THWC 447: This Will Kill The Hobby!

About this episode

<p>The Only Thing The Hobby Has To Fear... Is the Hobby Itself.</p>

This episode is published by The Hobby With Cage.

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Transcript

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What is up, everybody? Hobby with Cage episode 447. Look at that, a little soda action. Look, it's like see through. That's kind of. These virtual backgrounds are pretty cool. A little two liter bottle here. We start the episode off with a little extra caffeine. We're gonna need it. A little energy, guys. This is episode 447. Recording this on Friday the 4th. If you have not listened to yesterday's episode yet, please go check it out. It is the best received episode so far of 2026. I think a lot of it has to do with me leaving you guys for a week. I left you craving great content. And when I'm not here for a week, that's a week of shitty content in the hobby. So, you know, just being modest and honest. Those of you guys not looking, you know, I just wink there. That was my wink noise this week, man. We've had some really big numbers and some really successful episodes and some really great comments on them. So hopefully this is another one of those. I think it will be. But if you haven't listened to yesterday's 446, go take a listen. Get a lot of great feedback on that one. Sell Everything Immediately is the title Today's episode447 brought to you by Arena Club. Buy card ladder. Use code Cage. Save yourself a couple of bucks and buy the Philly show, which we will be at before you know it. Got a local show this week also maybe bring some cards there. I'm gonna talk about the cards for that in a second because I will. I may actually have to come back next week and tell you how it goes because I'm very interested. But I have a card story to tell you. We'll get to that at the end of the episode. It's a good one, I promise. It's a good one. But here you go. You can't put a title of this will kill the hobby and not just jump right into it, Right? What is it? What's gonna kill the hobby? What is it? What is it? All right, well, you guys know by now, I went to Disney World. No, I did not buy any Topps Chrome Disney while I was there. Mostly because they weren't selling any of it. It's weird. Went to Disney World 4 parks. Spent a lot of time there. Did a quarter million steps. And all those steps, none of them led me to top Chrome Disney carts. Only the hoppy leads me there. Only Instagram leads me there. Let's think about that for a second. But we're gonna table that. I was there. I was in Disney World. I left for a week. Right? Two cool things I did there. I'll call them cool. My kids will say lame, but I call them cool. All right. Hall of Presidents and the American Adventure. We get to hear about America, especially this year on the 250th anniversary of our country. You get to see the presidents, you get to hear speeches. But. But both of them dedicated a moment to the only thing you have to fear is fear itself. It had me thinking, how does that apply to the hobby? And it really does. Twofold. Number one. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yesterday's episode was not about sell everything. Okay. It was not. Even though that was the title. Now, don't get me wrong, we definitely went through almost like a psychology audit of knowing who you are and, and what you're doing in the space. And that did lead some people, I believe, to decided they should probably sell a card or two. I'm going to talk about something that I plan to sell soon as well myself and explain to you why. Right. But it was not about sell everything. But I got a lot of great comments in that yesterday, but one of them was pessimism doesn't ever work. It never is a good thing. That person clearly didn't listen to the episode. There's a lot of optimism in the episode. Maybe not as evidenced by the title, but if you actually listen to the episode, it was not a pessimistic episode. But the point is there, and we've been through enough of these cycles, right, where you know, saying the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Is it fair to say that part of what may bring down the positivity of the space, part of what may bring down the money flowing in and all is pessimism is fear. They call it FUD in the old crypto space. I mean, it's very possible. And let me talk about some of the things that could turn sentiment negative, because right now sentiment has to be as positive as it Goldin be. Almost a billion dollar month last month. New people coming in. I see new people making content. I see new people buying cards. I see people buying cards in different areas. I see price appreciat, okay? And everyone who has come in in the last year, they're happy. Why? Well, mostly because everybody else is happy. All the content is happy. You know, you got Jeff Wilson out there Talking about the 10 reasons why this is different than it was last time and everybody wants to talk about why it's different. I've even pointed out some reasons why it's different than last time. Because everybody wants to avoid last time. Because last time went from positive to negative pretty darn fast, right? And there are some differences. But when the going is good, everybody seems happier, right? Because there are people finding gold and then there's people making money selling those gold. People shovels, right? Everybody's doing well. EBay's doing well, selling the cards, Whatnot doing well, alts doing well, Fanatics is doing well. Everything's propped up. And more importantly, when new people come in, they see two things. Number one, they see content from people who