welcome back loyal listeners to the stacking slabs podcast to season four episode six of the wnba card podcast my name is caitlin and i go by at cold lunch cards on the instagram machine and a couple other places in the internet and i'm super excited to continue to book to bring you guys collector driven and community focused content i'm super excited to introduce today's guest joy who will be joining us to talk all about the rittenhouse era the second half of it previously we had five episodes with four different collectors we started off with a vintage discussion with cindy from at giants legends then we got to know anne marie from at women on tops to talk about the birth of the league in nineteen ninety seven we had on an international collector named elodie to talk about sue bird diana terasi and the evolution of superstars internationally and then just last week we had on garrett from at w m b a cards dot com to talk about the entrance of rittenhouse which brings us to today which is the evolution of rittenhouse and to talk about this iconic set or or manufacturer and to talk to a collector that knows a lot about it so joy how are you doing today i'm good thanks for having me i'm excited to chat i'm super excited i guess for the guests for the audience that don't know our guests do you mind introducing yourself and telling them what you're about yeah my name is joy i'm on instagram as harris dot sports dot cards i my my my day job i'm a sociology professor and so i think what why that might be important for this is i have a tendency to like overthink everything you might hear some of that but i am i mean i'm a lifelong sports fan i guess my my collecting origin story i always think about the first set of trading cards that i can remember and it's nineteen eighty seven tops okay which like i was probably four five years old but i like have this vision of those wood paneled cards the set that i really remember like really formulating a love for collecting around though was nineteen eighty nine tops and it's still my favorite design of any sports card ever to this day and i i don't know i think at that age i was like i was like set building and cataloging and like organizing my cards and just spending a lot of time with them like there weren't variations or anything right it was just the cards and the gum and the packs and i would ride up my bike up to like the convenience store in the corner and buy packs and like bring them home and hope i you know got the ones they didn't have and so i was i will say that like my in my heart like baseball was like my first my first sports love and i've played a lot of baseball and and then softball for for still like most of my life but as a teen girl i sort of moved away from collecting i did not have any friends who were girls that collected and but yet you know like i played a lot of sports and so like even even my teammates like we loved the sport we played but i probably always had like a stronger as anne marie says right fan of vidity for women's sports than like a lot of my peers did which i think is kind of interesting and i you know that's probably a different podcast episode but i will say like i sort of got away from like actively collecting for like a a large part of like my sort of adolescence okay but would like casually pick up things here and there if i thought they were cool and like for most of my like young youth and then young adulthood like there just weren't a lot of examples of of women's sports cards so if we had a fast forward to like around twenty seventeen so i had been married for seven years by then i knew my husband liked sports cards because like everywhere we moved we kept moving around like giant boxes of sports cards and i was like you know like this is a lot of cards but i think around twenty fifteen twenty sixteen he found a hobby shop indy card exchange in indianapolis where he just like found community and it really got him kind of like reinvolved in sports cards and i think at first he was like a little hesitant because he didn't know if i was gonna be like okay chill out with this but no i totally i loved it like the nostalgia of enjoying that as a kid came back to me and it was a a hobby we got into like you know and he he always sort of had one foot in but i think i kind of came back to it like with him and met some friends and formed community around like the hobby shop which to me was like really neat because that's what i felt like i was sort of lacking for a long time so kinda really got back into cards mainly with baseball cards at the time because that's kind of what i had the most history with but like quickly realized like in all those years there have been a lot of other you know developments in women's sports cards and was grabbing stuff wherever i could so that was really cool and we were always buy selling trading setting up at like local card shows and then kind of you know buying selling trading more just sort of like to fund our own hobby i began setting up in in at the national and i always tell the story it's like actually a really important i think kind of turning point to like where i am currently in in my hobby but i i had been communicating with anne marie online because like you can't be interested in women's sports and not at some point right like completely agree right and this had to have been this was right before the national i think it was twenty twenty two atlantic city and she had been starting to post quite a lot and i thought her content was super cool and then i think she did a and i had been like kind of a lurk i mean i had an account you know lots of follows but in terms of like my engagement maybe a little bit of a lurker okay like just little cards you know but she was like who's going to the national and i had like my kinda crew of like they were all guys that like i knew right my husband my our friends but i was like oh awesome like i just don't know any women that collect and you know she kinda said oh like tell me where your booth is i'll come back so i still remember i didn't you know the online presence at the time was just like these very normal messages right not ready for the personality that showed up and it was amazing right but she came run over to my booth she's like so nice to meet you she threw a bunch of candy at me she's like because you're probably hungry and candy is a good way to make friends and i was like okay and then she looked at my booth and she's like where are your women's cards and i was like oh well i collect women's cards but i don't bring them here because like in my head i'm like there were so few of us interested like you've got prime and limited real estate at the national like mhmm you know putting at the time i was thinking like putting cards in that i thought people wanted made sense for mostly you know baseball and basketball is what i had you know more of nba and she you know i said i collect them and she said well how is anybody ever gonna buy them it's like don't have them on the floor and i was like noted like i you know like that was simple enough and anyway we got to meet a lot of other women sort of on that trip but the next year i took her advice and i was like she's right like you could walk that whole floor and you gotta dig in boxes in dollar bins and spend tons of time at that time i mean we're only talking