POP CARDS EXPLODE: Disney Chrome, 1st Appearances, Iconic Cards | Pop Cards #8
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About this episode
Papa Slabs and Jack talk about the explosion of Pop Cards in the market today.
This episode is published by SlabStox Sports Card Trading.
Transcript
Machine transcript — exact wording may vary.
What is up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Pop Cards Pod. I am here today with Jack. Welcome, Jack, to the podcast. Good to have you. Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me today. Excited to talk about some non sport cards. It's something that Papa Slabs here and I really have gotten into kind of together over the last year. And really at the national, we had a lot of fun looking at non sports stuff. So since then, everything's taken off and going. Up and up and up, I was gonna say. So Jack is everything Slapstocks, really. He does all the backroom shipping with us, keeps everything nice and organized. He's a guru back there, but he's also newsletter editor, social media poster, and I'd say UFC aficionado. The guy really knows his stuff. I should say expert, not aficionado. That's just under. Under what you can do. But, Yu-Gi-Oh Jack and I have a love for pop cards. And when we went to the national this year, I do remember us saying, hey, we think it's going to be a big year for the pop card sector. I mean, I know you chase. Some of the stuff you chase is Lord of the Rings. Yu-Gi-Oh What are some of the other things you like?
I really like Lord of the Rings. A lot of the James Bond stuff, like the Rittenhouse archives, Game of Thrones. That was a lot of fun. And what's nice with all those sets is there's some really valuable cards, and there's also a lot of really accessible cards where you can get, you know, autographs and relic cards of your favorite characters from those shows or movies, you know, for sometimes in the 10 to $20 range. So it's nice. It gives you. It's a lot of nostalgia. For me. I like thinking back on memories when I first watched those shows and movies. So that's why I like to watch. That's awesome.
Same here. Jack knows that I am a fan of the Star wars stuff, so we try to stay out of each other's sandbox, even though once in a while we. We cross paths. But Jack's always on the lookout for good stuff for me, and I appreciate that. So why don't we get into it today? What do we got in store for you for pop Cards Pod? Got to make sure I'm on the right window. Here we go. All right, we are going to talk about the pop card boom. And first appearances, big first appearances for some of these sets that people are really chasing after are really heating up. But before that, let's talk about the Slab Stocks Pop card Calendar. What's coming up this morning? Actually on the left side, if you can see my screen. If you're not listening to the podcast and watching on YouTube, you can see Marvel Mint and Jack ripped that earlier this morning. How was it? Did you guys have a good time and good hits?
Yu-Gi-Oh it was a decent case. I think we had four Cerebros in the case, which I think like last time we were averaging like two per case. So it was a pretty solid case. Dr. Strange had a cerebro out of 99 and a gold out of 50. And Yu-Gi-Oh take that. As you know, we rip on Fanatics Live, WWE Universe coming up this Friday, and then what do we have coming the rest of the month on 9 23's the release of 2026 Topps Vault Marvel. That's always fun. I know you love the Marvel stuff. And then 2026, Topps Chrome, Star wars coming out on 9:30. So we got some good stuff on the calendar, as you can see in 2027, there's some exciting stuff. 65th anniversary of Spider Man. A little older than me, so I feel young. 50th anniversary of Star Wars. I'm a little older than that, but I remember being 12 during that time in SpongeBob, watching that with my kids. So that's coming up. So let's talk about the pop card Bowman, eight months ago, we started this podcast. You know, we said, hey, let's start talking about some of the pop cards. They're fun. It's something I've been into my whole life. And you know, we just started putting out the podcast and little did I know, eight months later, eight episodes for us, all of a sudden we're in the middle of a white hot pop card wave coming up. And I think it was fueled by Disney, if I'm not wrong. What do you think? I mean, that was a big impetus, I think.
Yu-Gi-Oh At least the first really massive increases that we're seeing now. You may have seen a little bit of Star wars here and there, like with the vintage Luke Skywalkers. I think in December, I remember making a post on a Luke Skywalker card trend, but nothing like what we've seen in Disney. Disney's been like the main catalyst for it. Particularly Everybody knows the 2023 Chrome Disney set. While not technically the first Disney cards, it's the first Topps Chrome Disney cards. And right, wrong or indifferent, Topps Chrome is kind of the standard when it comes to trading card sets. We've seen the same in Marvel where you've had a lot of Upper Deck sets that have been around for years, but the first year Topps Chrome stuff kind of is king for. For a lot of collectors. Again, not that the Upper Deck stuff isn't just as good. I like some of those designs just as much, if not more, but that's not what the market dictates.
