welcome back loyal listeners of the stacking slabs podcast to season four episode nine of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin and i go by at cold lunch cards mostly on the instagram machine you can find me in some other places on the internet as well and today i'm excited to continue to deliver more collector driven and community focused content to whoever you're listening or watching us today i am just so excited to be on this journey of season four and to continue to have some amazing guests with us to share their perspectives this week we have an amazing guest who goes by kyle kyle is joining us to talk about the next era of wnba cards as you know listeners may know the last week we talked about kind of the end of the era of rittenhouse and the entrance of the dominance of players like asia wilson brianna stewart and so on and so forth and we pick up at this truly incredible inflection point of two thousand nineteen and two thousand twenty with the entrance of big names like nafisa collier like sabrina you know with brands like prism and all sorts of backgrounds that are kind of in the background of this huge inflection point it kinda represents a rapidly changing moment for our segment of the hobby of wnba cards and i figured you know who else to talk about this than kyle so kyle's gonna be talking about his personal collecting journey during this time and we're gonna unpack kind of what was going on in the league at the time kyle welcome to the podcast for those that don't know you do you mind introducing yourself and telling them a little bit about yourself yeah so i'm kyle i go by at kyle underscore collects on instagram that's about the only place you'll find me don't really do twitter don't do or x or whatever it is now but yeah i've been collecting since the late eighties until i graduated high school in two thousand stopped for a while got back in in two thousand nine collecting nba cards you know growing up outside of chicago in the early nineties i was a huge jordan fan everything jordan collected jordan buying all the jordans i could find and then when i got back in just kinda got priced out of collecting jordan and so i jumped to kobe so i'm collecting kobe i'm collecting kobe can't afford kobe start buying nash start buying dunkin' just kind of this this progression of nba greats and then in twenty nineteen i took my daughter to the national here in chicago and picked up my first box of wnba cards that's awesome that's a great story i think that whenever we talk to people that get quote unquote priced out it always leads us down paths that we wouldn't have expected and sometimes those paths are the most rewarding and i think that that's where we wanna start today is that you know the era we're talking about is twenty nineteen to twenty twenty as we prepared for this episode and as you just noted you said that twenty nineteen wnba was really the first time that you dipped your feet in this category what set did you explore and what kinda drew you into that so i bought twenty nineteen don russ and honestly i was looking for something so i could get panini silver packs i was like great i am here let's let's see what we like let's see what's in here yeah and yeah i like i was just buying random boxes and i had my daughter and i said oh great like you're she was seven ish at the time starting to get into basketball and i was like great let's let's buy this we took it home we ripped the box we got some okay cards i'd say the best card was jackie young signature series that's not really showing up very well it's the out of one ninety nine auto they're like oh that's cool you know you start doing some research you're like oh jackie young number one pick like this is great so you go buy some more and ripping silver packs i got a a katie smith hall of fame on card auto and i was like oh like who's katie smith you know you started like following following the rabbit hole and just kinda like okay like the the national passes these are cards that are just sitting in a box in my closet and you know they're they're just cool they're fun yeah it just kinda grew into something that you ended up really being passionate about at least from my perspective i guess i wanna ask you at the time in twenty nineteen it sounds like you kind of stumbled upon wnba cards right you're searching for a way to kind of get into silver packs which is an interesting concept but what did that product wnba don russ at the time represent to you or to the hobby i mean for me i was like this is a set that i'm familiar with you know they look like the twenty eighteen optic you know i'm walking around i'm buying you know shay gilgous alexander cards i'm buying luca cards i'm buying i'm i'm actively searching through boxes for these cards and so to see optic cards that look the same there's hollows there's don ross i'm familiar with those there's lasers there's it it's very it's a very easy transition to say oh okay like who's who's this player and you know you start looking them up you're like oh this is like this is a cool card like oh this the shine on these hollows is nice like the i i love the lasers the lasers are personally one of the best things for me that panini has ever done like they just have a unique shine that's different from anything else and so i'm like oh great like i can buy a gold laser for twenty five dollars like i can buy this great looking card and it's inexpensive like this this is fantastic and you know nobody nobody had it on the floor like you you weren't going to boost in finding singles you