a few years ago right but to like find a large amount of women's cards and i was like okay i'm gonna give it a try and just like see how it goes and i had i think four showcases and i was like i'm just gonna put women's cards and see how it went and it was i mean when you think about how many showcases are out on that floor and still like it's difficult to find women's cards so it went well but more importantly like the community of people that had been like talking to each other online were like showing up and i was meeting them in person which like was to me the most exciting part of like that year and that advice so that's a really long origin story but like where i'm at today is primarily buy sell trade women's sports cards i'm not saying there's never other little ones you know from men's sports but primarily women's sports cards really excited about the the collecting community of women's sports which are people of all genders but i will say on a personal note like meeting other women who collect to me like that was something i didn't have when i was a girl and so like meeting that as an adult that community has been really fantastic for me uh-huh i couldn't agree more and and i'll inject a little bit of a personal story here as well is that i had my first experience similar to that this past year at the national meeting all of you including the fact that it was facilitated by anne marie and i also didn't have any girls my age when i was collecting as a young kid to share that hobby with so it really was like healing to my inner collecting child and that experience was all because of women's sports cards and that's what brought us together and so that's a really good backdrop to keep in mind as we go through this conversation is the power of the of the community surrounding the space and the people that are in it it's it's just awesome so i'm excited to get into it that's a really good good start why don't we get into the context of the league with our typical typical structure that we follow here and then towards the end we'll get more into joy's personal collecting and more stories i'm sure it'll be weaved in and out of these but why don't we get started with the state of the league to ground everybody today's episode we're talking about rittenhouse between approximately you know it's a little bit here and there approximately two thousand ten to two thousand eighteen and so i wanna ask you joy if you could kinda set the stage for what the wnba looked like during this era and how that influenced collecting at the time yeah i think it's an interesting era because i think that you're starting to see some some growth right i mean obviously it's been a trajectory of growth all along but one of the things i think it's characterized is like college basketball and women's sports and college changing so like you know prior to this era for so long like when i was growing up it was like tennessee and yukon and like we'll we'll throw we'll throw stanford a little bit oh how nice of you both were like i mean like those are the programs like if you you know the top recruits went there and it was like a story of those two teams you know year to year but you're like you're seeing some changes in this era at the college level and then those players are coming up right like i really remember watching brittany greiner at baylor and you know like baylor wasn't a team that i had paid very much attention to but seeing her play and and and what she could do at that time and they were so good was really cool notre dame has like is churning out a bunch of really good players at this time right and so you're seeing right kelsey plum wins the you know it takes the scoring title at washington kelsey mitchell's doing it at ohio state so you're seeing like a diversity and a growth across the college game and like the talent pool deepening which is setting us up for like where we are today so i think we're also seeing the tail end of some really great careers like yeah know complete goats like and so i'm in like the middle where it's like my the players i watched like as a kid are coaching now right i'm thinking about like dawn daley and what she's doing at south carolina as a early coach right like winning first national championship in twenty seventeen i think some of the players that were my contemporaries was actually really big fans of okay to be fair i played one year of high school basketball freshman team i got cut and the coaches said the coaches said we really think you should focus on softball and i that makes sense right like i was i'm i'm five foot three and i'm built like a softball player so anyway but i i was playing i was in high school in chicago we had some like the the catching sisters are playing in the suburbs right candice parker is just a couple years younger than me so like we would see at the time like the high school blurbs of like high school stats every weekend were in the newspaper and i would get those blurbs to read from every school i these were like people i knew you know as women like i mean not knew knew of right they don't know me i don't know candace parker or tamika ketchings but but they were like from the area and you know we we would play against you know people who played with them or whatever and it was cool so yeah i think that that's like you know you're seeing the league sort of like i don't know maybe like turn turn over this kind of new leaf and really start to build a foundation for i mean where we're at today right like we're seeing some exciting stuff we can come back to that today that's like grounded at the end of this era but you know building off this legacy that people have made i mean in terms of fandom though yeah you know like there's always been a community like strong community of wnba fans you can't like count that in like revenue dollars the way that like other you know that like the nba could or the nfl of course right but there was always a group of people that like did feel a sense of fandom and belonging with wnba fan dome right so i think that's growing and really strong in this era and it's like kind of like the last hurrah before we're filling stadiums like all the way to the top row right so it's like yeah it's kind of a neat period in in that sense i think and we kinda didn't know what was right around the corner but we wanted it to be right around the corner so like looking back on it it's cool that hindsight it it's really really insightful because at the time of this era i was in high school and so when i think about it i'm also thinking about looking up to those players as somebody who played very poor basketball like jv level basketball as well but i completely understand the kind of turning of a new leaf is a good way to put it with the expansion of the collegiate pipeline really getting that respect and then translating to the league i think that is the defining i guess characteristic of this era is that not only are the powerhouses like yukon and tennessee still exploding but other programs are popping up on the map and creating that visibility for other players across the country that then would join the league so i think that's a really good way to frame i guess the the actual wnba league growth i guess i wanna get into like the cards of it all of this time because you you dropped a lot of names in that first