since about the early two thousands by about two thousand and and then i've been obviously collecting ever since then i took a little bit of a hiatus in the hobby for about ten or twelve years but got back into it in very early twenty twenty four so in regards to my my collecting fandom within the wnba i do collect caitlin clark they're she's just not my primary focus but i collect tamika catchings and katie douglas who are indiana fever stalwarts they're they're absolute legends hall of famers and the fever certainly wouldn't be what they are today without their performance and their commitment to the community one hundred percent there's a lot to unpack there mitch you said a lot i wanna start kinda with where you are you're in indianapolis what's it like what's it like being a fever fan in indianapolis these days it it's great the sports scene here in town is is as big and as popular as it has been historically obviously we had success with the fever last or i'm sorry excuse me with the pacers last year indiana hoosiers football has taken the world by storm and then the fever ever since leah boston came to town in twenty twenty three and then caitlin clark in twenty twenty four the the the energy within the city itself is is at an all time high and i know that sounds cliche but i don't have a better way to put it and everybody just kind of feels a different way here in indianapolis which is a a massive sports town to begin with but now we feel you know we get we get more than our traditional midwestern heat now because we have a lot of eyes upon us across the country because of all the attention that caitlin clark brings so it's great i i focus more on what i can control generally speaking in life so with everything that's going on with the fever you know historically and especially this year with all of the extra attention that we're getting i try not to get get too high and mighty on on the fever fandom and i also try not to dwell too much in the dumps so whether it's a good week at practice or a bad week at practice or a good performance bad performance in games which there's a lot of attention on that with the fever especially over the past couple of weeks i try to tune most of that out and i think fever fans generally speaking feel pretty good about the team that's awesome i'm i'm so glad to have you representing the fever fans on this podcast i think you're a perfect representation and you can kinda stay level headed as we have these conversations you don't need to get too excited or too down in the depths about whatever the controversy whatever the flavor of the week is over there in indiana let's focus on kind of let's let's focus with your personal collection you named a couple players that you liked you kind of explained a brief summary of your introduction introduction into fandom with rebecca lobo in houston but then you transitioned over once your hometown team got a team i wanna ask you when did you kinda realize card collecting wise that you were becoming a fever team collector not just necessarily a wnba card collector or some other type of collector it would have been in two thousand and one when tamika was drafted tamika so she was drafted no one i think she was third overall lauren jackson went number one that year but tamika was coming off a a really bad acl injury from the march madness tournament during her final year at at ut so she didn't end up playing for an entire season because her rookie year was technically an o two so you know wnba card collecting back then was really refined just because it was only two products so i would try to pick up any of the fever cards that i could whether they were new cards or duplicates i didn't particularly care i just wanted as many fever cards as i could so and then when when products started to evolve especially with rittenhouse's involvement that's when it became became a full on assault for me collecting all all the fever cards that i could gotcha and so when you say all the fever cards you could has that kind of philosophy or lane continued or have you sharpened your focus when i look at your instagram page i see kind of player super collector on top of team collector would you consider would you kinda agree with that assessment or how would you describe your collecting philosophy no that's a pretty accurate description i i collect any and all tamika catchings and katie douglas cards that i do not already have in my collection i'm a player collector definitely for those two players i will also pick up any duplicates that i find of of any of the the more rare editions as well as the the limited run copies at last check i think i had like eighty or eighty five gold out of ten cards of tamika and there's a lot of them that are duplicates but i pick them up whenever i can and especially if nobody's paying attention her cards are criminally cheap so i'll try to pick them up and then if i if i encounter any other collectors i'll make sure they get a shot at them so for the most part i would say it's mostly player super collector in that regard i do have a handful of cards from i've got a handful of leah boston cards and lexi hole cards and and they're more of their their rare rookie rookie cards that they do have but with the sheer amount of inserts and parallels that panini has released over the past few years i can't really keep up with everything else that's being released as far as collecting any more than that so it's a it's an extremely refined collection for fever players and fever cards outside of katie douglas and tamika catchings i love that and i can relate to that i think like we talk a lot about overproduction and scarcity and availability and these days it's so hard to keep up like you're saying so kinda creating those guardrails for yourself is really helpful before we get into more of your collecting itself and like i wanna dig in deep into why certain players why certain cards etcetera but before we get into that just remove the cards for me for a second if you could tell me what like kinda what makes the indiana fever different as a franchise compared to say the rest of the teams that we're gonna hear from this season what what would you say is kind of that distinguishing factor it's a really good question in my in my personal opinion i think the sheer insanity of everyone's passion for basketball in indiana it will set us apart just by itself and that's it's really tough to describe unless you've been around it here in indiana whether you're in you know any any any corner of indiana or if you're in central indiana indianapolis the love for sports and the love for basketball i mean it's really unmatched i mean otherwise we wouldn't hold you know all of the world's largest sporting events here in indianapolis all of the time so the the team does a really really good job of connecting with the the local basketball community they always have and they're owned by the same group that owns the pacers so that always helps too the simon family who are the world's largest shopping center developers so they've got let's just say they're they're well funded they've they've owned the pacers since the early eighties they've owned the fever since the fever were born so a lot of that consistency and a lot of that passion really really helps our community i know a lot of teams get involved in their community but the way we do it it's it's like we're all on steroids it's it's crazy so and and the fever have always been they've always packed the house thankfully they've always played at greenbridge other than when it was being renovated but they've consistently been near the top of the league as far as their attendance figures and and have been at the top of the league for at least the past two years so yeah it's i i i tell people i said you gotta be here to to feel it and experience it and it was we we had a lot of those folks come to town last year for wnba all star when it was here and many who that i talked to were just absolutely blown away and they're like why don't we just have it here every year and i'm like well that's not how the world works but i would like it to so yeah one hundred percent i was one of those people and when i was in indianapolis i was like i didn't know you guys rolled like this like i didn't know it was this kind of production going on but i i could feel the energy it's a certain energy it's a