are doing well, right? There is no real pessimism. There is no real, hey, be careful. There's just, Yu-Gi-Oh I bought this last month and I'm selling it for this much. Look at all this great stuff. You got backyard breaks doing repacks. They're dressed up like Iron man, you know, you got Jeff telling everybody how great he's doing. You got people talking about how they open up this Pokemon pack two months ago and how much is worth now. This guy, 10x on this card. You got people making content about buying cards last week, last month. Hell, if they bought it last year, they're all rich now and can retire. They're Monopoly guy walking around with a, you know, like a. A monocle, right? Yu-Gi-Oh that's what it's called. Look what you just did. You turned into Cage and learned a word today, man. So they're seeing this, and they're happy. And that's a good place to be. That is good for new people to see new people come in and see positivity. They see people making money, and then the second they're making money themselves, even if they're not selling, if they came in and bought a card last month, two months ago, three months ago, six months ago, and they're still here. They look at their card ladder account that they put that card into, and it's worth more than they paid. So that's a twofold. Like dopamine hit one, they hit the card that they wanted, they were able to come in and buy their card. They bought their scoring kings, or they bought their Griffey Refractor, or they bought a Barry Bonds card, or they bought whatever it is, right? Whatever they like, they bought that card. They scratched that nostalgia itch. They came in, they bought something, and guess what? They get a second little dopamine hit because they look and it's worth more. So now they're. They're not just scratching the nostalgia. They're not just saying, hey, I bought this cool card that I had when I was a kid or I always wanted, but I'm also a genius because I bought it cheap, and it's worth more now than what I bought it. So not only did I buy what I want, but if I needed to sell it, let's put this little thing under my pillow at night so the tooth fairy can come visit. I can sell it for more money. I'm smart. And as long as that's what they're seeing, and as long as that's what's going on, everything's great. So what could kill that? All right, let's talk about negativity. Let's talk about what's going on in space number one. Alt. What the hell happened? They had an auction that ended last night, only it ends tonight instead. You don't see too much negativity about that. So that's good, I guess, right? PSA grading. No one's grading cards anymore. You can't grade a card. The thing that we have to fear, the thing that the hobby has to fear. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. The only thing the hobby has to fear is the hobby itself. Now, let me explain. The hobby is the only thing that can get in its own way. We do not have the infrastructure in place to support this growth that we're seeing. We just don't. The grading companies can't figure out a way to get out of their own way. They can't grade cards fast enough to keep up with the demand, so they shut down. That's not good. Like, a new person comes in. They're learning about the space. They're buying cards. They want to grade a card. They open a box of cards and want a graded card. They can't. That's not good. Auctions. Auctions not ending because of some sort of a glitch. It's not a good thing. It's definitely not. And I'm gonna go one step further. Trust. Trust is a very important thing in the space. And you know what? Somebody asked me once? How come I don't have more views? Hell, somebody asked me that every day. I tell him it's because I say what I want to say. And here's one of those things. Here's one of those things I want to say. You have to be honest. Sometimes honest comes off as pessimistic. Sometimes honest does not come off as rah rah, cheerleader. Now, in this market, it has been Cheerlead away. Because if you haven't, if you are not a bull in this, you were left in the cold. You were wrong. Right? But every once in a while, you have to tell people who are coming in what's really going on. You have to be able to preach a little caution. You have to be able to be honest with people. You have to be able to protect them or at least give them the tools to protect themselves. Now, when I see, oh, I'm doing vinyl now, look at the albums. I went to the store and bought vinyl, man, does that scare the shit out of me. I mean, I haven't talked to Jeff Wilson in a while. We have a decent enough relationship. But I'd be stunned if that guy knows the difference between a 45 and a 33, let alone what a 78 is. I'd be stunned. But this is what happens when this much money is moving through the system and people are looking. Yu-Gi-Oh look at me. I'm doing a little dance here for you guys on YouTube. The money's moving through the system, and it's already flowed into Jordan and Kobe and LeBron, and it's flowed into baseball, and it's flowed into basketball, and it's flowed, Flowed into football. And Josh Allen got his. Well, guess what? We got all this money still in there. What are we gonna find Net Marvels It's Disney. Hell, let's go over to the vinyl and let's talk about grading vinyl. And then. Not for me. And it scares me. It just does, because it's a whole nother world. What are we going to do next? Talk about fancy bourbon? Are we going to talk about watches? Are we going to talk about one-of-one Are we going to spread this out further? You know, am I going to be drinking my Chateau Lafitte 1982? A good vintage. Please look it up. And smelling it as I put on my