Well, Topps carries weight. Right. You know, really, when you talk about first appearances, Mickey Mouse has to be the Michael Jordan, I would say. Yu-Gi-Oh Mickey Mouse, Disney, Mickey Mantle or Michael Jordan. There you go. Mickey Mantle, Mickey Mouse. Good comparison. Take a look. You know, here's a couple comparisons. Why don't you walk us through them? Because Jack, you know, he's in card ladder every day and digging up great stats for us. So take a look at where this thing has gone and the timeframe we're talking.
Yu-Gi-Oh So we tried to go within about a year and a half of trends. So you'll see that kind of throughout this episode. You've got this one is a year trend. From September of 2025, September 8th, you're looking at $1,250 for a PSA 10 copy 2023 Chrome Light. That's the dark blue and light blue out of 75 of Mickey. So 1250. And now fast forward to last week, August 31st, or just over a week ago, just over 20 grand. So you're looking at, you know, what 18 incredible 18 multiplier there. It's just an unbelievable return for a year's worth holding. And, you know, I think a lot of people would have seen some of this boom coming if you bought, you know, like you said, Mickey Mouse is the iconic Disney character. So if you invested in his chrome rookie year, it makes sense that it would go up. But for it to suddenly do it like this over a year is pretty crazy.
Let's not take a look at Mickey Mouse, but let's take a look at a hall of famer, if anything, in the Disney lineup. You got Elsa. Right. And look at what happened with that. That is incredible as well. Yu-Gi-Oh I think some of this has to do with the low, a lower pop count on, on this one for it being out of 100. So this is a diamond. Right? And this is diamond out of 100 from 2023. This is a 2023 diamond out of 100. Elsa PSA 10, you're looking at, you know, 60 times increase about a year and a half, 1200 a year ago, and bounced up to 66 recently. What was that, end of August?
Yu-Gi-Oh end of August, April from of 25 to August of 26 looking at about 60 times increase. Now again that's 66,000. That was an auction. So you probably have a lot of people bidding each other up. But it's crazy. It doesn't come up for sale very often. It's really. You know, Jack and I watch Sunday night auctions. We watch the Thursday night auctions and we see it. I mean Disney's not something we're chasing because out of my budget and I don't know if it's in Jack's budget or not, but I'm not chasing it just because it's up there.
You know, I like to watch, but I'm definitely not chasing any of the big Disney stuff. Yu-Gi-Oh but as I think we both agree, this is fuel for the non sports card market. Even stuff outside the Disney chrome and stuff, you look at the vintage. We got 1931 cinema stars, Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. This is kind of like we've been seeing this on, on the nightly auctions for years. You know what I mean? These cars have popped up, but not in these numbers like we see now. The example you got Here is what PSA 4 or 5?
PSA 5 copy. So this is kind of considered like Mickey and Walt Disney's rookie cards. There's some debate. I know there's some die hard vintage. Collectors say that there's a. There's another Mickey card. I don't remember which one exactly what. It's a solo Mickey card that they say is his true rookie. But either way, this is the first appearance of Walt and Disney together on a card. Card came in. It's tobacco card. So believe these came in cigarette packs like a lot of old baseball cards did. And Walt was a big smoker, so it makes total sense. That was his holy grail, I guess.
Yu-Gi-Oh You'll notice it's a, you know, roughly a 10x increase. A little less. You'll see that trend a little bit. I don't know if that's indicative of cross pop cards, but you'll see it in two separate grades. Here we saw PSA 5. Now this is a PSA 3. Yu-Gi-Oh we wanted to kind of see. Okay. Does it hold across all grades? Are there certain grades driving us? But it looks like it's holding, huh? Yu-Gi-Oh With this card it's kind of 10x between those two grades. There's a couple others that we'll see as this episode goes on that are also in the 10x range.
So let's talk great first appearances and Superman Number one has to be right up there at the top of the list, if you ask me. It's one of the earlier, you know, comic cards that are truly non sport. Right. Non human. It's just a comic card. Right. And we got the 1940s Superman number one. I've been seeing this card pop up on the auctions and it excites me every time I see it. I mean, when I look at it. Now this is a Mickey Mantle card, right? Yu-Gi-Oh And tell us where it's going. It's going bonkers. Really?
