Why Buying Less Can Make Collecting Better

Stacking Slabs · Ep 1074 · 2w ago · 25 min

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About this episode

Online card sales reached $911.79 million in August, setting a Card Ladder monthly record. That level of activity brings demand, access, and pressure to keep buying.Brett shares why he has limited his buying, sold cards that no longer fit, and focused on cards that hold meaning after the transaction ends. He breaks down the forces behind our purchase decisions, from social proof and scarcity to auction competition and comparison.The episode also offers six questions to ask before your next purchase and a 30-day exercise designed to bring focus back to your collection.Buying less is not about owning fewer cards. It is about making sure each yes belongs to you. Check out the awesome software that <a href="https://infernored.com/">InfernoRed Technology</a> can build for you.Sign up for <a href="https://stackingslabs.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=hjr6d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy">Hobby Jobs and The Weekly Rip</a> for freeGet your free copy of <a href="https://subscribepage.io/CollectingForKeeps">Collecting For Keeps: Finding Meaning In A Hobby Built On Hype</a>Start your <a href="https://patreon.com/StackingSlabs?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink">7 day free trial of Stacking Slabs Patreon Today</a>[Distributed on Sunday] Sign up for the Stacking Slabs Weekly Rip Newsletter using this <a href="https://stackingslabs.substack.com/p/coming-soon?r=hjr6d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy">link</a>Follow Stacking Slabs: | <a href="https://twitter.com/stackingslabs">Twitter </a>| <a href="https://www.instagram.com/stackingslabs">Instagram </a>| <a href="https://www.facebook.com/StackingSlabs/">Facebook</a> | <a href="https://vm.tiktok.com/cvNbNG/">Tiktok</a> <a href="https://www.patreon.com/c/StackingSlabs" rel="payment" title="★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★">★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★</a>

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Transcript

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Foreign. Welcome back to another flagship episode of Stacking Slabs here on the Stacking Slabs Network. Hopefully you're off to a great start this week, enjoying your time collecting sports cards, enjoying all the interactions and experience that you're having in this space. It is a wild time and that is for sure. It is also a time to make this hobby your very own. I've been observing a lot of fun things across all of the social channels of how people are building their collections, selling, making deals, a ton of energy and we're going to get into a topic regarding buying today and something that's been on my mind and I wanted to talk about it. That's what we do here on the flagship. Usually it's something I'm experiencing or something I'm seeing and we bring it to this show today. Today we're going to be talking about why buying less can make collecting better. Just a thought. We're going to get into it before we do that Got a shout out Inferno Red Technology. They're the engineering team behind some of the biggest names in sports and collectibles like DC Sports, 87, COMC collectors, Upper Deck and eBay. From Yu-Gi-Oh powered solutions for startups to full stack platforms for industry leaders, they will tackle your toughest technology challenge. They build awesome software for the hobby for league and fans and everyone in between. See what they can build for you@infernored.com Shout out Inferno Red for sponsoring the flagship episode of Stacking Slabs. If you're enjoying what we're doing over here, hit the follow button. Tell a damn friend we got a Patreon Group. Appreciate all of your support. I want to start with a number. 911 million. That is the total number of online trading card sales card ladder reported for August. That number could move by the time this recording goes live. For context, the previous record was 695 million in June. July came in at 694. August did not inch past the record. It exceeded it by more than 216 million. That is an increase of about 32% over the previous high. One month more than 900 million in tracked online card sales. That number deserves our attention. It tells us there's demand. It tells us there's liquidity. It tells us more cards are changing hands and more money is moving through the hobby than card ladder has recorded in a month. And that's exciting. It is good for collectors to see new people enter the hobby. It is good to see established collectors show conviction. It's good to see the cards that have been held onto for years finding new homes. It's good to know that when time comes to sell, there are active buyers across categories and price points. I am not opening this episode with a record number so I can spend the next 30 minutes telling you that the hobby's out of control. I'm not here to predict a crash. I'm not here to tell you that every expensive sale is irrational. I'm not interested in treating a strong market activity as a problem. I like what is happening. I like seeing important cards surface. I like seeing collectors compete for them. I like seeing attention come into the hobby. I like that the market has enough depth to support cards in categories that received little