basketball energy for sure it is it is and we only had we only had thirteen months to prepare for all star because we were awarded it so late in the process because somebody else backed out we were still coming off of our our hosting experience with the nba all star game in twenty twenty four so we had a we had a short runway to prepare but we we did the best that we could with what we had and i think they're putting together a bid to to hold to host it here again in the next handful of years so we'll see how that goes but i always tell people i said if you wanna get a feel for what basketball means to indiana fourteen of the largest sixteen basketball gymnasiums in the country are in indiana so it's it's it's a whole new world when it comes to basketball absolutely that one of the things that was talked about not to bring up a a rival here but one of the things that was talked about in the mercury episode was the idea of the x factor of the kind of vibe of the stadium when you're at the game and even when i was at kind of the recreational game of the all star game they're not competing for anything you could feel the energy of gamebridge and that's like out of towners coming in it just felt different so like i'm sure gamebridge has its own kind of like feel vibe fan experience and i for one as you know not a fever fan just because that's not the team that i root for could still feel it and i felt welcomed and and it was just a great experience and and thank you for your part in putting that on i know before we got on the mic you said you were involved in all star game planning or production and all those things just such a cool cool thing that indiana puts on for sure yep and we we take a lot of pride in it and and especially news or hospitality and it's what we're known for across the country so anytime we're we're able to welcome folks that are not from here we're we're we're always happy and willing to show them a slice of what we're all about period i love that well one question that i wanna ask every guest this season and there's a few that'll be sprinkled in here so hopefully the listeners can listeners can kinda understand and compare apples to apples against franchises the first one that i wanna ask that i asked last episode and like i said we'll ask in the future is if you could kinda describe the fever fandom in three words or less that's a tough ask but if you did have time to think about it what would you say probably crazed chaotic which could be a synonym of that but and then i would say community centric the the fever i mean they go above and beyond to make sure that their their mission of inclusion and the development of women athletes not just in basketball basketball but in every other sport that they can do is is felt in the community the pacers do a good job of that but the fever do a great job of it yeah and i think they work kind of in tandem to do that occasionally but again we're we're a bunch of basketball sycophants and we we can't get enough of it and like i said the fever do a do a great job of of fostering and developing that in all corners of the state i love that that's a good three and i like the alliteration too with the four c's by the way mitch that's good stuff right there yeah cool i like that alright so one of the themes of this season is all about community which you just brought up and it's around women's sports and inclusion and diversity and it's something that you know isn't really talked about too much in the sports card hobby so the final question i have as part of this segment is around what women's sports in general means to you whether that's the fever or just more broadly well that's a great question i mean people ask me why why or when i got into collecting wnba cards and becoming a wnba fan honestly in in ninety seven when the league was formed i was just i i'm i'm just a a a proud supporter and and a and a fan or and a spectator of sports in general i didn't really care if it was was was men or women it didn't matter to me i just wanted to see excellence in action so i started becoming a rebecca lobo fan in ninety seven because of her involvement with the us olympic team and she was from what i had read and heard and seen she was friends with shaq when during his tenure with the us olympic team which you know i was a shaq fan ever since i was well ever since he was in college when i was a young kid so he was my first kind of foray into sports in general but it it's it's a lot easier to to market the wnba with a lot more eyes these days it was it was tougher back in the two thousands to to be a fan because not because we would get we would just feel like we were kind of on an island a little bit just because the league wasn't as exposed as it could have been should have been and and is now yeah so the the community aspect of it you know you felt it in all the other major sports leagues we didn't feel a ton of it in the wnba unless you were in in my opinion unless you were in los angeles new york or houston you know one of the original franchises that that had a hotbed for success to begin in the league yeah and the comics won four straight championships with van chancellor to to start the to start the league so you know they had they had a really good head start in everybody else as far as developing the fandom but the wnba has done a a better job and an even better job today of making sure that they they market what the league is about they showcase the excellence but they also showcase that hey we wanna involve and include as many folks as possible but also guess what you can do this too and here's how yeah and they do a lot better job of in my opinion of messaging that than than the nba or the nfl or the mlb in my opinion but yeah it's it's an it's an easy thing to be a wnba fan because it's such a great it's such a great concept it's a great art form and and it's and it's easy to be a fan i that clip right there like i can see it alright that's what i want like a a a tagline to be it's easy to be a wnba fan that's so true like i i relate to that so much so let's kind of transition here we talked about your fandom we talked about how you got into cards and now i wanna talk about how the collection looks today because i for one when i see your instagram i drool just because of the the quality of sports cards that you have in your possession so why don't we kinda start if you don't mind by trying to either quantify or qualify your collecting philosophy you mentioned player collector and team collector but i kinda wanna hear a full picture for the audience so they've got an idea of what you're working with well in regard to my wnba collection it's i mean it's probably ninety five percent tamika and and katie douglas okay and and and i collect you know everything that i can find of theirs you know i have limited storage space so i can't collect everything that that they have but i i i think my my tamika katching's collection is right now is it's it's about probably seventy percent of her entire catalog and there's there's a lot that i'm missing that are older more rare cards that i will try and keep an eye out on online through for through various marketplaces but i'll also look at card shows but i try not to put too much focus into those because my assumption is that they're in collections of wnba card collectors that have been collecting since the beginning and and they knew what they had back then but they certainly know what they have now and if it's value so i know where some of the cards that that would skyrocket to the absolute top of my priority list are they cannot be bought right now but i i'll usually check-in once every once every six or eight months just to say hey how are you feeling about this card you know and and see where they're at but i put a big focus on on procuring cards from the latest releases just because those are a lot easier to get because the product's being being broken out now rather than something from twenty nineteen or two thousand and four or something along those lines that is either in somebody's collection or it's in a in a stale sealed you know wax box that hasn't been touched in twenty years so my kitty douglas collection she has a very limited catalog i think she only has maybe about a hundred and forty five or a hundred and fifty cards i have about three hundred and twenty including duplicates but i