question you know i heard ketchings i heard c p three i heard bg you know there's a lot of folks that you named i guess do you think that there are certain players from that era that stand out looking back or do you think that there weren't ones that defined it at the time in terms of cards or the lead either either is there a difference yeah yes i think there i i would argue there's a lot of difference okay that's what i wanna hear yeah yeah well special more so now maybe than then you know i think collectors and then people who are kind of buy selling and trading around like hype and performance and hobby popularity are different and yeah so i think that that's interesting i mean there's so many like amazing names from the era i mean i really like thinking between twenty ten and like twenty eighteen we come from like myanmar to asia right and so that's i mean there's been so much awesome stuff in between you know rittenhouse like during this era as cards though is like really funny it's so limited it's just so limited i mean we're talking like most years the set run is five hundred like if you're collecting today try to think about five hundred cards of that's it from each year and i think twenty eleven was actually what like two twenty it was two twenty five right there's two hundred and twenty five my more base rookies it's yeah the scarcity of these carts right so the first thing to think about is like they weren't easy to find like yeah they weren't now you could get them but it's like you didn't walk in to any big box store and see them you probably have to order them yourself for like being a hobby shop right and even then like most people don't have these there's just like not that many cards so i don't think that like at you know at the time it was really built around like a small community of collectors those people are still part of that community of collectors now right like you you know you've probably met and you have talked to a lot of them already so it's just like not it's not really anything like where we're at today yeah what are i think go ahead go ahead i was just saying it was really a a collector's market it had the cards weren't worth anything they just weren't like i mean in the scope of what we think cards are worth today that you know someone's gonna get mad at me and say like no you know the mymore card was always worth something but like in in the scale of what we are thinking today you didn't buy rittenhouse cards then thinking about like a meal ticket right like it was just like you bought them because you're a collector because you were a fan of the league you were a fan of the players we didn't like rittenhouse while it was limited it was still a set dedicated to women's professional sports like you couldn't find that right in any way and so you know we we had some other women's sports cards but they were often mixed in like soccer a lot of times was like mixed into other products rather than like standalone until you know you get a little bit later on i mean obviously parkside much later but this was you know so like it it was cool but it was like limited and and collectible i mean this was like niche i like these great players yeah it was totally niche like nobody like i don't wanna say nobody because i actually like five hundred people every year you know but less you could still find unopened boxes of like some of these products right so it's not like and i don't mean to diminish like what the community that was there but you know just in comparison to scope and scale what we're thinking about today it was really extremely niche one hundred percent now on last week's episode we had garrett on who talked a lot about like the defining characteristics of those cards and like the early rittenhouse days and i wondered if i could get your tank on when you close your eyes and you think about rittenhouse cards for this era that we're talking about are there any like besides scarcity are there any notable design or production elements that stick out to you when you think about them yeah on card autos like number one strength i mean it's just like we don't have we hardly get them anymore right and you've got really nice looking on card autos like bold autos on most of the other players who signed they look great i think about that i mean look i don't think that rittenhouse year to year is like was like crushing it in like graphic art and design in terms of like what the cards look like and there's a few years that are just you know they're not like the best looking cards but and they vary really sort of in in the q c like certain years finding centered versions of certain cards and things like that is like impossible yeah other years are cleaner it just kinda varies but i think they but i like how they looked different every year right the designs from year to year like are pretty different looking which i think is fun one of my personal beefs with prism is like it just looks the same to me every year very recyclable yes yeah like i don't really get it but so like i like that right and and that kind of reminded me maybe of like you know the old tops baseball runs with like year to year they were look they looked different right so i thought that was cool so i think those are the kinda probably the main things oh okay i'll say one more thing that i this is one of my big actually the things i didn't love as much in the later years where they have the three variations of the autographs and they've got there'll be a there'll be a action like game action shot totally cool posed in the uniform i'm okay with that and then there's like they call it like posed street clothes or something i just always call it the glamour shot which will be like it's like stew in a ball gown i just like i don't get it they look like awkward prom pictures like they're real weird and yeah i never i for me i don't know i didn't get it but that would be my only complaint but i do think of it in this era are those in an all written house i mean you could think there's like isn't there one of super like laying in a little on a chase like yeah i know exactly what you're talking about yeah it's so interesting i think that like the approach that they took we talked about this on the last episode is like rittenhouse came from a very like entertainment background of producing cards and so we think like my hypothesis that we came up with was that they're just recycling that recycling that playbook and trying to appeal to what they think women like but you know i i don't want a picture of sue bird laid on a a couch and a dress for my for my basketball card but that's me personally look i i think that's an interesting an interesting explanation right like thinking about like yeah acting actors and actresses yeah i've always had another theory and this might be the sociologist in me coming out and i don't i don't know if it's the case but i did wonder about about sort of like the performance of like femininity for wnba players on these cards and i think that's one of the reasons i like don't love them to me they all look kind of forced and like look to be clear i've never sat down with sue bird and been like did you enjoy wearing that ball gown on the chase lounge or like ask them or like ask stewie if she like loves the lipstick she had on in that photo so like i don't wanna speak for