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Trading cards are cool again

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Re: Trading cards are cool again

#11

Post by hellbannedguy »

Does anyone ask themselves why they collect?

I collect everything. I don't have the room to be a Horder, but my compulsion to collect us strong, with the exception of money. I should be collecting money, but that has been too hard for myself.

I started off collecting snails. I would put them on my Tonka Truck, and they were workers. The guys on the roof were the bosses. The others placed all around the truck bed had their own function. As a kid, I was lonely and the garden snails were my friends. (My mom made me put them back after playing.)

I then went into marbles. Kindergarten through 1st grade I was crazy about marbles. I loved them all. The ceramic ones were my favorite because I imagined they were rare, or had a long history behind them. I imagined they were made in a magical exotic country.

I then grew up, and life got in the way. My collecting days were put on hold.

In my twenties, it was first edition books, and any old advertisements, or advertising.

I then got into collecting watches. I never went crazy, but I knew I needed to stop.

I stopped by learning Watchmaking. Even then--I went from collecting watches to collecting tooling.

I'm now so depressed I don't collect anything due to a lot of reasons.

I guess it was about the hunt? Then again, I still look at some of my old books and can't imagine someone mot seeing the value. Someone tossed a 1st edition of The Deep. It was not price clipped, and in mylar wrap. I am still astonished the original owner didn't see the value.

I don't have a point. I just know I'm a Collector at heart. Maybe if I had a more full life, my addiction might be different. It was never a addiction. It was just a passion.

I'm the guy at the beach looking for shiny rocks, even when I was physically passable, and should have been paying more attention to my girlfriend.

I still remember Ingrid saying I came to the beach to be with you, and not collecting small pieces of agate.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#12

Post by kadabra9 »

exdsq wrote: post #8
kadabra9 wrote: post #4

As someone who has been into cards and collectibles all my life, the past few years have been wild to say the least. What we saw in 2020/early 2021 was really a classic bubble - FOMO buying pushing prices to unsustainable levels. Then throw in the grading shutdown caused by backlog of new collectors and investors sending in millions of garbage base cards for grading, clogging up the grading companies, plus profit tak…

Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? Seems like something I’d enjoy trying as a side-hustle but never really done before outside of Pokémon

Both.

I have cards for certain players, teams or inserts that I buy to collect, if I can make money on them great, if not I enjoy having them in my personal collection (PC).

Then there are cards I’ll buy anticipating a rise in value with the intention to sell in 6-12 months or longer. Typically this involves buying rare cards or good players of sports in off seasons when demand dries up, so for example I was buying a lot of big name football cards over the summer when the football news cycle was slow, and recently moved to buying basketball leading into the NBA season.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#15

Post by dehrmann »

lettergram wrote: post #5

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

Or cryptocurrencies. Picking on NFTs, at least I can frame and look at a baseball card, maybe show it to visitors. NFTs have even less utility.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#16

Post by brianwawok »

lettergram wrote: post #5

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder.

But hey, I could be wrong.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#17

Post by adventured »

adam_arthur wrote: post #6
pram wrote: post #2

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

Imagine if Elon Musk selling Tesla was the pin that pricked the everything bubble, hah. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...

Or it's going to pop regardless and he readily senses the insanity of being worth ~$340b on paper as so many others also sense it ($315b gain in two years), and is using a ridiculous poll as a Musk-style ridiculous cover to finally secure some tangible wealth outside of the paper bubble valuation on Tesla (and to a lesser degree, SpaceX) and the large pile of debt-as-living ($6b and climbing) he's having to maintenance. Musk went from $100b to $340b in a year. He'd be a moron to not sell some of it, secure some safety capital, clear out his debts; if Tesla implodes, he can buy the stock all back; if Tesla's stock doesn't implode that just means he'll still be worth a zillion dollars, shareholders will be happy, and the sale won't have really mattered anyway. The only serious risk is that if the stock crashes shortly after he sells, he will never hear the end of it (and he'll have $20b in new cash to cry upon).

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#18

Post by whatshisface »

pram wrote: post #2

Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.

It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#19

Post by redisman »

brianwawok wrote: post #16
lettergram wrote: post #5

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder. But hey, I could be wrong.

You can in the metaverse

Re: Trading cards are cool again

#20

Post by vmception »

brianwawok wrote: post #16
lettergram wrote: post #5

My instant thought was “NFTs”!! NFTs are effectively the new reading cards. It’s gonna explode then implode, but I know a lot of people are getting into it.

I can’t hold a NFT. I don’t see people in 100 years talking about a rare cat meme NFT like we talk about a 100 year old antique coffee grinder. But hey, I could be wrong.

this is too reductive, there are entire generations of people, plural, that don't draw the line at "I can't hold it". People said the same thing about mp3s and digital music, the people they were criticizing have children now. both of these recipient generations don't care.

but to say more about what you are missing - without drawing a different conclusion just adding an extra variable - is to look at how issuers act. In the trading card world, many series have continual mints from the issuer with no transparency on the supply. People haphazardly buy sets and hope they get a card that has been found to be rare, while the issuer gets continual revenue. (just describing one behavior for comparative purposes)

what is typical of NFT collectibles - which, by the way, is just a subset of the NFT market and is analogous to trading cards, distinct from the one-off art pieces in headlines that have formed most opinions - is that the issuer mints one set. and the community discovers the rare attributes on their own, within hours. in this model, its the same pool of money as the trading card communities would have, except it pools towards a known quantity of collectibles, compared to the same pool of money always buying at MSRP from an infinite issuance and hoping for the best. that leans towards rationale behavior, at least at the same standard as trading card collectors. for the issuer, they get royalties from the NFTs changing hands in perpetuity (at least when traded on the marketplace smart contracts which allow that). and for the industry, there is never a backlog of authenticators so they're extinct now. that doesn't mean the prices are sustainable. but that standard is also being separately applied to NFTs as an entire concept, when such nuance is applied to trading cards: some cards have continual interest in any market and 99% of others are ignored forever.

you can still have the same conclusion, I'm not here to play devil's advocate, I'm just here to say "hm that's not what's going on".

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