think i have about ninety percent of her catalog so wow this year i wanted to focus more on the one of ones that have been produced for both of those players and really anything before twenty twenty three tamika only had i think three one of one cards maybe six now she has forty six holy cow from from the twenty twenty three through twenty twenty five releases and then katie douglas she's got i think twelve one of ones and i own seven of them so got a few others out there i don't know if i will ever find them and and honestly i don't know what i would do with all of them once i do have them but i try to just focus on procurement and then i'll figure out what i wanna do with them from there on but i have different philosophies as far as if i grade when i grade how i grade or how everything gets stored i don't want anything in my house so it's all gotta be located elsewhere and in in today's hobby there's a lot of different alternatives for off-site storage and and of your collection that kind of thing so i just try to focus on procuring and determining where cards are and then i'll focus on the rest of the stuff later gotcha that's so interesting it's to me it sounds like you're kinda drinking from the fire hose when it comes to catch and it comes to katie douglas mhmm and i'm assuming you've got other players or even like outside of the realm of wnba you probably collect other things maybe is the philosophy the same of give me anything i can get or are you setting up any particular guardrails or rules to kind of keep you in check most of it is based upon how much time and how much capital i'm working with my my philosophy ever since i was a young teenager was you know everybody thinks their most valuable asset is their time in my opinion it's your attention because sometimes you can you can give somebody your time but you don't you you can't give them your attention in some in some scenarios so my collection gets my attention outside of wnba in a very refined way so similar to our our esteemed our mentor here with stacking slabs network brett so he and i are both in our collecting habits we're extremely similar and we're both lifelong hoosiers so you know colts and pacers you know have a big big dominance in my collection outside of wnba but it is extremely refined and then same thing with a couple of other nba players that i collect and a couple of other wnba card collectors or excuse me wnba players that i collect i'm only a player collector of of tamika catchings and katie douglas everything else is just by selection either as as you have discussed on previous episodes either based upon a moment or a an era that relates to me personally last i think it was maybe late last year i adopted your philosophy of the one card pc for a handful of wnba players so i'm still waiting on nafisa collier to to get her act together but she owes me a couple of signed cards that are still sitting with panini right now but one of them is her private signings card from don rose from the twenty twenty five release and that is going to be my my showcase nafisa collier card i don't wanna go i i'd rather put my money on on in my tamika catchings and katie douglas collection than spend a fortune on you know nafisa collier you know gold don russ rookie or an asia wilson you know rittenhouse rookie or anything like that granted those those cards will will demand a a pretty penny and deservedly so it's just i can put that money elsewhere in another section of my collection that will give me more joy so that's what i will end up doing but i like having the one card pcs of nafisa diana terasi asia kelsey mitchell rebecca lobo michelle tims i'm trying to think who else stacy dales becky hammond you know a couple of the older style players and i will have i haven't finished this room yet but i'll have a display of all of those onecards pcs put out so uh-huh that's that's kind of how i how i've tweaked my collection over the years back when i was much younger fifteen eighteen years ago i had a completely different collection philosophy but as life evolves and it will with every collector you kind of your collection will evolve as well depending on how much time and how much capital you wanna put into into a hobby so and that's exactly what it is for me i don't i don't flip cards generally speaking usually if i if i buy wax which is extremely limited but if i do and if there's a you know a nice card in there i usually try we'll we'll try and find a a a player collector for that particular player and i'll just fire that card off to them and so they can add it to their collection so people have done that for me without me asking and i've done that for others and it's just a cycle so we're all trying to make sure these cards end up in the in the best hands possible so that's just kind of my philosophy one hundred percent i always find like just hearing from other people kind of how they're i think of it as like a pie chart of their collection how it's weighted and it sounds like tamika is like taking up a huge portion of the pie but you know we're not gonna leave leftovers here there's other parts that make it whole and so it's super interesting to hear kinda how that converges with time capital availability scarcity all those different things that go into what makes up your collection it's cool to kinda see under the hood one thing that i kinda wanna ask you is you've been in this hobby or at least in the fandom of wnba for a long time you said you left for a hiatus in collecting at some point but you've been doing it for you know a long time for people that are newer to the hobby or maybe they're they've been in the hobby for a while but they're trying to explore team collecting or collecting certain players from a certain team any sort of flavor like that do have any advice for those folks because you seem to have kind of your your i don't know blinders on you know what you're going for you know what you're looking for how would you how would you kinda help somebody that's trying to do that well we live in a in an information overload society today so and especially with ease of access of information sometimes it's a great thing sometimes it's an awful thing yeah it just it just kind of depends and i have this discussion occasionally with collectors sometimes over a couple of my lcss that are here in in indianapolis but i usually ask them what makes you happy like yes you you wanna do this do you know why and if so what what makes you happy and what do you want this to look like whether it's x amount of months or x amount of years down the road and this is kind of a a a a little bit of a bleak way to look at it but our collections are all going to end one day and it's just a matter of what what kind of a journey do you want to have along that path so when it comes to whether it's player collecting or team collecting i i just ask them what makes you happy and then just kind of figure out what their initial ideas are because not everybody's gonna know what's on what makes them happy they just kinda gotta dip their toe in to begin with and try and see but i i will try and encourage people to start slow just because the the the access of cards i mean you can go to an lcs and buy them you can go to target walmart meijer dick's sporting goods which you couldn't do when i was younger and get them or you can just go on ebay you can hop onto an online marketplace or seemingly now twenty four hours a day seven days a week you can hop on whatnot or on fanatics live or ebay live and you can go buy cards literally at three o'clock in the morning if that's what you want to do so i try and encourage people not to get overwhelmed by the the sheer access on demand that they have but figure out why they're they why they wanna collect and who they want to collect and what makes them happy i know it's a very generic response but i usually everybody's why will change as soon as they get into it or at least evolve yeah the deeper they get into it so yeah i think that's really sound advice i think if i would've heard that my collection would be better from the start so i i think whether it's generic or not doesn't matter it's good advice well it's it's more from an organic approach some people will say well i wanna make some money on this stuff so i can fund my own collection which i think that's everybody's goal yeah and that's not always gonna