were just going home ripping boxes seeing what you can find like i got sylvia fowles gold laser insert and again like this is showing up terribly on camera and i'll put these all on my instagram but like it's one of those cards you're like oh okay like this is awesome it's number to ten it's a player who played here in chicago like you just kinda start diving in to kind of the history of the league that way it was it was a very easy entry point for how i like to collect you know you i'm a big get a card research find what's next yeah i think that when we think about twenty nineteen donris and the way that you're explaining it i hear a common theme which is that a lot of people that maybe collected in a different categories like nba for instance when they see a product that kind of has similar parallels no pun intended but parallels across leagues it can make that transition a lot easier because you have this almost layer of legitimacy that's already there for collectors it feels familiar it feels familiar but new you know so that sounds kinda like what was your experience do you think you're not i was gonna say you're not you're not learning a brand new collecting language yeah it's you you have the basics and you can just jump right in one hundred percent do you feel like wnba twenty nineteen wnba don russ kind of represented this inflection point of finally having a quote unquote mainstream product no no like in in a in a way it like it was there it was in the background it was it was an option but i don't really think that until prism in twenty twenty i feel like that's when it became oh okay like panini is in yeah panini is giving this the treatment that they give nfl nba their college products even their unlicensed like they believe that this is that this is a thing one hundred percent when i think about twenty nineteen wnba downrest the word that comes to mind to me is penultimate right like we're we're at the last step before we hit twenty twenty which feels like yeah a brave new world but twenty nineteen is so special because that one that draft class was incredible you mentioned jackie dunn i mean you know just insane names but i guess i wanted to ask you looking back now do you think that twenty nineteen don russ feels more historically important than it did you know when you were ripping it oh yeah i mean it's it's fun because it's kind of that bridge between the rittenhouse you have the danras like the paper cards they're you know typical kinda what you would get from rittenhouse and then you have the optic and you have the hollow as like the transition into the chromium prism era and it's like this great melding and i like i was looking at prices of some of the cards yesterday i was like oh man like maybe maybe there's some stuff i should go back and get and i was like oh no i can't afford i can't afford to go back and buy and buy any of these things you know at the national boxes were like sixty five dollars and now they're five fifty like they're just like it's incredible one hundred percent before we kind of move away i i wanted to start you know with your personal perspective twenty nineteen downers before we move away from that did you have any favorite cards from that set that you either pulled or acquired yeah okay so we'll we'll we'll do it we'll do it the let's see here let's start let's start with the papers so again you've got you've got the regular base paper you've got the gold gold laser the diana terrazzi oh that's a heavy hitter yeah it's it's it's a yeah you've got the alana smith gorgeous you've got the alana smith the rookies and again just kind of one of those inserts that's common across both brands you got the base optic you got the optic hollow again you just not not showing up well on camera and then you've got the hollow gold like those those are just like kind of the the basic ones but man the cards from that set that i love the most is they did buybacks they did buyback autos so you've got alisa leslie nineteen ninety seven pinnacle buyback auto number fifteen but you got nancy lieberman buyback pinnacle auto like you don't see that anywhere else and like that's the stuff that's the coolest to me like it's not it's not that mainstream stuff it's not that stuff that like everybody knows the gold everybody knows the hollow everybody knows that but it's like the hidden stuff that doesn't pop up on ebay and that people don't really seem to be looking for you just like randomly find it in a dollar box somewhere where you're like oh great like i'm gonna grab this i'm gonna grab that and like you take it home and you put it in your box and then it disappears for the next twenty years that is a point that i'd like to hammer home is the kind of rarity of these cards despite the fact that they're not necessarily some of them that you mentioned some of those parallels are obviously serial numbered very short to ten or less but not all of them and they're so hard to come by that when you do it feels like they get pocketed and put into a collection immediately and personally as somebody who collects a rookie from twenty nineteen this scent is extremely hard to track down for that reason and that makes it very attractive to me as a collector and i'm sure you kinda feel the same way about that yeah and that's i think i think at one point garrett said that the optic i think it's the optic base or there's maybe five hundred and the hollows there's maybe a hundred and it's just one of those like they're not numbered nobody unless you really care to find out nobody knows and so you're just