attention five years ago. But I also know what a number like 911 million can do to a collector. It can change your sense of normal. It can make you feel late. It can make you feel small. It can make you believe that everyone else is buying while you're sitting still. It can make a card you have never thought about feel urgent after you watch three other people chase it. It confuse you. And it can make activity feel like progress. That is what I want to talk about today. What if one of the best ways to improve your hobby experience right now is to buy less? It's a question. Not stop buying. Not leave the hobby. Not wait for some market decline that might never come. Buy less. Make fewer decisions. Pass on more cards that you like. Create enough room for cards that matter most to become clear. The point of this episode is not that fewer cards make you a better collector. The point is that a record market places more demands on your attention. If you do not decide what matters to you, the market will keep giving you reasons to buy what matters to someone else. A record month is information about the market. It is not instruction for your wallet. I think the market is giving us more of everything. Think about the hobby experience most of us are having right now. We wake up, open our phones, see the big sales from the night before, watch auctions end in real time. We can get notifications when a card on our watch list is ending. You can see a collector post a mail day, learn that a card exists through your research, search for another copy, check comps, message sellers, and pay for it without getting out of bed. That's something. There is less friction between seeing a card and owning a card. There is more cards available. There are more auction houses. There are more marketplace tools. There are more live selling platforms. There are more shows, more products, more parallels, more creators, more everything. There's more information. We have sales histories, pop report market Indexes, alerts, vaults, digital collections, group chats, private deals, public auctions, data, data, data. That access has made us better collectors in many ways. It has also made buying the easiest response to almost every hobby. Feeling you're bored? You browse. You see a card sell. You search for another one. A player, a big game. You check to see what's ending. A friend lands a card. You start thinking about the version you want. You sell something before the money reaches your account. You've already assigned it to the next purchase. You have a slow week. A mail day gives the week a hobby event. None of those actions make you reckless. They make you human. The hobby gives us a steady supply of prompts. Most of the prompts leads towards acquisition. Buy the release, bid on the card. Do not miss the copy. Look at what's sold. Look at what someone else found. Look at what's moving. The market is good at presenting possibilities. It is not responsible for protecting your priorities. That part belongs to you. I want to talk about what record activity can do to our judgment. It is an important topic that I don't think it's talked about enough. And I want to make this practical because we throw around words like FOMO so often that the word can lose its meaning. There are a few separate forces at work when the market becomes this active. The first one is one that I know well as a marketer. It's social proof. When we see more people spending, bidding and posting, participation begins to feel like confirmation. A card attracts attention because collectors want it. Then the attention becomes another reason collectors want it. The sale is no longer evidence of what one buyer paid. It becomes a signal. This card matters. This category is moving. Serious collectors are here. Do not get left behind. The sale might be valid. The card might deserve the price. The category might have room to grow. None of that tells you whether the card belongs in your collection. The market can be right about a card, and the card can still be wrong for you. The second force, Scarcity. Sports cards play scarcity in front of us all day. 1 of 1 out of 5 pop. 1 first copy to surface, fresh to market. How about pack fresh? You heard that? One final hours. Scarcity is not fake by definition. Some cards are hard to replace. Some chances do not return for years. A disciplined collector has to respect that. But scarcity can answer the wrong question. Scarcity tells you how often you get the chance to buy something. It does not tell you how much the object should matter to you. Those are different questions. If a card is rare and meaningful, scarcity supports your conviction. If a card is rare and unrelated to your collection, scarcity can create conviction that was not there before. That is where collectors get into trouble. The third force is competition. Auction. Turn a purchase into a contest. Once you place a bid, it can stop feeling like you're evaluating a card and start feeling like you're defending a position. Research on what is called auction fever found that high time pressure and competition with real people increased bidding arousal and led to higher bids in ascending auctions. That should sound familiar. You set a number before the auction. Someone passes you. You tell yourself, one more bid. Now you are not only deciding what the card is worth, you are responding to another person. You