them but there's always been like that part of me that's questioned like what who was this for like were they guessing what women liked or were they guessing what women were supposed to look like and trying to combat what they think wnba players do look like i don't know but that's been i think a reason that for me they never resin resonated like i love cards to this day like you know what cards i love the get hyped variation in down risk cards yeah because like i love the cards where we're seeing like players like look hyped or angry or excited like as women's athletes i think that's cool you know you talked about like healing the little athlete in me right right that gets to express themselves any way they want like i see that on those cards i when i see some players in like ball gowns it makes me think of like every easter dress i didn't enjoy wearing you know like so i don't know but yeah those are my that's but i don't know it would be interesting to to learn more or to talk to somebody at rittenhouse know i'm like where are the people that were making these decisions at rittenhouse and can we please talk to you and get inside your mind because we can only guess but okay the last question that i kinda had on this this through line that we've been talking about is we talked about the context league we talked about design features of the cards how scarce they were i wanna get your your kind of take on the rookie versus the star of it all because in today's current context it seems like so much of the hype and the monetary value is surrounded is surrounding rookie cards and almost exclusively and now in these like very premium products can get vet pretty cheap pretty cheap vet autos vet color etcetera but in rittenhouse because of the limited production there's not much of either i guess do you have a take on how rookies versus star cards were handled during this era and how we look back at them i you know so i do think rittenhouse did make an effort to highlight rookies which i love a rookie card personally as a collector so i like this i mean they they made like the kind of unique rookie inserts the rookie auto series although they don't know the autos don't always say rookie but the cards do indicate rookie on them which like is so they knew it was maybe important to the collector if they're putting that on cards so i like i like that and i like it now in terms of like stars i mean look this is across all sports men's and women's you know like like old timers complain about this with baseball all the time like hall of famers are like you know penny cards but like a prospect who's sixteen years old and you know has played zero professional baseball will be worth thousands and thousands of dollars because one day he might be good i don't know there's a there's a piece of prospecting when you when you're talking about like value of cards it's really mainly driven by what people think it will be worth right and by people who are thinking you know in a prospect sense collectors collectors care less about prices they want the card yeah and they'll pay so like when i'm selling cards across the booth i met so i met a woman in nashville she got really excited to find my table and she was talking to me about card prices and she didn't haggle a single price and this is why like i'm always i mean look i'm in an s primarily a hobbyist i sell cards because i want people to see women athletes and women collectors and dealers in the spaces i don't do it like i have a full time job right so i mean i don't wanna like sink a ton of money but but like i do it for these other reasons and i so i do my best to be like like always super transparent and honest because i want people to enjoy that experience with me across the booth i've had really bad experiences with people across the booth and i'm not gonna do that to other people right i've also had many good ones but like you know you remember the ones that don't go well so but she so i was i was i was using your sponsor cardladder who i love right now i do use cardladder right and i was showing her the prices on the cards she was asking about and she never she was like okay and honestly didn't even really seem that interested in what i was telling her i was just trying to explain my prices but it seemed that i could have said any price she's and i finally like talked to her but she was going through the case being like i don't have that card i don't have that card i don't have that she was just buying any card she had have and eventually i was like you know just asking her more about herself and she was like i've never sold a card who knows what she has i mean right like yeah she probably has an extraordinarily expensive collection but here's the thing she probably doesn't know how much it's worth nor does she care because she will never sell it it means something different to her yeah and so that right like she was filling out her collection she probably bought a set amount of money brought with her a set amount of money that she was like ready to spend and she was gonna spend that down just filling out her collection right that's a different that's a different world than where we're at now with a lot of buyers but they still exist right that nashville show was last year right when that happened and collectors look at the end of the day like the true collectors who don't wanna flip the card like if there's any staying power to this hobby and like what it's become it will be those people who will buy because they want that just really want that card you know a hundred percent slippers at the end of day is a game of hot potato and so i'm not saying that like they shouldn't exist right like but i'm just saying the house of cards could crumble if we keep dropping the hot potatoes right but the coffers kind of are the foundation of that that there is peep there are people who will you know buy when the price is right and when they see the card they want yeah so yeah that's a really good story to kinda like underpin this what you said earlier about how this era really was a collector's market so while the league was growing and we saw growth in the in the collecting wise but also in wnba fandom with the collegiate pipeline we also saw you know less of that prospecting prospecting market and it was more of the true collectors and i think that's kind of like my key lesson of the brittenhouse era how we are looking back on it is this idea of like collectors not they weren't looking forward to making money they were just looking forward to picking up their favorite cards to their favorite players you know and i think that's kind of like a good transition to getting into our next topic which is talking about era significance and its influence on today and like so talking about rittenhouse in the broader picture like you said like how do you think i guess this is a big question so take it how you'd like but like why why do you think this era matters two thousand ten to two thousand eighteen is marked like you said by a unprecedented growth but not nearly what happened the year after in twenty nineteen and in twenty twenty i guess do you think how does it fit into the bigger picture why does it matter yeah i mean i do think it was this sounds like oh yeah that's really obvious joy no it will you say that but like each year is like progressively