scooping them on ebay for fifteen twenty twenty five dollars and you're like great i'm just gonna put this away and pull it out later for sure that's that's a really good place i guess to transition to our next segment which has been very illuminating to me throughout this series which is kind of framing it as the context and the state of the league at the time you know we've talked about twenty nineteen don russ we hinted at twenty twenty prism which we'll get more into but i wanna talk to you about what was kind of going on at the time in the wnba around twenty nineteen could you expand on kinda what was going on yeah so i mean twenty twenty nineteen i was still not really following i was following ncaa i was my my first my first foray into wnba was when elena della nand signed with the sky like when her and greiner and skyler diggins smith were all i was like okay great like these are great players and you know you look for games and you you still can't like you couldn't find them anywhere even twenty nineteen there was next to zero media coverage i live in chicago we have a team you could not find them on cable you could not find them on local tv you might get the wnba finals on like maybe espn two or espn news like it was nowhere like you could literally not watch the games in chicago unless you like went to the games right oh just hearing that like okay so as we've kind of recorded these episodes when people talk about the popularity and then the media coverage around it it makes it sound like we're like thirty or forty years ago we're literally talking about twenty nineteen this is seven years ago and it feels like a completely foreign time to me which kinda brings me to my next question which is a little bit more tied to cards which is twenty nineteen was you know like you said difficult to watch in terms of access and availability but it was growing you know like we we asia was in the league you know players that you just mentioned were in the league how do you think the league's kind of rising profile set the stage for panini's entrance to this segment of cards i mean like at at least you could find the finals on tv you know i i wanna say twenty nineteen was that when washington won i think so yeah so like you're seeing elena deladawn you're seeing emma meissman you're you know saying oh man i i wish i wish she had done that in chicago but like i understand all the all the family background that pulled her back to the east coast i understand why she's there and you're watching you're like man like this is great and again as at that point my daughter was seven you're you're sitting down like hey look like here's women's basketball like this is a thing like you don't you don't have to like strive to this but this this is a thing that's happening and you know at at that point it's like oh like should we should we go to some games should we should we try to do this and you know again twenty nineteen leads to to twenty twenty and best laid plans and all of that kind of stuff but it was it was becoming more more in the consciousness even if people weren't like taking that leap yet yeah for sure i think that one of the things that really contributed to that and that i see as kind of a through line here is the idea of storytelling i think that's a huge part of you know gaining people's attention is like there's players and you're following them around the league there's storylines of dynasties and players and so on and so forth it feels like twenty nineteen was really the place where it kinda at least the the fire caught there was a spark yeah and it feels that that's kinda how i see twenty nineteen do you think that twenty nineteen for the wnba do you think it did it feel like they were ready for a big manufacturer when i talk about manufacturing like know we previously had rittenhouse for over ten years twenty nineteen happens do you think we were ready for panini like almost like it was like sizing up in something i mean i am i am not a panini apologist i am definitely a big a big panini critic and again i feel like with donner's it felt like they acquired the license they're just kinda like oh we've we've got this we've we've gotta put something out right and even twenty twenty prism like it still just kinda felt like okay like let's let's put something out like we've got we're gonna put out we're gonna put out one product we're gonna make a pre prism so we don't have to redesign anything we're just dropping photos in and like send it out yep so i i mean was the league ready probably was panini ready no did they no okay that kinda brings me to my last question of this segment which is how much do you think timing mattered here and what i mean by that is do you think that if sabrina entered in twenty fifteen during rittenhouse instead of twenty twenty with the first appearance of prism do you think the impact would have been the same no no simple answer that was immediate and simple do do you wanna expand on it why twenty twenty is like the perfect storm for like the wnba starting to ramp up and then everything that happened like and i mean like i i know i know we were gonna talk about this later but this this feels like this leads into this perfect like let's do it twenty twenty is you've got you've got this connection between sabrina and kobe kobe dies at the end of january specifically going to a game to watch his daughters play like you you you have that connection you have that connection between sabrina and kobe you have that tragedy middle of march nba stops like there's the there's the whole covid outbreak