want the card, but you also want to one-of-one There is nothing wrong with enjoying competition. The problem comes when the price of winning becomes detached from the role the card will play after the auction ends. The fourth force is opportunity cost neglect. And this one matters a lot. Consumer researchers have found that people often fail to consider what a purchase displaces unless they are prompted to think about the alternative. When those alternatives are made visible, purchase rates can fall and buyers can choose less expensive options. In collector language, we are good at asking, do I want the card? We are less consistent and asking, what does buying the card prevent me from doing next? That $300 card is not only a $300 card. It might be 10% of the money needed for a card you have wanted for three years. That $2,000 card might require you to sell something you still care about. The impulse purchase might take your attention away from the private conversation that needs patience. Every yes uses money, but it also uses space, attention, and future flexibility. The cost of a card includes the next choice you lose. The fifth force is comparison. When the market is doing record numbers, your own collection can look inactive by comparison. You might be holding cards you love. You might have spent years building a collection that reflects your life. You might be in a sound financial position and you might have no reason to change anything. Then you see what everyone else is buying. Your collection feels smaller than it did five minutes ago. Nothing about your cards change. Your reference point change. That is why comparison is so costly in this hobby. It can reduce the meaning of something you own without changing the object at all. It is really important to understand buying is not the same as collecting. This is the distinction I keep coming back to. Buying is part of collecting. It is not the whole experience. Buying is a transaction. Collecting is the relationship you build with objects, the people, the history, the choices. Over time, buying can happen in 30 seconds. Collecting can take years we have built much of the modern hobby around the moment of acquisition. The post, the package, the reveal, the mail, the auction one-of-one Those moments are fun, and I'm not giving them up. But the high from getting a card can cover up a weak reason for wanting it. You can feel good when the package arrives and still realize three months later that the card is no place in your collection. I've done this. I've seen a card, thought it was cool, reacted to the opportunity, and bought it. I didn't make some terrible decision. I did not put myself in financial danger. I bought a card I like. But liking a card is not the same thing as needing to own it. The difference has become more clear and important to me. There are thousands of cards I like. Just look at my watch list. There are fewer cards that can make my collection more meaningful if I treat those two groups the same. I spend my money and attention on cards that will not last. That is where buying less starts to help. It forces a distinction between appreciation and ownership. You are allowed to think a card is great and let someone else own it. You are allowed to follow a category without entering it. You are allowed to celebrate a record sale without looking for a cheaper version of the same idea. You're allowed to admire another collector's taste without copying it. That is not passive collecting. That's confidence. I want to talk about the season I'm in right now as a collector. And I want to make this personal because I'm not presenting a theory from outside the market. I feel the same pressure. I see the same cards, I get the same messages. I watch important cards get listed. I know if I pass, the next chance will cost more. I know that some cards might not surface again. I also know what happens when I buy too many cards that are good but not central to what I'm building. The collection gets larger, but its purpose becomes less clear. Right now, I've limited my buying. I've been selling more. I'm trying to land cards that I have deep connection to me and a collection I want to hold. That means I'm moving away from the pattern I know well. See a card, think it's cool, buy it, wait for the mail day, post it, start looking for the next card. There is nothing evil about that cycle. It can actually be a fun way to explore. It has helped me learn some of my favorite collecting lanes. Started because I took a chance on a card that caught my attention. But a behavior that helps you explore can limit you once you know what you care about. At some point, exploration has to produce judgment. You learn enough to say, this isn't for me. This is for me. That card moves the collection forward. That card gives me a mail day. This card is what I want to build around. This card is what I'm selling six months from now. I do not want my collection to become a record of what caught my attention five minutes ago. I want it to be a record of what has held my attention over time. That requires more passing. It requires selling cards that no longer fit. It requires holding cash without treating it as an unfinished transaction. It requires accepting that another collector will buy a card I like. It also requires trusting that my best hobby experience will not come from keeping pace with the market. It