Yu-Gi-Oh This one's far more than 10x. That's a PSA one and a half. Looking at August of 25, 3800 and then this past August, 18 grand. I think a lot of that has to do with this one. Sells much more infrequently at any grade than like the Walton Mickey that we just looked at. If you look at this, you look this card up on card ladder, it does not come up for sale very often. There's very few listed on ebay. So I think that's some of it. But you'll even notice in that, I mean, you look at the card on the right that sold for more. It's definitely got more yellowing and for sure, um, it's in worse shape as far as Yu-Gi-Oh appeal, I think most people would say so. You know, that could be even a bigger increase if it was the same card on the left, if it had the pure Yu-Gi-Oh appeal. So Batman as well has a grail card. Right. Kind of a first release rookie card. And we're looking at 1966 Batman number one. I love this set. I Beckett up a couple myself. One at the national. This one. Thanks. Shout out to Tyler. We did a nice trade for this. Catwoman, sinister smile. That's such a cool card. And I Beckett up this one recently, which Jack pointed out is the British version. It's much smaller than the American version. Same image as the American and sometimes a little more sought after because of scarcity, which I kind of just stumbled into it. It was dumb luck that I stumbled into that because I.
What is bc? You know. Yu-Gi-Oh the. The British and Canada versions have the same images as the American versions, but they're a lot more scarce as far as like graded pop counts go. I don't have info for you on like how many were produced. There's. There's no print run count or anything like that, but they are definitely more scarce in PSA pop counts. So, Yu-Gi-Oh some of those are more sought after. The one on the screen though, you're seeing is the American version. It's a PSA4. Again, looking at approximately a year's trend, 450 to just over four grand. So there's kind of 10x.
Now if there was a card I'd really want in my collection, which I don't have this card I only have Catwoman, Sinister Smile, which is pretty cool, but it's not Batman. And I'd love to have this one. Yu-Gi-Oh I don't know. We'll go through to the end and then you tell me which one you'd love to have in your collection. That's cool. There's also Joker and Robins and that's that your other Batman characters are also there. So check that one out. There's a lot in there that's awesome. Spider Man. Gotta love Spider Man. Aaron's a huge Spider man fan. I spent most of our vacation reading a full time magazine bookazine on Spider man at Aaron purchase that he told me about that local Walmart.
It was awesome. Had a timeline. So I appreciate it way more now than I did just a few weeks ago. But this is the rookie Spider man card, which is kind of cool. It appeared in 1966 Marvel superhero set number 34. And this is the first card appearance from of his. Yep. So it's not actually a solo card. I believe that's Johnny Storm on the card with him. But it's Yu-Gi-Oh 1966. Donruss. This is a PSA 2 example. 425 in May of 25. And then just a couple weeks ago looking at 3, 800 another one where the Yu-Gi-Oh appeal on the one on the right that sold for more is kind of not as strong as that one on the left. It's a little more yellow.
Right. So again, another example of approximately 10x increase over a year. This is the first appearance of Spider man on any card. So looked at that Superman, that was from like 1940. These came well after. But this is Spider Man's technical first appearance. And it's a funny set, man. I love the little speaking bubbles, you know that whatever they're saying. And then we move into my world, right? Star Wars 1977. To me, this is the Michael Jordan of Star Wars. You know, I'm not a huge Mark Hamill fan as far as his acting ability. And Even back in 1977 when I was 12 years old, I thought he's kind of a hokey actor. But there's something about this card that, that just, it's like a perfect Pose, you know, kind of headshot of him. I don't know what it is. And that definitely has 10x. What's the date spread we got here on our example? This is Star wars number one, Luke Skywalker.
Yu-Gi-Oh We got 9-2-25, and then August 29th of this year. So we're looking again at 10x, about 255 to just over 2600. Yu-Gi-Oh man. This card. This card I've probably had in my collection come and go, buy and sell more than any other card. Now, my collection is not extensive. It's not as huge as, say, yours or Aaron's, but this is a card that kind of has been my. My big card. And, you know, like, you and I talk, you know, you got the 1977 original Star Wars Series 1, and then you got the 2022 Zebra That was kind of a knockoff of the same image. And I just love, you know, kind of pairing these cards together and looking at them and looking at the improvement of print quality, there's something endearing about the original border as well. It's just fun, you know. Yu-Gi-Oh I got Luke, I got Leia. You know, I even got the Darth Vader comparison I've been picking up over time. You know, Darth Vader 77 and Darth Vader Zebra So I just like, you know, if you don't have massive budget like some of these cards, look for the Raw in these and they're attainable. You know what I mean?