and we're done like there is no sports like i don't remember if i mean there was i remember waiting for episodes of the last dance like it was it was appointment viewing because that was the closest thing we had to sports every everybody for the most part at least everybody in my life is locked down nobody's going anywhere everybody is just like stuck fretting you know you're you're seeing terrible news on the tv every day you're just like tense all the time and then you get the last dance and you're like oh man what a great time like i remember the nineties bulls like this this was fantastic so you've you've got like a little respite in there to kind of feel normal right and then then you get the the announcement of the wnba wobble the nba bubble all of that going on and that that just kind of sets the stage for twenty twenty cards i mean you've got and i mean the the the wnba bubble was amazing viewership for the league jumped sixty eight percent during that time and people can say oh because it was the only thing on but that's all it took it took for people to say wait a minute like alright there's there's nothing on alright we're gonna we're gonna watch this basketball and for people to say oh wait a minute like this is great like these players are amazing they're doing everything the men do with maybe the exception of dunking and traveling but like this is high level basketball these are great players and then all of the social justice things they did these are very likable people you know they're out there campaigning for black lives matter they're out there talking about george floyd they're pushing for voting rights they actively campaigned against a wnba owner who was a senator from georgia because she was terrible for the players they're like this person is terrible for the players she's a bad owner she shouldn't be a senator go vote for raphael warnock like they were actively doing that they specifically halted the season when jacob blake got shot in kenosha like these these aren't just shut up and dribble players these are players who are smart they all went to college for four years because you can't leave early these are smart intelligent players who are playing a high level of basketball and using their voice and man if you're paying attention to all of this what's not to like you look at it and you're like these are my people like i love all of this ugh i like low key got like goosebumps listening to you talk about that that's exactly what i wanted to hear like to to kind of set the backdrop of you know we're here to talk about cards but it's so much bigger than cards and the way that the cards have really been amplified especially during this era is a culmination of like you said that perfect storm of all these factors that lead me as a collector to want to collect your cards and it just yeah i just wanted to say like that was just awesome i really enjoyed that i wanna talk to you a little bit more about you know getting into the finer details okay we've we have this backdrop here but what what about you know when i think of twenty twenty prism when i think of kind of the the added legitimacy that it brought to the category the name that comes along with it is sabrina and and i wanna get into that you you touched on obviously her relationship with kobe which is another layer of legitimacy that's a that's a theme that i wanna keep bringing up because you know like you said if you have something in front of you in front of your face you have to watch it it's the only thing on tv or it's your favorite player's favorite player suddenly you feel compelled right do you what what do you think made sabrina a a different prospect or a different idea to collectors than maybe previous superstars i mean so the funny thing is is that that season she hurt herself in the first game and missed the whole season and everyone who doesn't collect wnba cards they saw the connection to kobe they saw the prism branding they saw that she was she was next she was the number one pick in the first set of prism and people just took it and ran like you know you you see you see accounts with multimillion dollar baseball cards and hockey cards and whatever on instagram and they're all scooping sabrina base you know they're getting sabrina base they're getting sabrina color they're getting like they're getting these cards and showing them off on their feed and it just lends like a little bit more legitimacy to it where know if if these guys who are highly six if they're prospecting wnba now like okay like we're here like this this is a thing like it's not it's not going away these aren't people who generally buy cards and then just have them completely turn on them for sure and i think that go ahead go ahead i was just saying and and again sabrina has turned out to be a great player like there there are some players from that class where you're like okay like that that they're not sabrina you know or you're you're coming in and you're saying great like i'm gonna collect wnba cards i'm gonna buy first round picks and then you realize later like oh yeah like maybe four of them will make it past year three mhmm just just based on like the roster crunch and how small the league is and the hundred and forty four players and you know it's like oh man okay like sabrina was safe yeah ugh that's a good way of putting it and i i kinda wanna dive into this idea of sabrina's investability i don't even know if that's a word but like you maybe you get what i'm getting at but like yeah what you said really resonated with me of this idea of