built on layers of what happened years before there's a really great thirty for thirty episode have you seen it about the ninety six women's basketball olympic team no i have nothing no i think it's thirty for thirty it was one of those year or maybe i mean sorry was it one of the nine for nines anyway i'll have to look up i should have looked up what it was called it's really cool and it and it talks about it tracks that team through a few episodes or whatever but there was there was like some marketing around that team in the late nineties and some popularity actually it tells a really interesting story in there too about rebecca lobo and like how she really was at the time a player being well the perception at the time from a lot of other basketball people was she was a player being marketed because of what she looked like and who she played for more so than her actual skills and she ended up on the team and was you know there's some discussion it's really interesting in the in the show about like whether or not you know she was good enough to be on that team and she was a little bit of an outsider in these kinds of things i just tell that story to say like there's a kind of marketing component but really people i think like the team was successful right they won a gold medal people get really excited about like a a bunch of the players on that team who become you know you see like the league taking off and it's an early marketing of the league and they market like i remember some of the early marketing ads of the league the we got next campaign and all this stuff and like cheryl swoops get a gets a shoe which i thought was like the coolest thing and so like they're kind of like building toward this i would like in some ways the active marketing of those players of the players in the league feels like a little less intentional during the early phase of this era to me minus maya minus maya though you gotta you gotta admit right yeah yes yes and i and sometimes i wonder too if like how much you know i mean i i i admittedly say like you know during some of this era like i'm kind of not as deep in yeah but like you just couldn't catch a wnba game like mean i watch sports all the time right you like couldn't find one on tv so like it's not happening in the same way even college women's basketball was like you you couldn't find it if you wanted to watch it so like you had to like seek it out and that starts to change like toward the end of this era so i think that like and it's working right like people are watching yeah i don't know all the ins and outs of like what happened in well but players like maimore i mean maimore became right like her like she retires far too early right don't even get me started with this can of worms but like launch is a very visible you know like gets involved in like social justice and advocacy and other things that like people that i think really like coalesce with the interest of a lot of people who are also fans of the league yeah i mean certainly social media must play some kind of role like in here too with marketability but yeah i mean it's just like right in this period where it's like i think in the early end people are like can this work you know you're not that long into the league and by the end especially with the growth of like these players coming out and being recognized in college spaces too yeah right like that's helping prop up programs like south carolina because guess what you watched dawn staley in the wnba you know who she is now like she didn't have to go play i mean at the beginning she did but like you know overseas or places you couldn't see her so like you're gonna recruit differently and and change things so like i guess with that legacy like you get that people built into systems like longer and longer and every little piece of it counts and builds to like you know get us ready for where we get to in like you know twenty nineteen and twenty twenty ish one hundred percent it's so interesting to like look back on this era of like the marketing and compare it to the birth of the league versus today because like i said the only marketing campaign granted at the time i was in high school or in middle school so like i don't remember all of it but like it was really just like the jordan maya campaign that's the only thing that really defined this era there wasn't like this competing superstar narrative or something along those lines where you could really look back and be like oh it's this this versus this because not only was the marketing not as visible but like like you said you couldn't even find something on tv usually the fandom was actually curated physically boots on the ground going to games or going to final fours that's where people kind of like elevated the visibility of the players so yeah i think this this era could be defined as a silent rise and silent elevation of women's sports and of women's sports cards i think when we look back we kind of pinch ourselves and say like oh why didn't we buy these when they were coming out right with the limited run how could we not see this i guess do you have a take on lessons learned from this era that collectors that are maybe interested or looking back what they could take from it you know i look i you should always if you are a if you're a collector like then collect cards you like right like grab them if you didn't grab them in this era ask yourself and and you wish you had them now ask yourself why and if the reason you wish you had them now is because they're worth a ton of money that's okay but like i wonder if you're a collector of that player or if you're not right one thing i try to do for my own because like the hoard is you know everywhere and so like i need to make decisions right and one thing i try really hard to do when it's like i whether you know trying to decide to sell a card or not is i'll look at it and i'll say two things do i know how much this card is worth i have cards that i know i'm a collector of because i have no idea how much they're worth i collect women's vintage sports cards that's actually how years and know few years ago when i was started trying to get into it found cindy's you know one of your previous guests her website online and like started to learn from reading some of things she had written i think she's amazing but i i have a bunch of stuff i just grab it when i see it if it if it i mean vintage i heard anne marie joking about please don't call these written house cards vintage right we're talking like i'm talking like eighteen hundreds and nineteen hundreds vintage right like i just grab it if i see it and it looks like a woman playing a sport i don't know what a lot of it is and i have no idea what it's worth and i really don't care i mean honestly don't care it's i i like to look at it i put them in boxes right i think it's cool i like to hunt for that kind of stuff i consider myself like purely a collector of those cards on the flip side i can look at some of my modern women's sports cards and i know that there are some cards i have because i'm thinking prospectively about the value right or and so i try to look at a card so if i do i know how much it's worth if i have no idea and i don't care i'm probably collecting it right and i should keep it and sometimes i'm like i don't even wanna know because i don't wanna be tempted