work out but i'm like okay well here is probably an easier way to to kind of scale that to some degree i mean if i had all the answers i'd be doing it myself but that's that's not the way i approach my my collection it's usually okay i've got x amount of money in my budget to to focus on cards so that's what i'm gonna operate under yeah especially since i don't really spend time flipping anything yeah for profit or for for loss but that's just kind of how i operate it happens we've all been there we've all been there we've yeah all been there i've got a ton of i'm not gonna name names there's a there's a few wnba players that i've i might still hold a minor grudge against so i get it i get it we'll leave them anonymous for now but i think you know we can read the in the lines there yes i guess one interesting part of you as a collector at least in my in my opinion is that the folks that you're collecting aren't necessarily like like super old vintage cards right like there's this whole segment of baseball cards from like quite a long time ago but you're collecting legends of a league that are no longer playing and so when you think about kind of the journey of your card collecting as you just described it of what makes you happy and kind of approaching what you're going to leave behind one day i guess in your collection is the point of collecting cards of these players like catch or like douglas to transport you back to specific moments or is it just like a fondness i suppose of the players and what they brought to your your favorite team it's both most certainly and yeah they're they're the retired players tamika is is in my opinion she's in the top five greatest women basketball players of all time i think she's in that list for a lot of people as well she's still employed by the fever as a basketball ambassador she's on you know obviously the call for some usa network games she's in studio on some as a wnba analyst she does a ton of work with the sec for women's college basketball so she's she's still seen a lot in today's market so i think a lot of people even if they're recent fans they're still familiar with her to a certain degree similar to like the dawn's dailies or the becky hammonds or the rebecca lobos of the world who all played you know they all played at the same time and katie douglas she's not as involved with the wnba these days but she's still around they're both still heavily involved in the indianapolis community i see tamika pretty frequently in the market so part of it is i like collecting them because they're such great people and they're great for our central indiana community but they are also magnificent for the sport in general for women's sports as well as as idols to lots of people but the also also the other great thing is that they're among the best in their in their field of all time so katie douglas doesn't get the love that i think she deserves but she was i mean she was successful in her own outright starting in high school and then you know she won a national championship with stephanie white at purdue in in ninety nine i believe so and they you know her and tamika both were were extremely successful in the wnba and and and ruled for for a lot of years so not only because of their off their their on court success but their off court success is is why they're why they're they're so heavily focused in my collection that makes complete sense and and one of the things that i wanna kinda ask about here and i know you said you had a a hiatus so i'm not sure how it applies it but you know at some points the indiana fever are at kinda like the top dog in the league you know they've had really high moments but they've also had some really low moments in terms of collecting does that get reflected in your pc at all or how do you kinda navigate winning seasons versus losing seasons versus know underwhelming overwhelming is there a difference or do you try to stay steady and have you stayed steady throughout that time i've stayed steady throughout that time in regard to to the collecting itself i mean both of these players were retired before you know by about twenty sixteen so the really and in in the fever's case i mean you can you can break it down by era but it's pretty much pre tamika and post tamika because of how long she played for the fever for sixteen seasons and she was with the team for seventeen years so which is the the the large portion of how long they'd existed really yeah the fever you know they really as everybody remembers they were really bad for about five years there six years there for after after tamika retired i mean historically bad i mean there there there was i think three or four seasons where they won six games i mean it was it was really really bad but as with bad teams i mean they they stop start to stockpile draft picks when they can and then everything started changing in twenty twenty three but my collection's been pretty steady as far as players that i've collected outside of tameka and katy i can see where some some individuals that collect fever cards they might have they might have taken a backseat a little bit during some of those years but those years that the fever were historically bad that was when panini started to come in and take over and and started releasing products left and right so it was a good time for wnba card collectors to to to to keep collecting in that regard but generally i try to keep it pretty consistent and pretty pretty safe there good for you i i don't think i can say that i think i get really emotional with it when when the links lose like even when phi's not playing right now i'm like ugh like it just takes so much more for me to like tune in or to wanna collect when they're not like right here in front of my face especially when they're losing or like when they're not playing well so all the power to you mitch that's that's like true fandom right there i love that well and it's too bad the links are you know they're missing their star player because it seems like they're pretty bad and they don't have any good rookies right yeah yeah they just like kinda suck right nobody pay attention please nobody pay attention no we're not talking about the links today we're not doing that well they're alright we're still doing we're still doing pretty well but they are for sure i'm happy about it but yeah kinda my favorite segment so far that we've done on on this season is the personal grail segment and i think you know i can kinda predict i know what the card is but i can i think the audience can probably predict who's gonna be on the card that you choose that represents kind of your pc the best but i'm gonna pull it up here and while i'm doing that why don't you kinda explain to the people that are listening what card you picked to be your personal grail and if you have any story behind it sure my pick was the impeccable honors signature platinum one zero one card of tamika catchings from panini's twenty twenty five impeccable release that was released i wanna say it was shortly before christmas and that's it's the first release of impeccable for wnba the wnba has never had an impeccable release yet even though the other i guess the other three major sports have and they've seen it for a handful of years panini announced its release i think just a few months before that and i think the community is pretty excited about it because they knew they were going to get higher quality cards a thicker stock material now the only thing they didn't like was the price point obviously but i think a lot of folks were really excited for the the absence believe it or not the absence of memorabilia from impeccable temporarily but on card autographs which haven't been seen on wnba cards in quite some time so the reason why i picked that particular card was one it showcases tamika's successes from two thousand and twelve when they won the wnba title and she was the mvp it's a good looking photo it's a great background the the the platinum foil which is tough to tell in that photograph it sits on the card really really well and it looks great it's a great looking autograph i did not pull the card i with the players that i collect i very seldomly break into wnba product recent because of the price point it's just it's just a lot easier and a lot more inexpensive for me just to chase after singles so me being as impatient as i