oh these big fish in the collecting sea are buying up her cards because you know they believe in her for one reason or another we've recycled sort of familiar design from other categories and it built up this kind of quote unquote herd mentality of sabrina's safe she's investable she's she's worth it compared to say her peers and i wanna ask you on like do you think that at the time sabrina's cards felt safer versus other wnba cards from a you know investment standpoint and why so i i like i like to say i'm a i'm a pizza collector like i collect cards that are in like that range of can i buy a pizza so like twenty to thirty dollars like that that is my sweet spot those are the cards i love sabrina cards at the time like the hyper prism i think was a hundred dollars base cards you know again base cards are bay but like they were fifteen to twenty dollars on ebay and so to buy like a nicer sabrina is like oh man like okay this is this is a little bit of a splurge like but i bought i bought a hyper prism because i like the pattern i like the way that looks i like i have some of the nba cards from the twenty nineteen set that are hyper prism and i'm like oh like this is this is great i like i like pairing these up i like having this this grouping no that makes sense yeah but but again it's just kinda like oh man like alright even even if this go again like i'm i'm pure collector i don't sell anything yeah so my my horizon is always the longest term so i'm like great you know what if i buy this card and sabrina even turns out to be moderately successful by the time anybody's selling this this is forty years down the road and no one's gonna be able to find this card okay like sure what whatever i'll i'll spend a hundred dollars on it it's it's fine that conviction that long term hold i wish i had more of it in my bones i feel like i just maybe it's because i just like came into the hobby at a weird time it wasn't twenty twenty it wasn't twenty nineteen when we had this explosion of profit where it almost felt like you were you were entitled to making money on cards you know during the time that's kind of the theme that i get with these sabrina cards at the time is people just thought they would print you money like the rest of the hobby and you know injury her lack of a tournament in college due to the pandemic you know all these kinds of things that were piling up with the backdrop of everything else happening in the league i wanna ask you do you think that sabrina was really the spark for this inflection point that we're talking about or was the infrastructure just ready for her at the time i mean i i love sabrina but i think i think it was more it was just the time like and granted you know if you i think charlie charlie collier was the number one pick the next year if charlie collier had been the twenty twenty rookie yeah i think a lot of people would have left they would have sunk the money they would have taken a bath and they would have said no like this this isn't for me like i'm i'm out like this is this is it's too much you can't you can't buy the number one rookie and even expect them to have a successful career so i mean it's it's partially sabrina but i think that all of those factors together kind of made it work whereas as long as she was even all star caliber you know dis discounting the shoes discounting the three point contest against curry discount discounting all like it's it's amazing to think of all of the things she's done but because she's not asia wilson because she's not phi because she's not caitlin clark you kinda look at it and you're like oh yeah like it's it's sabrina but oh my god it's sabrina like what what an incredible standard one thousand percent and i not to like get too personal here from like my bias but like i looked at sabrina in that kind of lens for a long time of she's not but she's not this player she's not this player and then she fucking hit the three to win the game while i'm sitting there in the finals in minnesota and i said oh i get it now i understand it she really is sabrina like she is sabrina you don't need anything else and so when i you know this conversation what i was trying to what we're trying to get at here is just kind of like a catalyst moment was infrastructure society wmea plus sabrina plus all these layers of legitimacy really culminate into an era that i think is going to be very memorable for wnba collectors and we're gonna look upon it with a very special lens both from like a card perspective but also from a lead lead perspective and that's where i wanna get out some more questions to you kyle about error significance and influence on today and this is a a segment that we've had in each of the episodes where you really get to reflect on okay it's you know seven years ago isn't a long time but it's long enough you know what i mean like a lot has happened in between there i i graduated high school in twenty nineteen so it feels like i'm a completely different person than what i was in twenty nineteen but that being said like i wanna talk to you about how we look back on it so my first my first question for you is do you think that this era and when i say era i mean twenty nineteen twenty twenty do you think it marks the beginning of wnba cards really being quote unquote taken seriously by the broader hobby oh hundred percent again before i would even say before twenty twenty you never saw wnba cards anywhere and you you wouldn't even see you know there was flir retro sets where you would have cheryl miller you would have skyler diggins you would have