to sell it because i wanna keep it that's how you really know you're a collector of that player yeah and the second thing is okay if you do know the value what would you do like if tomorrow that value tanked to zero would you still be happy that you had it or would you be really mad you didn't sell it yesterday the asking myself that question is usually like there's a very clear answer and it really helps me make some decisions and so to circle back to your question about like what's your collecting advice for like looking back at an era like that look i mean if you see it as an investment an opportunity to make money or things like that like i said i'm not critiquing it i'm just saying i wouldn't call you like a collector yeah i would say you're in it for other things and that's okay like there are certainly cards that i buy hoping they'll go up and then sell for a profit and sometimes you take your hits too right i try to do that to funnel like money into my collecting which is just the money suck because i don't right so i don't know i mean there's never hindsight advice but if there is a card that you just like are drawn to you feel connection to you want to have beyond the value like then pick it up you know like yeah and sometimes unfortunately sometimes sometimes those are expensive i don't have anything for that all the ones we don't care about for real yeah that's really sound advice and i think like the the nuance of like a collector versus somebody that's selling is the the truth of the matter is somebody has to sell the card for you to be able to buy it so there needs to exist both of those people for that relationship to really be effective so taking either side or taking both is very healthy and normal in collecting i think we need to make it more normalized especially in the w space where a lot of these cards especially these written house error cards they get eaten up put in a box and stored away and they're never coming back so if you do like something from this era or you're looking at it there's no time like the present that would be my only piece of extra advice there i guess yeah joey i wanna ask you to to cap off the significance question of this this i guess component of the show is how do you think collectors are gonna look back on this era whether that be in five years or ten years or if you wanna expand that horizon what do you think it's gonna look like looking back so i believe that we might still be undervaluing this in terms of value these cars because of their scarcity and there are some great players in this era like great we talked about before that not all greats end up being of value later but i think there could be a few exceptions in this bunch maybe i'll save that conversation to the to the canon contribution when you come back to it but i i do in many ways i look at the like they sell so rarely that you don't have the data and i mean actually cardladder does a really good job of this with with its indexes and other things of like trying to project you know values on certain cards but there are a few that i like that haven't sold in so many years that like there's always the value based on an index and percentages of growth but what you can't account for in that is how much more collectors will pay because it's so rare that's higher and so like some of these cards are that rare and that especially in if you're into high grade and other things that like i am shocked at there's a card i'll i'll talk about in the canon contribution that i'm actually surprised it didn't go for more but yeah so i think there's that i actually and i think we'll see a continued growth in value of those cards over the next five to ten years so i say that to say grab them when you see them to your point like there are so many that are in collector's boxes forever even singles of like no name players no offense to the no name players they were professionals they're better than i'll ever be at sports right but to the people we don't really remember but certainly like any of the players you like i mean if you see those cards from rittenhouse like in a dollar box or in a dime just buy them oh my god yeah yeah absolutely pocket and repair like keep them right comms is like a great place to pick up those singles but even they've been creeping up even you know even for the kind of you know average wnba players you know they're they're creeping up in value so yeah and i think we're gonna see it we're gonna we're gonna see this i mean it's it's definitely the last hurrah before panini gets the license and everything changes right right it it's a complete change that that like between twenty and eighteen and twenty nineteen it's a complete change in wnba era you know in terms of sports cards one hundred percent that's a really good way to kind of like finish that conversation on significance i think that i completely agree with your points there and i wanna get into a little bit if we could transition to a little bit of your personal collecting in this era or outside of it to just kind of talk about your wmba collecting philosophy and how you navigate this space so i was just wondering if you had any favorite sets or cards from this era specifically or if you wanna share that with the with audience yeah so previously prior to anita getting the license i was there aren't many of these cards i would i would always if it's a women's sports card i'd buy it wow okay there just weren't that many like you know and like i'm not talk at that time it's like like the things i was coming across without like actively looking would be like lower end things that you could easily just like kinda grab and stack up or i buy like weird lots of things right where you get like i never so during this era i never bought like the sealed boxes of of the products for myself i was collecting actively again in the later half of this era and then i'm like picking up like singles here and there right so i can't do like that was an era of like still being impressed that like we could get so many women's sports cards right like i you know i have my box of old like sports illustrated for kids ones that i you know tore out when i was a kid and then like you get like certain like i love softball right like there were certain athletes that were like like jenny finch was very popular for for a host of reasons right so you could always find like a jenny finch auto somewhere you know things like that but and you know certain college sets and other things but but now we're in this era where like they're flooding the market with women's sports cards i'm very excited about that i cannot keep i cannot buy them all you cannot buy them all you have man decisions yeah there are some cards that i absolutely did not buy when i should've and have spot now from this era right so specifically a stewie rookie auto it's the glamour shot but i had an opportunity a few years ago to buy that card i was like it's stewie it's a rookie auto i know it's the glamour shot but i need to have it and i did eventually pick up an asia based rookie which not when i you know not when they were a few bucks right but i right like i had to have and so that's like i'm still looking for oh cool story a few years ago it was probably twenty twenty ish my husband was in our local car shop where he like i'm in ohio and he he was in our local car