will come from building a collection that keeps pace with my values. I think buying less can give you something back. When people hear buy less, they focus, go straight to money, and money matters. A budget is real. Debt is real. Family priorities are real. No card is worth creating a problem outside of the hobby. But the benefit of buying less is larger than the amount you left in your account. Buying less gives you attention back. Each card you own asks something from you. You track it, you store it, you insure it. You evaluate it. You decide whether to hold it. You, you compare it with the next version. You consider grading, selling, trading. One card does not create much of the work hundreds of weak decisions do. When you buy less, you have more attention for what you already own. You can go back through your collection. You can research cards history, remember what you bought, have a conversation with another collector about it. You can improve how you display it, how you store it. You can understand where it sits and inside the player's card history or inside your own collecting story. Buying less gives you patience back. Patience is hard to maintain when money is spread across 10 cards you kind of wanted. It is easier when you know that one or two cards you are prepared to wait for. A patient collector is not inactive. They're researching, building relationships, watching copies, learning ownership history, understanding condition, saving, selling, getting ready. The transaction is delayed, but the collecting is still happening. Buying less gives you standards. When you know you cannot buy every card you like, you have to decide what meets your standard. The question develops taste, what player, Issue, year, copy? Why does it deserve space next to the cards you already care about? Standards are not designed to impress other collectors. They protect the direction of your own collection. Buying less gives you memory. Think about your favorite cards. You can often remember where you were when you found them, who helped you, what sold, how long you waited, why the card mattered. At that point in your life. Those details give the card weight beyond price. When acquisition becomes constant, cards can arrive faster than meaning and can form around them. The package lands, the post goes up, the next search begins. Buying less creates time for ownership, and buying less gives you flexibility. This matters most in an active market. Record sales do not create temptation, they create liquidity. This means that it can be useful. Time to evaluate what you own and move. Cards that no longer fit you can turn past decisions into flexibility for future ones. Selling is not a Fleer of conviction when your collection is changed or holding cash is not missing out when you are preparing for a card with more meaning. Passing today can increase the quality of yes, you give later. Probably the MVP of the flagship this year is Russell Belk. We've talked about the extended self a lot. The basic idea is that what we own can help express and reinforce who we believe we are. Collectors understand this without needing to read Belk or any research paper. Your collection says something about you. Not because every card has to carry a serious story. Not because a collection needs a mission statement. It says something through repetition. The players you return to, the designs, the eras, the risks, the cards you refuse to sell. The collection becomes more specific as your decisions become more specific. That is another reason buying less can improve the experience. When you remove the need to act on every interest, your real interest becomes easier to see. You look at cards you still care about and give you excitement. You look at cards when no one's watching. That's useful evidence. The hobby gives us public metrics. Sales prices, pop report followers, likes, auctions, results. Those numbers can inform you. They cannot define a personal collection. If the only evidence that a card matters is that the market has started paying attention to it, you don't have conviction yet. You have a signal worth investigating. Take the time to learn whether the signal connects to something real for you. I want to challenge one easy conclusion before we move on to the framework. You will hear people say that too many choices makes us unhappy. There is some research behind choice overload, but the full evidence is mixed. A major meta analysis found that the average effect across many experiments was close to zero, with large differences based on the person in decision setting. That nuance matters here. More cards do not automatically make collecting worse. More options can help you, an experienced collector, find better fit. More marketplaces can improve access. More data can improve judgment. More categories can give people more ways to connect with sports and culture. The issue is not that the hobby contains too much. The issue is entering a market with endless options and no clear basis for choosing when your preferences are weak, every new option competes for your attention. When your preferences are clear, more options give you more chances to say no and wait for the right fit. That is the goal. Not a smaller hobby, A clearer collector. Buying less is not a rule that applies to every collector in every season. If you're new, you need some exploration. You can learn