two thousand eight press pass that would have candice parker autos you would have some exquisite sets that would have candice parker autos nobody was showing those off like those those were kind of like oh you got it and you're like oh my my box was a dud you know you like yeah for for for most people that was that was the feeling i mean it was great for me because i went back and i pulled out some of the i was like oh my god like here's a a cheryl miller pmg gold like this is great like but until twenty twenty i i don't i don't think the broader hobby really paid much attention it took it took the prism branding for it to finally like step up and be seen and be seen as okay this is this is on the the same level this has the same kind of structure it has the same parallels for the most part you know and there's thirteen parallels instead of fifty but it it was familiar it was it again made the transition easy for people one hundred percent i think so much of it is really not to be that person but i think it a lot of it's so much of it is accredited to accessibility if if you see it it's real it's if you see the prism brand on wnba cards for the first time that's real if you see wnba on the tv for the first time that's real and that's going to fuel the growth of the category and so i i completely agree my next question i have for you is do you think that this era introduced new types of collectors collectors and if so do you think there's a certain archetype of person or collector that entered during this era i mean yeah like i i i am that collector i am that guy who before this was like oh like okay like maybe maybe you see the cards and you're like oh it's not it's not for me but yeah like there i mean we starting in twenty twenty one we bought sky season tickets after watching twenty nineteen watching the bubble watching candace parker come home it's amazing like it was like great like i wanna be part of this and at that point at that point i had been buying twenty twenty prism like i'm collecting them i'm ripping them with my daughter we're going through we're sorting the cards like i remember i got ten of the fanatics blasters because like again it's it's the accessibility for they're fifty dollars each and we sat there we ripped them on my birthday we put them all in the sleeves we did the things we looked at them and like it's like great like this is this is what it's supposed to be this is it's fairly inexpensive it's accessible it's something i can do with my kids without it being like i have i have to buy a fifteen hundred dollar hobby box that has you know a a josh giddy auto and like a jaylen rose patch card and like you open it and you feel just so defeated yeah this like the buy in was low it it's like a a low entry point that everybody can kind of come in and i could give my daughter a box and say great like open it if something happens it's fine like the this this is not like a huge financial outlay where like i have to have enough one touches to put the thick cards in and i have to have like no we we were just opening and collecting like that's like i i feel like that's the group that came out at that point i love it very pure very almost yeah that's the word i would use for that it's just very pure it feels like that okay my next question for you is a big one so take it however you want but in your opinion why and how does twenty nineteen to twenty twenty represent an inflection point for us i mean i mean the the obvious answer is covid like it every everything changed like again you went from twenty nineteen where you can't find games anywhere to twenty twenty where everyone is home everyone is just distraught everyone is starved for sports like you you are looking for any distraction you can to get away from the whores of the outside world and i i think a lot of people turned on a wnba game for the first time and watched it and just fell in love with it like they they remembered why they love basketball they remember that it's not you know one guy dribbling once at half court running to the basket and throwing up this ridiculous layup it's passing it's cutting it's screen it it it's basketball in it in its best form it is basketball again i i love that i i just keep coming back to the word pure it's pure bass pure team basketball pure collectors kinda like an inflection point here but when i think of covid particularly in our hobby space something that you know is completely it just automatic association is the pricing bubble that occurred with prices spiking right but like you said in wnba it wasn't as big of a a financial commitment to say open a box still i guess how do you think this era of cards set up the explosion that now we've seen in pricing structure in the wnba card space how do you think it set it up i mean i i again it was i think it was for a lot of people again myself included kind of your first your first jump in and then you're you're seeing people camping out at target to buy retail boxes for twenty dollars that they're flipping for sixty dollars like you didn't see that so much with wnba but it's kind of that that rising tide lifts all boats right like nba is going up through the roof everything is like slowly slowly coming up you're seeing cards that you have never seen before like that's i bought my lisa leslie pinnacle executive online during that time because i was like well like this for me this is like this is like the forty eight mic in yeah for me like i'm buying this like i'm just doing it like just for that that dopamine rush of like here's something good that