And what's also really fun about that set is, you know, the, this card is number one in the set, I believe, like, Darth Vader's is number seven. So the lowest numbered ones are like, you know, technically the rookie cards are the first appearances of that character. But the set's pretty expansive and you can find other cards of iconic images from the movies. This is one that's very attainable. Here's a great example. So that's from the same set, you know, still technically a rookie card, but it's not the number one. It's number 57.
Number 57. But right now they're attainable. Who knows two years if. Who knows where this goes? But Yu-Gi-Oh that's why I Beckett those up, because the, the, the Luke Skywalker number one is a pricey card. It's hard to find. When I walked around the show Fleer and I sold a couple of these out of my case Raw and I sold some graded ones, but when I looked around at what other people had the raw one sitting out there for I was like, Yu-Gi-Oh these things are going someplace I haven't seen before. Yu-Gi-Oh So I'm glad a couple people Beckett some of my old collection up because hopefully it spurs their interest in, you know, expanding their collection of original Star wars kind of memorabilia, trading cards. All right, so that gets us into the final slab. And this one's all Jack, because he did the research on this and he's covered it for our newsletter. But I think he's had a lot of fun with it. And I Love this card. 1975 Comic Book Heroes. Walk us through it, Jack, because this one here is a Atomic bomb. And it's not atom bomb. This is an Atomic bomb card.
All right, so if you want to see the post that I made about this, that has all the info, it went out at noon today, which is the eighth. So look out on our Instagram slab. Stocks on Instagram. And you can see the info on this. But this is a card that sold on the 5th, which would have been, I believe, Saturday for 6 grand. So it's PSA 8 copy, same type of set as that Spider man one we looked at earlier, but much later version. This is technically the first Topps Appearance of Dr. Doom. Dr. Doom is going to be the main villain in the upcoming Avengers Doomsday. As a lot of people know, he's going to be played by Robert Downey Jr. Which people are also very excited about. But regardless, PSA 8 copy sold for six grand. That is in just over a year's time, up from $100. Now, if you auction a PSA 8 copy right now, this is the best offer sale. Would it do six grand? Very unlikely. But it just goes to show you that this card is. Does not come up for sale very often. What's interesting is there are actually 12 PSA 10s in the pop count and none. I think the only other sale I saw was in 2017. It was for $81. So if you look up on card ladder, try to find one, you're not really not gonna see any again. It's a Pop 12 though. So they're out there, I think. You know.
And this is a sticker card, right? This is a. Yu-Gi-Oh technically a sticker. So I mean, there are some people who say this technically isn't his first card. His first card comes in one of the. You know, I think there's like 1990 marvel universe. Some people might say that is his first car. But technically it's a sticker. It's produced by Topps. It's the first tops appearance and obviously, it's holding the weight of the rookie card premium right now. This one here excites me because you know me. Wacky pack Collector. Wacky packs were all stickers. Those are 1973, 1974 in the height of their popularity. This is 1975. Probably falling into the cadence of Yu-Gi-Oh these Wacky packs were just white hot right at the time. So to me, that excites me. I can't wait till the Wacky packs get the traction that this did.
Yu-Gi-Oh So be on the lookout for sales of this card. I imagine as the movie gets closer, a PSA 10 copy will surface. I'm very curious what that would do. Fantastic. Well, that's our final slab. I hope you enjoyed the first appearances of some of these iconic cards and how the market is really driving some big prices, big sales on auction, buy it now, you name it, it's all going up. But, you know, collect what you love. It doesn't have to be the most expensive stuff. Collect what you love. A reminder. Our upcoming pop card releases the 23rd, 2026 Topps vault marvel. Join us on Fanatics Live. I'm sure Aaron will be doing that. If not, Jack will be. And I will be doing 2026 Topps Chrome Star wars right around the Release date of 9 30th, September 30th. So appreciate it. Jack, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Look forward to doing more in the future. Take care. Take care, everybody.
Guys,