typically am i try to i wanted to avoid ebay so i i spectate on breaks on whatnot all the time sometimes i'll participate if there's a pick your player type of break but in this scenario i wanna say it was a it was a it was a team break so if somebody purchased the indiana fever spot they would give all the fever cards and this was being run on whatnot i can't remember what night it was but chelsea stafford who is a a prominent wnba whatnot breaker she found this card in an impeccable box in in for a collector out in arizona and i know that if it's after nine o'clock ten o'clock eleven o'clock at night and i start getting text messages notifications from whatnot notifications from instagram all simultaneously i know that somebody hit a big card that i'm going to want there aren't a whole lot of collectors out there so that's one of the other reasons why i collect them is because i don't have a whole lot of competition but i got i got messages left and right that this card was pulled and i knew that with what the other impeccable honor signatures cards look like i figured that this was gonna be one of my favorites if not my favorite card of hers that i've ever seen so i was able to i reached out to the to the owner of the card and she was like i was waiting for you to reach out to me because everybody told me this needed to be in your hands so she collected caitlin clark and paige becker's you know deservedly so they're two of the most popular athletes in the league and i have a handful of their cards and some of them i i will keep in my collection forever but there are some that i use for trade bait so i made sure that this other this owner of the card had a handful of caitlin clark cards that were numbered that were rare and and a handful of page cards that that made up for what i believe to be the value of that card so we agreed on a on a trade and and that was that so i didn't have to go chase after the card i didn't have to go you know pay fees through another marketplace to find it it pretty much came to me and that's one of the many things that i love about the wnb card community is like i said before we all try to make sure that the cards end up in the in the in the best hands possible and i and i do that for a lot of others i don't necessarily expect that to be reciprocated i just want to do it because it's the right thing to do so when this card ended up in my collection i was i i still am extremely and eternally thankful so it's it's one of the best ones that that i have and i know it's you know it may not measure up to to somebody else's cards or a couple of the cards that are demanding high value these days but you know what it's it's got it's got a lot higher value in my collection than it does anywhere else oh that's a perfect way to end that like i love the way you explain this card i'm like keeping up on the screen for a little longer because i just cannot take my eyes off the like so pure of a signature here from catch it just looks so good you talked about kind of the disappearance of on card autos in the wnba card collecting space this impeccable release bringing that kind of back i think was a huge win by panini and this card in particular i think a lot of folks understand that once you get a trophy in the photo not one but two trophies in the photo that kinda connects you to a moment it brings you back add on that you know catch actually touched this card held it in her hand and signed it it yeah it hits all the marks for me and i'm i'm glad that it ended up in your collection because like you said i think you appreciate it most and and it's just awesome so thanks for sharing that story yep it's a great card and and i i can't believe i heard it but did you say huge win by panini yeah i think i did i think i did they they do that every now and then so we every now and then for sure for sure okay so part of that conversation and part of this conversation in general what i've heard echoed is the word community it's a word that we use you know on the wnba card podcast it's kind of a pillar of what i'm trying to build is to cultivate a community where people can explore the wnba and explore card collecting but with that in wnba i think we can all agree that fandom is unique the the community is very unique what would you say i suppose about the fever collector community is different than say other franchises either in the wnba or outside of it what makes it kinda unique well the sheer amount of wnba card collectors we have in this market no i don't i don't travel a whole lot across the country but it feels like it's it's huge here yeah now indianapolis has a lot going for it obviously the fever you know they have a lot of high profile players right now they're doing moderately well to above average in the league's performance from a sales and marketing performance they're probably top of the league they've got a eighty five million dollar athletic center that's being built down the street from cambridge fieldhouse that is exclusively for the fever's use so the the the city and the community are pouring into it but one thing i i i do my best to not take for granted is that we have such access to the wnba card products that are that are being released yes indianapolis is a large market but we have a ton of card shops in this market that wholly embrace the wnba hasn't always been that way now they're businesses they have to embrace you know what their consumers want for sure but there were a handful of shops that you could you could easily go find cards that were released from i guess near the tail end of the rittenhouse days you can go find those in shops now some were in their in their their sealed cases because you could buy them one full set at a time but i remember twenty twenty prism i could i can go anywhere and find that here in indiana so the the hobby does does really well here and and i consider indianapolis kind of a hotbed for for wnba cards just because there's a lot of a lot of shops in town that embrace it and to make sure they have products left and right to to for consumers to access most of it i mean they they do a really good job of making sure there's hobby boxes and limited releases that are that are in stock but when they're not you can go find six to eight of the different types of retail releases anywhere you want so that's that's a good part of it a lot of our card shops have have larger kind of gathering areas so you probably saw that when you were at indy card exchange when you were here for all star last year you know there's a big area kind of in the middle of the room with all their cardboard dime boxes that they have you can come out and just hang out or you can sit at the bar which is more often what i do i just go in there just to hang out they have they have a lot of fan events here in town that embrace the fever not only for just the fever's sponsors and supporters on monetary perspective which is what most of the teams do but yeah there are a lot of community events that the fever just pour themselves into when nobody asks so nobody's paying them to do it for exposure yeah so i just feel that the market does a really well really good job excuse me of embracing it some of the card collectors you know there's there's a lot of them that are that are newer from the past two to three years which we kind of anticipated that but there's still a lot of of the legacy card collectors for the fever in the market as well and while it's tougher to collect the wnba cards of of old let's say because they were either limited releases or there was a lack of products some of the older collectors have have gotten into some of the newer releases and are just just like everybody else they've got their mind blown with just how much is accessible in this market so not to not to make anybody else feel bad out you know elsewhere located in the country but you want any card just come to indianapolis and come hang out we'll have a lot of fun i was gonna say i think you're gonna evoke some envy from the audience here especially like our super rural listeners who maybe don't even have a shot near them they're hearing you can find rittenhouse in your local card shop they're like freak out so like yeah that environment it's it's special and yeah you mentioned it i went to indy card exchange while i was in indianapolis for all star game and there was a wide like wide selection