happened today and so like i i don't know like i just feel like everybody was looking for just that that little sliver of happiness and if that meant like hey i'm buying a a twenty five dollar sabrina card today because you know what that's that's that's the that's the good thing i need to happen today yeah that that really i feel like i just like got propelled back to the pandemic with that mindset shift let's let's kind of talk about this next question i had i think you'll have an interesting perspective on which is we're now post you know obviously twenty nineteen don russ and in the thick of the second appearance of don russ in wnba with twenty twenty five don russ how do you think collectors are currently looking back on twenty nineteen donras and how do you think they'll look upon it in the future i mean i'm looking back at it wishing i got more like i i open i opened two retail cases of mega boxes of donras and just got smoked like just just completely smoked and honestly the cards aren't as nice you know the the gold lasers don't look the same you know they they switch to kind of like a like a sandy like a gold like sparkle and it's just not it's not what i want it's not the same yeah so like i'm looking back and i'm you know sitting here i've got the the diana tirazi gold laser on my i'm like man like that's that's just a nice card like i wish i wish they had just kept doing that and again like some of the treatments are cool you know like the the dragon parallel is kind of nice it's kinda got like a an escher squares like vibe to it but even the gold in like the prism it's not the same like the the optic gold from twenty nineteen like that is gold there is no dispute that that is gold and it shines and now everything's just a little bit more muted it's just i i i don't know i i feel i feel like everybody's gonna look back and be like man like that's that's a nice looking card why did they stop doing that and it's because they printed a billion cards now instead of you know a couple hundred thousand right right i i definitely agree on your take of how we're gonna look back on it and how we're already looking back at it i when i have one of those twenty nineteen optic golds and i look at it and i'm like they just don't make them like this anymore and it's not even that long ago like it's just it's almost you know one of the topics that we had this season was about nostalgia and i feel nostalgic for this for twenty nineteen and twenty twenty it's not even that long ago and yeah and it's not a period of time that i thought i would feel nostalgic for in the least bit yeah yeah so it's just such an interesting era to talk about and to explore so many layers of you know layered on top of each other of wnba cards social social anything in social life just so many things going on and i guess that brings me to my favorite segment that we talk about every week which is called the canon contribution where i ask the guests to pick out four cards that they think best represents the era that we've been talking about so i'd just love to get your take on if you had time to prepare four cards that represent twenty nineteen and twenty twenty okay let me grab these guys here first first i'm gonna start off with i'm gonna go a little bit different here i'm gonna say the green ice parallel so the whole the whole set of green ice parallel you got sabrina you got the fee green ice auto you got tina thompson you've got candace park like and for me like so i opened a ton of twenty nineteen prism and my favorite card out of twenty nineteen prism was the kobe orange ice little jersey match but they didn't make orange ice for wnba but what they did is they made the green ice and put them exclusively in the fanatics blasters and you could only get those you had to go on fanatics you had to send away you had to wait eventually they mailed you the blasters and i think based on graded copies people are ballparking there to be maybe twenty five copies of each and it's unnumbered so nobody knows nobody seems to care but i just love the green ice like i have four four of the sabrina's because i see them and i'm just like man that's too low that price is too low like yeah i need to buy more yeah they're almost like a little hidden gem like quite literally gem because of the fact that they're green and crystal like like i don't like i just i just love it like it's just a great set fantastic card well i mean fan base fantastic set because it's the entirety so like i see him i pick him up so that's that's my first one okay let's see number two alright number two has to be the fee optic i just have the base optic the don ross like it's nice it just doesn't do it for me there's i have like seven of them like just sitting here in my desk and like one and card savers like yeah ready to ready to go if i ever just get bored and send something to psa again why do you pick that one i think phi's the player of that of that era sabrina's great but she's not phi and unlike unlike prism where again there's thirteen parallels there's optic there's hollow there's optic gold like and there might i i'm trying to think if they did a one of one they might have just done the one of one and the don ross think they have a gold vinyl okay yeah but there there's not a million different versions of the one card so like i'm going with the fee optic okay i love the pick absolutely love it for no biased reason at all yeah number three third one i gotta i gotta go with the diana trazi gold laser like it's just such a cool card and one of my friends pulled it fair like sometime