shop where he like regularly went and then like one day there were just like two twenty fifteen box rittenhouse sets with the three autos which include the the jewel lloyd rookie autos and they were only like sixty bucks apiece which like at the time though i mean even in like twenty nineteen or twenty twenty whatever year this was it was just like it wasn't what it is right now so we just like brought these home he's like hey you want these and i was like yeah he's like alright we'll give you the money for it so we keep our we keep our hobby purchases very well defined so we don't get in fights about new stuff too no but yeah so like they they just had the sealed sets but like randomly right like they he goes in that shop all the time one day he had them he i don't know who knows where he he got them from i can't remember if he like had them in his back you know like this is the kind of thing like you still might have a few of those boxes just like you ever been into those older hobby shops i mean this guy's shop is actually really clean but like the hoarder style ones the hoarder shops yeah one hundred percent one hundred percent there could be like a glowing box of rittenhouse sitting up there in one of those shelves hundred million percent yes like that's where they are if there's any left right that's where they are so i mean or like garrett has them whatever but but yeah so i got i picked up those and then eventually i couldn't take it anymore i opened one and like they're notoriously like really poorly centered so i like picked through and and i like to grade i think it's fun although i don't know how fun it is the prices keep getting higher and higher but i tried to like graded as many as i could out of the one set that was pretty fun and then kinda like kept a few sold off a few from that set and then the other one i still just like have closed that i'm hanging on to i don't know where i'm gonna get it like that some people are really into like sealed sets i'm like i don't i like i have a few of certain things and i'm just like what am i supposed to do with this though like am i ever gonna really sell this without opening it like that seems unlikely right i think people that like let me just say this i think people that like sealed wax are either masochists or the most like patient people i've ever met in my life but you cannot be both you cannot be both you have to admit that you fall on one side of that spectrum yeah right and i'm on the not patient side so i can't do that at all alright well before we get into the final topic of today which is the canon contribution are there any cards from this era that you're looking for or that you're like actively chasing i'm just curious because i know i'm chasing like maya's stuff which is impossible to come by i was just wondering if you had some that are kind of ghosts that have been eluding you i wouldn't say ghost i mean look i i bought the the asia based rookie in in a psa ten i would i would love to have the like action game auto you can get them like i just it's a lot of money you know it is a lot of money it's a lot of money so i don't know i mean i think for me when it comes to cards like that it's more about making decisions in my own collection of like i need to if i'm gonna get something like that it's gonna be through like letting go of some other things to get that card and so you know like i i don't know i haven't really gotten to that or and then there is just like do i wanna spend that much money on a card that's a lot of that's a lot of money right yeah so yeah i think that's a card that like i the collector in me feels like it's missing from my collection but then the little part of me that's mad that i didn't buy it when it was you know more affordable and then like but then i'm like but if it goes three times and i never get one you know like that conversation that's probably like the main one i always i mean i'm like there's a lot of cool rookie cards primarily for my collection i really like to collect rookie cards and like in the more modern stuff like you know the the kinda lower numbered variations that i like i really like tie dye stuff it looks it's like like the colors it looks cool right yeah so yeah i think but i don't know that yeah i i guess that's the one that's like sticking out think it's sticking out for most people so i think we're in the same boat with a lot of folks the stewie base auto a base rookie card too i mean i don't have that one either and you know would love to i have out of twenty fifteen i have the jewel lloyds and the chelsea gray that i got out of my set and i think maybe an eight and a nine or something on those two cards i kept those because i was like you know that that's those are the main cards i wanted out of that year was the rookie cards yeah so i guess that's it i don't know look they're not goats right like you can see them but it's just like people are going that that that you're talking about like you don't even you can't even see it yeah literally literally every the only ones i see are the people that hold it in my face and they're like they're like look look what i have i'm like get out of here unless that's for sale i don't wanna see it don't tell me what i thought alright well good to know i think those are good names that you're chasing and i wish you good luck even if it's a long term discussion around like trade offs i think that's something a lot of collectors go through i find myself doing that a lot especially with bigger purchases but you know be on the lookout for the asia us and every other person on this planet are probably looking for that card so why don't we transition into probably my favorite segment that we do on this on this season which is the canon contribution for folks that haven't listened one go back and listen to the episodes so that you can hear from our other guests but we ask each guest to pick out four cards that are representative of the era that we're talking about to create a kind of mount rushmore and then at the end of the season we'll have this catalog of a canon of a community crowdsourced canon of wba cards that we think are significant so joy have you thought about what your mount rushmore is for this era i thought about it okay i did i i thought about it and i'm gonna go for i'm gonna go from like whoever like the least of the guys is at mount rushmore to the greatest okay so okay i'm gonna my number four coming in number four i'm gonna say since we were talking about twenty fifteen any twenty five fifteen written house in a psa ten okay i i mean we could go with like you could pay for them like jewel lloyd's rookie card is a pop one in a psa ten chelsea gray's is a pop two and a psa ten they just don't center like they just don't plus like there's only five hundred who knows where they all are you know they they come out of those little boxes kinda rough sometimes so those cards i'm a i'm a like leave that a choose your own adventure but like something out of that year and probably one of those two rookies i think i think some people might be mad at me that i didn't say like elena della don card here or like a kelsey plum rookie the four spot's tough i think there's like a lot of options there is there is there's lot of people here i'm not i would accept like you know the number four is is negotiable if you know