of wnba cards so just to see and hear from a local person that that's kind of across the board plus one yep for indianapolis as a card city for sure yep and we we try not to take that for granted we know there's there's a lot of rural areas in indiana you know indianapolis only or indiana excuse me only has a handful of of larger markets in it so me being located in in the heart of it like i said i try not to take that for granted and i know access to to products and and information that kind of thing is is not easy to come by for a lot people so i try to do what i can to make sure that while it is accessible i can i can share it with anybody i love that i'm gonna do kind of a hard pivot here mitch away to my next question sure which i asked on last week's episode and i think it's just a question that i find super interesting because you know as i mentioned in that episode i feel like rivalries aren't as kind of in your face in the wnba as they are say in more cemented leagues that have been around for like like hundred years or so so if i could pick your brain kind of as a fever fan when you look out onto the sea of wnba like teams what teams are like the fever's rivals who kinda gets your like blood pressure up whenever you play well some of it some of it are is is related to like team rivalries some of it's just player rivalries player it it just it just depends we used to have a pretty strong and we i i don't wanna say we used to but the rivalry with detroit with the lynx and with the mercury i mean they were i mean they were pretty strong rivalries not too long ago the fever lost to detroit like four years in a row in the playoffs and it was not fun and then you know obviously they lost to the the mercury in o nine in the in the wnba finals you know maya moore and lindsey whelan and sylvia fowles from the links gave us fits nonstop it still bugs me to this day i have my skin scrolling and obviously we lost the finals to them in twenty fifteen so i guess it depends on who you ask some of the some of the more some of the more recent fever fans have become fever fans recently that they they usually go to the the player rivalries for the most part whether it's with with whoever the fever tangle with on court whether it's and we all know who they are i don't need to go into it unless you've got another hour and half but i think that's where most of rivalries these days are coming from yeah because the the league has seen an insane amount of parity since really the the late twenty tens in my opinion there isn't one team that's just dominating their way through the regular season and playoffs there are some teams that we expect to be strong whether it's the golden states or the las vegases or the minnesota's or the phoenixes of the world there are some teams that we anticipate are okay they're gonna be rebuilding or they're kinda retooling but even some of those teams have come out of nowhere and they do really well i went and saw the the dream play the fever last night and to begin the season i didn't really know how atlanta was gonna fare with as many mouths as they have to feed on that team that are really really good because you got ryan howard alicia gray you know madison hillman's really good and then you got angel reese joining the team and i just didn't know how that team was gonna work and they're they're performing in a very very very well metered way they they do really well on the court they've got a lot of good court oh gosh i don't know court oh gosh now i'm now i'm drawing a blank here you're good i think they just shut a period record that we're gonna rerecord that you're good i think it's just like the star power like synergy energy like just the cohesion of them is something we i feel like i was not expecting i was expecting a lot more fragmentation of like not selfishness but like just getting used to one another and they're still waiting on brie jones to come back like that's a and then you have jordan canada that's a real team so yeah that must have been a a fun game to attend for sure it was and anytime angel reese comes to town there's there's a handful of people who feel some way about that which is you know that's perfectly fine me i try to keep all of my my attention towards on court demeanor so period it was it was a great game and i think that today we might have a maybe a regional rivalry with chicago yeah they'll be in town next week but i don't really see a whole ton of like strong rivalries we haven't really met with anybody in the in the playoffs recently on a consistent basis yes los angeles has done very well historically over the past handful of years same thing with new york but we really haven't butted heads with with too many teams as a whole but like i said i think depending on who you ask like my my my rivalries that i still that i still feel in my gut are with are with phoenix and with minnesota just because of the way the finals went that's so funny that this lined up like this because we had mercury last week fever this weekend but both of you both of you said the links and i'm just taking it so i just wanna be known that i am not fighting back here despite the fact that i have things to say i did wanna ask you no go ahead it's not like we don't like them because of the way they do things or anything it's just we don't like them because they're successful exactly it's just it's just the way it goes i hear you i i do wanna ask you with the entrance or reentrance i suppose of certain franchises like cleveland and detroit coming in you know on the horizon here are you gonna preemptively start that rivalry personally mitch or are you just gonna let them do their thing no i'll let them do other things there's been there's been a certain dormancy that's been that's been sitting for now so it'll be interesting to see how cleveland shakes out i think dan gilbert is still the one that's that's fronting that effort with the rockers detroit i don't really know who's gonna be involved with that but you know now that portland and toronto are in we'll kinda see how the league evolves and i'm i'm of the and and you've mentioned it historically on this podcast i'm more of the approach of you know rising tide lifts all boats so i'm i'm always embracing kind of any any further expansion that the league can can foster and develop yeah obviously that puts a lot of money in people's pockets and and has has a lot of other opportunities for players to succeed historically i've been more of a hey i wanna keep it pretty refined because i wanna make sure that the the threshold is still extremely high to make it in the league and i'm still of that mentality to a certain degree but we'll see how everything gets expanded and and i think it's it's nothing but nothing but great things for the league in the future for sure i i'm like this is kinda tangential and not related to the fear but i am like super excited to see how that detroit cleveland rivalry develops like michigan ohio rivalry like i feel like they could really i don't know strengthen the or like like bring up the temperature i suppose is what i'm trying to say i think that could be huge but i guess we'll see i guess we'll see and that's the way a lot a lot of markets operate i mean right all the teams stick together and if there's a rivalry like i'll give an example so us us pacers fans here in indianapolis we cannot stand anytime anybody mentions the knicks so we are you know we're we're we're kinda dwelling in the dumps a little bit right now with the knicks being in the finals but anytime that liberty come to town it's just it's just there's something there's something subsurface there that we already don't like so turn the mic up turn the mic up no i'm just kidding so we'll we'll see how that detroit cleveland works out yeah for sure okay so one of the things that you just mentioned with rivalries and this is how i'm gonna try to pivot us here is the idea of player rivalries so i wanna come back to like the player idea if you had to pick a mount rushmore of fear fever players who are you picking and right off the bat is caitlin clark in your top four she's not she's not oh and aaliyah aaliyah boston is not and it's it's not because i do not think that they are great players it's just because i mean they're in their third and fourth years respectively and unfortunately we don't have a winning record in the playoffs