last year tried to buy it from a man said no no no i'm i'm sending it off i'm sending it off i'm sending off comes back from grading it's still a ten he gave it to me for the price that the last roll sold for i was like oh like okay okay like i can't i can't argue with that like thank you so like that's that's a card that has like a personal connection great player my favorite parallel from the panini era incredible just a beautiful card okay let's let's round it off here what's the fourth alright and then the fourth is which one of these i'm gonna go with and this this is this is a personal one it's the elena deladon mojo i'm going with that because when prism came out i set out to collect the rainbow oh all i need is the one of one the black gold and the gold i have all of the other ones including the green ice and the green ice auto like i know the one of one got pulled i know it's in china somewhere i have not seen a black gold or a gold sell in forever and i'm just like so that that was that was like my first wnba chase that was like alright like i'm leaning in i'm going in i am buying like i'm making a run at this rainbow i'm not i'm not trying to get it for sabrina because that's gonna be too hard i'm not doing it for any of the other rookies because at that point i had already realized like some of them were already dropping out of the league and i was like okay like let's let's stay away from that like let's go back to my first wnba like my original wnba roots so like i went all in trying to find them and now i'm just kinda like alright i haven't found one in like since twenty twenty one and i'm just like alright like it'll surface eventually somebody will eventually maybe get tired of having it and then i'll i'll put some more together for that for sure it's kinda the beauty it's a good way to kinda cap off the discussion of this era is the beauty of the scarcity despite the fact that we're not that far removed from it these cards are still rare and scarce and hard to find desirable and you know already locked in collections of people that you know have decided that this is where they're gonna put their money in terms of collecting this era is just such a fun one the names that you're coming up with here that you're mentioning just to hear elena deladon mentioned it's like that should be plus one for everybody you know we're talking about phi jackie young i mean there's so many names that we didn't mention this era was just like kind of a a renaissance for the wnba and for the cards that were released at the time and i guess that that brings me to our final you know outro segment of today's episode i wanna hear from you kyle do you have any advice for people that maybe are looking to collect early early days panini cards if they were looking to get into this maybe they haven't explored this era of of wnba cards what advice would you give to them pick a bet like don't don't go back now and try to collect fee don't go back now definitely don't try to collect alana smith like just leave leave all of her cards you don't need them the they're fine but but pick a player that you connect with you know my my main pc right now is kalea copper she doesn't even have cards in twenty nineteen or twenty twenty somehow panini was just like never mind but like you can pick up her new stuff you can pick up her gold for twenty dollars thirty like find a player that you like that you have some connection to whether it's you know you you cheered for candace parker when she was in chicago or you cheered for her when she was in las vegas or you cheered for her when she was in la or you really like lisa leslie like just pick a player and start buying some cards like see see if like see if it connects you know like again i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily buy a cheyenne parker tyus gold donris cart but like she was good she's wma champ yeah she like went away had a baby and came back like holy like i like can't even imagine that like i'm a professional athlete i've just given birth and here i am like here i am playing again like oh my god so to have that as like the background i'm like yeah of course i'm gonna get this card slab like cheyenne parker ties is a badass like yes i wanna have a gold card it's great because she's wearing a sky uniform here like this fits like this fits my pc granted everything kind of fits somewhere in my pc but like this fits in a very specific niche in my pc yeah i like that advice of kind of pick a player and then a little bit of trial and error and you'll figure it out if you just follow your your kind of it's cliche but like your north star of collecting of whatever brings you to the table to really lean on that i think that's that's great advice kyle thank you so much for joining today's episode it was really cool to explore kind of the era of twenty nineteen and twenty twenty which is so often framed in the quote hobby as being around a single player like sabrina and kind of exploring it a little bit deeper to go into the infrastructure that you know was built up and then it meeting the time the moment of visibility and accessibility and panini and players and all those things the acceleration of modern wmba cards to talk through it with you and hear how you were kind of in it at the time and how you're looking back on it now was awesome so kyle thank you so much for joining the wmba card podcast and thank you all for listening we're excited to continue to bring you these these episodes featuring lots of amazing guests like kyle and we'll see you in the next episode