i think you could you could make a lot of great cases i kinda think the top three are like pretty firm for this era that like most people would probably agree on let's see what you got joy let's see what you got alright i think the three is the stewie rookie i mean we could get into like which one like i think some people are auto people and some people are base card people the autos are definitely shorter than the base cards there's fewer of them so if if like scarcity and autos are your thing right then like probably the the game version of her of her auto the base card's cool though too and there's only like gonna be five hundred of those but i'm thinking stewie at number three spot okay okay alright the next two i'm gonna be honest i put the card i'm gonna put at number two at number two because you're gonna prefer the card i say at number one at number one but i might swap these you no okay we need to remove my intimidation factor here just give it to me how you think it should be and then and then we can fight it out afterwards alright okay okay i'll give it to you the way i think it should be alright so i then i think number two should be my amores jersey auto right see look you're you're already what what could be better super scarce how many are there like thirty three years three yeah yeah thirty three it's on card it's my mower cool card right it's hard to find them so that card it's twenty eleven for anybody who wants to go on the hunt twenty eleven rittenhouse so i'll put that at number two number one is okay twenty eighteen rittenhouse has asia's rookie but there was also the platinum edition set and that's a print run of twenty five it's like it looks like the card but it has a stamp of platinum edition over it so i'm gonna say asia wilson rookie platinum edition to twenty five is the number one card from this era i mean i it actually i think is by like by sales it is the most expensive card i think that's sold from this era but i mean i just wanna talk about asia wilson for a minute it is a national travesty that asia wilson is like not a household name she she you're watching like the greatest basketball player like of all time maybe in terms of her stats and her accolades and she isn't thirty years old yet yeah that like what she's done to me like it's unbelievable i think asia wilson even though she's expensive i still think in many ways like she's undervalued if you put her accolades onto a man who's twenty nine years old do you know how like his cards would it's like it would be unbelievable right so i mean we're talking about a four time mvp like so you're up there with like lebron has four mvps right and he's at the end of his career so i mean it's like she's unbelievable yeah so that card and that was the card so that's i i looked up like has that card sold and there was one that sold last june for eleven thousand dollars robbery robbery right and i mean like part of me is like okay eleven thousand dollars a lot of money for like a piece of paper obviously but like in the scope of the hobby that's ridiculously too cheap for that card like it's it i mean i think card letter was already valuing it at based on the index sort of like i wanna say like sixteen or eighteen or something like that but i still think like that's criminally undervalued when you compare her against her especially male counterparts i think we had like an entire episode where we talked about the sale of this card and i remember like prior to recording was like i thought it was gonna finish much heavier like twenty thirty forty even like i thought it was gonna push the envelope of what was possible for that and when it ended at eleven thousand i was like oh okay were we all sleeping did we all forget that this was running on auction or available like what's going on so yeah i think we were together with our friends and like sold a few cards and like raised a little cash and bought it together at that price like that's wild i think we went a whole podcast episode without saying caitlyn clark but to be fair to be fair i'm a caitlyn clark fan love her love the attention she's brought to the game she's exciting to watch who doesn't like three pointers right like very cool but like even her who has not done what asia wilson has done yet like at all right no what would that card those cards like of hers be you know i mean it it like doesn't make sense that that card for asia is that valued i i think the question to ask here is will people devalue rittenhouse because they lost a license because it's a shorter era all things considered because it doesn't have a name like topps or panini i don't know right i tend to think it's one just like still the undervaluing undermarketing and underappreciation of asia and two like just a lack of knowledge that people just like really don't know about this era very well they're not saving rittenhouse platinum in their searches so you know like simple things like that it's still like a alerting era i think one hundred percent yeah i wish i wish i had that i mean you know like there's prob and i'm sure there were probably real like i'm not a real bidder on that card you know but but i'm sure there were people who were like well jeez if i would have thought it would have gone for that i would have put a minute like you're saying like that's just wild i hope we're i don't i don't remember who bought that card but i hope they're happy yeah i hope they're happy because i wish i had it yeah i i will say i will i will i will concede your mount rushmore order and say that okay i agree with the asia platinum edition sitting at the top honestly at the top of the greater broader picture of wnba cards the entire existence and run of wnba cards i think that card sits in the top four i will say just to make my case because if i didn't i would be a fake fan that the maya card doesn't also does not get the same respect that it deserves probably at even a greater scale than what the asia is in terms of disrespect what we call like the disrespect index i think that maya's kind of like you know early exit of the league suppressed her card values even more so and so that that would be my case is that the maya's what if almost increases the allure of that card and that's why it would personally sit atop the mount rushmore here for me but if we remove my personal bias i will say i completely agree with all of your picks especially i like the call out of the twenty fifteen high grades i didn't realize how incredibly difficult that particular set was to gem especially with house not household but for me household names in my household like jewel lloyd and and chelsea gray i think that that's a great pick at that four spot so that was an awesome mount rushmore joy thank you so much for picking those out and and thank you for joining the podcast this was a super insightful era when we talk about the rittenhouse era not having a lot of visibility or education around it hopefully this this episode can kinda serve as a catalyst for folks if you're interested in collecting the era to listen to this episode and the previous one this has been inspiring to me as somebody who's a aspiring rittenhouse collector this will be motivating i'm excited to see where the era goes and where your collection goes joy thank you so much for joining the podcast thanks for having me was a lot of fun