a lot through research. You can learn a lot through digging into cards designs, going through ebay. A new collector who refuses to make imperfect purchase might not ever develop taste. Keep the stakes manageable and treat the early buys as tuition. Buying less can also be the wrong advice when a true target appears. Some cards are irreplaceable. Some cards are not. If a card has been on your list for years, fits your collection and goes through your whole criteria, buy it. Do not say buy less because you know you love the card. Fear can be mistaken for patience. There is no virtue in owning a small collection. For the sake of owning a small collection, I want to make that very clear. The number of cards is not the measure the alignment is. Buying less is useful when it begins to improve your own clarity. There's a practical filter I think about and I've been documenting in my own collecting before I'm making my next purchase in this season. Here are the questions. Did I want this before I saw it available? What role does the card play in my collection? What does the purchase displace? What if the price and the audience were hidden from me? What is my walk away number and when did I set it? If I pass, what will I do next? Put out a challenge for you. If this episode hits and connects with you, just try this for 30 days. This isn't a no buy challenge. The goal is not to prove that you can resist cards. The goal is to produce better evidence about your own behavior. Check out your last 10 purchases. Go through the process. Start understanding where they fit in. Would you the answers to the questions be the same? Do not make the first moment of interest. Carry the full decision. I think that's the point. Return to the card if it allows you with some time. Some interests will get stronger. Many will disappear. That is not a lost opportunity. That's information you can sell with a purpose. You don't have to feel bad about it. It's a good time to sell cards. You can spend time with your collection in no marketplace open. Pull out your cards, hang out. Have a good time. Start asking yourself which cards stayed on your mind? What interest faded? What did you learn about the collection you already have that last Question really matters. I think these are good exercises to go through as you're going through your process. There's a lot of conversation right now about who has the advantage. The biggest buyer, the person with the best data, strongest inventory, most information. All of those advantages can matter. But there is another advantage available to everyone. Knowing what you do not need. If you know the social signals that affect you, you can create distance before you act. If you know what belongs at the center of your collection, the rest of the market becomes information instead of pressure. This does not mean your taste can never change. Collectors should evolve. The collection I want today is not the collection I wanted five years ago. That's part of the experience. It's part of the evolution. But change should come from learning, not being pulled towards whatever received the most attention that week. The ability to say no is not a restriction on collecting. It is what gives your yes meaning. 911 million. It's a great number. It's worth celebrating. It's proof of participation. It is proof that people care about cards. It's proof that the hobby has reached an unprecedented level. I want important cards to find strong buyers. I want new collectors to enter. I want sellers to have liquidity. I want categories with history and meaning to receive attention. I also want to come through this period with a collection that you recognize. That requires separating the health of the market from the health of your own collecting. The market can support more sales while your best decisions pass. A card can set a record while your collection needs nothing. Another collector can make a great purchase without creating an assignment for you. You do not have to match the speed, spending and volume around you. You have to understand what makes the hobby work for you. For me, that has meant limiting my buying. It has meant selling more. It has meant trying to move away from cards that create a quick reaction and towards cards that hold meaning after the transaction is over. I do not expect to get every decision right. That isn't the standard. The standard is whether my decisions are becoming more honest. Am I buying the card because it fits my collection? Or am I buying it because the market made me feel the standing still was a problem. Am I pursuing the card I've cared about for years? Or am I treating it like someone else's bid? As proof that I want in? Your collection does not keep pace with a record market. It needs to stay connected to you. So celebrate the sales, study the market, enjoy the energy. Buy the damn card when the reason is yours and when it is not, let it go. A card can be good and still not be for you. That might be the most useful thing a collector can understand right now. Appreciate you supporting stacking slabs your hobby content alternative. Hit the follow button, tell a damn friend, do all the things. We will be back with more content each day. Every day. We one-of-one stop, can't stop. Always appreciate the support. Happy collecting. Take care. Talk to you soon. It.

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