since then so there's no and there's nothing in our trophy case since two thousand and twelve other than a commissioner's cup trophy which is nice you know we got that last year but i think most of us have forgotten that we won the commissioner's cup by now just i and i get why the league does it but that's not something that i personally focus on so i you know with the wnba it's tough i mean there there are very few players especially today that spend more than half dozen years with their respective team especially with the way the cba has evolved over the past handful of years i mean brittany griner's on our third team in three years and mercury fans would have never guessed that yeah that would never happen so market dynamics change everything so my mount rushmore i i kind of focus on on court success and tenure and caitlin clark leah boston anybody really in the past eight to ten years is wouldn't be on my mount rushmore i think the closest person that would would be kelsey mitchell she's been with the team for a while but she's also an extremely dynamic scorer who is in my opinion still criminally underrated from a card perspective as well but and that's another topic but i would put more than likely would put to to make a number one which i think every wba fan on the planet would agree with that yeah i do katie douglas second and then i'd probably do breanne january third she was she was very good with the fever and spent a lot of time with us helped a lot of teams throughout the playoffs and i think that a lot of people still underrate her as well and even the the recent wnba fans they have no clue who she is other than maybe an assistant coach because she is the assistant coach for the fever now i don't really know if i'd have a fourth okay but in in my opinion there's a there's a drop off from tenure and performance and maybe team accolades from third to the rest we can make their space smaller on the yeah and i think that that's probably where i would probably stop because i probably have a handful of players that i think could be tied for fourth but but that's those are probably where i'd put my three for for the fever i'm not even gonna touch that list i agree completely with your top three so we'll we'll leave it there and listeners if you disagree i'd love to know who you're replacing because you can add one he's giving you space to add one yeah i don't think you can knock off i don't think you can knock off those three for sure yep and i think that as the years go as long as the fever developed the way they they are on the trajectory to do it honestly it wouldn't surprise me if all of that changes yeah and you got a completely new four for mount rushmore you know tamika she she gets not a lot but some flack because she won one championship with the fever you know she was in the finals twice and lost with the fever were they had control of both of those final series in my opinion in o nine and fifteen and just couldn't couldn't get it across the finish line so i think that if they won both of those years and maybe picked up another year she'd be up higher in that conversation as far as maybe mount rushmore in the entire league all time she's probably in the top five maybe sitting on the outside of that in my opinion just because of you know the success with dt and asia and so forth but i think that you know the fee if the fever can start to stack up a a championship or two with how they're developing the roster that that mount rushmore that i just listed could completely change and i i would embrace that yeah for sure that's a that's a unique position for a franchise to be in to kinda like see this transition period hopefully result in trophy case being filled up right like that's the goal it would be so interesting to see how fans react to that if that happens you know just from a legacy perspective one of the things that you touched on throughout this conversation and i can hear hints of it you know coming up is this idea of you know disrespect or like like players not getting the credit they deserve from card collectors percent one of the terms we came up with on the wma card podcast is like the disrespect index which is like one day i hope to quantify this but like mhmm on the court performance not equating to market prices if you had to pick a player from the fever current or retired or anybody who would you say has like the highest degree of disrespect index you you're right i have touched on this and i and i and i've mentioned both of them before but i would i would put kelsey mitchell and tamika catchings at at the top of that list tamika's is is a little bit because she's been retired for ten seasons already so people have been focusing more on some of the current players but her cards are are they're underrated they are extremely inexpensive in my opinion now if you talk to a wnba collector from ninety seven to o four you know they're like well i would have never paid these kind of prices market market's changed but yeah to make it for sure and for example i don't know how but i swiped a twenty twenty three prism hall monitors which is one their their insert set from that year it was a it's a gold parallel of the hall monitors and set set out of ten in a psa ten for forty eight dollars on ebay so i'm just like that card is worth that is worth more than that just in a raw condition so i i could not wait to buy that card that cheap and you know that's gonna sit in my collection for a long time i mean anybody else in that checklist it would have been probably triple the price but in that similar nature kelsey mitchell is is the same now she doesn't have any championships yet but she's got i mean she just hit five thousand careers points last night at the atlanta dream game and i mean she had twenty five points going into the fourth quarter and and she does it so quietly you don't see you don't see a whole lot of emotion at least newsworthy emotion from her on the court or off the court she's she has some some pretty toned down demeanor as a player she's an absolute court general even though caitlyn's the one bringing up the ball at the court kelsey really knows how to run that offense by herself and she does a great way of executing her cards are criminally cheap as well i know a handful of of kelsey mitchell player collectors that are out there so anytime i'm seeing cards that are that are out in breaks or that are online or anything like that i'm trying to make sure they end up in good hands but i think over time i don't know how much more time kelsey mitchell's gotten in league hopefully six or seven years which would be which would be great because she's already been in the league eight years i think that if somebody's looking at a good way to add some value to their collection start picking up some of the older kelsey mitchell cards because they'll be a lot more valuable later on for sure i agree and i know this is the wnba card podcast but to add to kelsey mitchell's resume she will always be in the record books in the collegiate level as well just with scoring ability so like you add that on top of it and it just doesn't make sense the equation does not add up and so yeah i i completely agree with catching with with kelsey mitchell being high on the disrespect index i think you could add anybody honestly in wnba cards to the disrespect index and they'd like agree make sense yeah for sure but and even some of the some of the players that are demanding the highest dollar amounts right now i still think the cards are undervalued generally speaking i do i agree i agree completely i suppose we talked about mount rushmore of players and i don't wanna kinda like make you rattle off a bunch of options but if you had to pick a card or two or three to be kind of the mount rushmore i suppose of fever cards instead of fever players are they lining up with that mount rushmore of play of players that you just named or are they different they're probably a little bit more different and i think some of that is based upon the card product releases themselves and the rarity of them and scarcity of them so you know obviously we didn't have you know one of one parallels that were yeah that pac produced until twenty nineteen generally speaking i like to put a little bit of a higher premium on those now depending on the manufacturer there's all sorts of one on ones that are that are produced to players need to take a quick pause i'm so sorry okay so we had a bit of an interruption there but i wanna reask this question to mitch about kind of like the difference between the mount rushmore of players and the mount rushmore of cards for fever fans and so i kinda wanna hear from you your take on which cards not players but cards of are seen as the centerpieces of fever fandom collecting i think i mean i think a lot of that's right now it's caitlin heavy yeah whether it's some of her rare you know base cards or whether there's some of her rare autograph cards i think it's caitlin heavy right now just because of the sheer number of cards that are being produced as well as some of the loud dollar amounts that are being demanded for those cards so like if i had to create a shortlist i put you know i put by tamika's her her flare tradition rookie card at the top of that list just because it was a you know all the rookie cards in o one flare tradition were all redemption only and the cards were of a a more thinner stock but they were fully glossed so they're really tough to keep in in good condition i'd probably put maybe a couple of caitlin's more rare rookie cards up there maybe her her green kaboom that sold for six hundred plus thousand dollars or maybe her her similar to brett i'm a i'm a massive fan of the black finance in prison yeah so more so than i am of the gold final one of ones so i'd probably put one or both of caitlin's prison black finance rookie cards in that list as well maybe an aaliyah boston gold parallel from from prism in twenty twenty three but i think the the the the mount rushmore of quote unquote fever cards are probably they're probably more heavy towards the recent releases than they are the older ones i think that's undisputed i think clark cards just like are in a league of their own i think the only comparable cross sport comparison i can think of sort of is shohei just where like it feels like i heard somebody recently i can't remember who said it but i think it was contrarian cards jason said like collecting or iowa dave versus one of those guys was like collecting shohei is collecting shohei it's not collecting baseball and collecting clark is sorta like collecting clark and not collecting wnba cards just because of the financial implications and that brings me kind of to our last segment which is all about hobby market perspective and i this is a unique position i would say is that your team whether it be in team breaks or in singles or just all these different avenues that you can acquire a card it feels like at least from an outsider perspective fever cards have increased in price exponentially since the entrance of caitlin clark and the kind of like attention that she's brought to the franchise how have you navigated a exploding market as a fever fan when prices continue to just rise and rise it it is very tough and it's wildly unpredictable from a monetary perspective of how cards are going to perform and kind of where the where the where the the bar and the threshold are of kind of the point of entry into certain cards so you can budget okay maybe i'm gonna spend x amount of dollars on this particular set or this particular parallel if i wanna pull you know all the all the fever players on this particular checklist and and panini knows what they're doing they know how to build checklists they know that you know collectors are gonna focus on more on on some of the fever players than they will on maybe a couple of the other of the other bench players on some of the other teams so fever players you know in checklists will have eight or nine players on a checklist out of the the twelve team members which right is crazy but again panini knows what they're doing and we're they're not stupid so it's tough to kind of gauge where those cards are going to perform generally speaking but there's a there's a considerable drop off from caitlin to kelsey mitchell to aliyah boston to lexi hall and then in my opinion everybody else kind of kind of those centralized four so right i think the team performs well in the hobby itself but but especially in in in my case you know i'm chasing after a couple of retired players which yeah some appear you know tameka will appear in some sets and katie douglas will do the same but sometimes she isn't so she's not even in she's not even in prism or select or impeccable this year katie douglas is not so my collection for her this year has been focused on don russ and one on one for the twenty twenty five releases so i'm i'm happy about that but i'm also a little sad because i i like the cards i don't want the cards but my wallet's a lot happier when that happens so yeah i can i can focus that money elsewhere now it's still gonna get infused into my hobby it's just a matter of where so but yeah that's where we're that balancing act is just so interesting and i think the reason why i wanted to ask that question is because like i said the fever franchise is such a unique position to be in financially right now it just seems like it's operating at a different level especially if you're collecting caitlin clark so to kinda hear the i don't know the inside scoop on that is interesting i guess that's where we'll we'll kind of round the corner on today's discussion i feel like we've been going for a while mitch i feel like we could go like forever but i'm gonna ask you to kind of like finish off today's episode with a question that i i'm gonna ask every guest which is if someone today is listening to wnba cardpod and they're like damn i don't really have that amount of fandom for a team yet but i want it i wanna be immersed what would be your sales pitch for the indiana fever well i think i i somewhat made it earlier in the podcast of kind of kind of our our love and infatuation and clinical sheer obsession for the sport of basketball that we have here in indiana and i mean the team is named the fever for a reason and it's because we have basketball fever here in indiana so my my pitch to to someone would be well you know if you're if you if you love basketball for the sheer love and performance of the game then what makes the most sense and that is to become a fever fan in in in the basketball capital of the country and that's that would be my pitch to them and and yes we've got a great team and a great community that's behind the team but i think i think every other team has has great aspects in that regard and similar regard as well yeah for sure well mic drop on the fever there mitch if people want to see your collection there's more than just you know what we talked about where can they find you online where can they see these awesome catching katie douglas cards i'm on instagram at almanac sports cards then i'm on whatnot as well under mitch donor so right now those are the only two platforms that i participate in but i'm i'm heavily active in both of those if anybody has any questions on wnba cards in general caitlin is a great resource for that as well but i'm i'm happy to help out i study i study checklists for a living it seems so especially with wnba cards so i love kind of studying checklists and how the sets are composed by panini so if anybody has any questions on on any of that please let me know and and if i can make a just a very quick plug for for stacking slabs so brett our esteemed mentor on this platform he has a a great flagship episode that he releases and if there are any newer card collectors that are getting into the hobby or some that are that are recently reentering the hobby or some long term ones i i will say i listen to a lot of the sacking slabs network podcasts and the flagship episodes that he releases every week which are relatively short they're twenty to thirty minutes in length usually they're some of the best sports card content that i can that i can find on the internet and he does a great job of of thinking about the hobby and not only a a mental and monetary or fiscal perspective but also in a psychological way of of trying to make sure that you're you're doing things the way that you want and you kinda learn your learn a few things about your own self in the in the process so i just wanna make a quick plug for that always room for a plug for stacking slabs on this podcast for sure mitch thanks for joining the wnba card podcast and we'll see everybody next week thank you for having me