Audemars Beckett and check out the time while I do my baseball cards. No, come on, guys. You have to see what's going on here, right? That. That there's just so much liquidity right now that everybody's kind of like looking for the next. The next, the next. Let me give you an example, right? Because this is what we have to fear. We have to fear the new people coming in getting hurt. And let me give you an example of where I think new people might get hurt. And this is. Now I'm going to go right into what I'm selling and a little psychology of this, guys. Right? What I'm selling. I bought These cards with no intention to sell. Let's. Let's. That's a whole nother episode. Whether you're a flipper, a buyer, a hobbyist, a collector, this is just one of those things. It just. I'll take the line right down the middle. You ready for this? I've been buying and selling cards forever and a lot more this year because the market is good, right? It is a hot market. There is a lot of cards to buy, a lot of cards to sell. There's a lot of, you know, cool little areas to kind of, you know, learn about. But in doing all that, I thought to myself in June, hey, you know, maybe I should just buy myself some cards that scratch that nostalgia itch. Something that reminds me of when I was opening cards with my brother and my father, you know, collecting as a kid. Something that I wanted but didn't have, right? Something that I think is cool, and just buy it and put it in a box and throw it in the basement. And I did, right? You know what I did? I noticed the scoring kings cards were going up like crazy in price, and those were awesome for me. 93 Fleer. Come on. I was 16 years old when these things came out. I was a kid. I was in high school, right? My dad was still with us. Not for much longer, but still with us and collecting with me and my brother. We love the lightning strike. We love it. I had a Jordan 10, man. I sold it. I wish I had it. I wish I could sell it today because it's crazy what it's selling for now. But I looked at the rest of the set. I had the set. I had a Shaq. I had a Barkley. I had a Dominique Wilkins. I had a Patrick Ewing. I was a big Ewing guy. I had all those bra as a kid in a Pandora I never had them again since. So I decided I was gonna go on alt on the June 5 auction and buy PSA 8s of all of them. They were all there. I saw them in the auction. I said, I'm just gonna buy them all. And I bought them all, and I put them in a box and I left in my basement. And I haven't thought about them since. Not me. Thought about them since. So I have nine of the 10 card set in PSA eight, right? Nine of them. Call Malone. Water Malone. No Jordan in the eights. Let's just get that one clear. The most expensive card that I bought on June 5, I got in hand after alt shipping them and stuff. June 15, good shipping, not so great. This week, Alt do better. Fanatics actually beat you. I don't know how that happened, but they did. I bought these cards, the most expensive one of the nine, right? So you got good guys. Barkley's a big guy. Dave Robinson, Ewing, Karl Malone. You got some good guys in a set. The biggest one, Shaq. Don't look up what it is yet. I bought a shack on June 5th. It's there. It's alt you. That's my sale in Alt on cord ladder. Go ahead and look it up. $206. Think $206.40. If we're going to be like completely on it. And I put it in a box and didn't look it again. David Robinson was like, 80 bucks. Just talk about the shack for a second. Somebody messaged me and asked if I had a Shaq PSA 10 for scoring Kings. I said no, but, you know, it's a cool card. Not one I ever really want to know. And I love the Jordan more. Jack. I would go for, you know, the year before. I like the rookie year Shaq stuff. Those always hit me a little bit better. You know, Magic's old rookie team, maybe, you know, some. There are some cooler rookie shack stuff that I would want to own instead of owning a scoring king shack. But they messed me and, and I thought to myself, oh, I do have a scoring king shack. I forgot about it. It's in a box in the basement. But it's an eight. You're not interested in eight. And he's like, what price? And I'm like, I don't know. I think I paid like 200 bucks for it. He's like, well, I'll give you double that. I'm like, double? I mean, let me look up what it is first. You want to take a guess what the last one sold for? I think. What's the last three sold for? Take a guess. Close your eyes and take a guess for yourself for a second. You know, get. You know, they say lock that guess in, right? Think of what. What is it? What do you think it's going to sell for? What do you think a shack is? All right, well, on August 30th, one sold for nineteen hundred dollars in an ebay auction. And I'm like, oh, that's an outlier. Nope. Another one on August 30th sold the best offer at 1849. Right after that, an auction of 1900. And then one sold on Fanatics. Buy it now for 1825. That Shaq PSA 8 scoring kings is up 900% in less than three months. I'll say that again. The card that I bought has 9x in less than three months. The content that's out there is rah, rah, rah, bye, bye, bye. Everything is great. New people will be coming in. Now, I'm not saying that cards are going to go down, but there are probably other people like me who are going to come in the space and remember the scoring kings. I bought a PSA8 because I just wanted to have cards of the set. I figured that was a good collector's grade. There is a 0% chance that I will keep that card for $1,800. At $200, it was a no brainer. Hell, if it was $500, it'd probably be a no brainer. But I will be able to buy another copy of that card millions of times over my lifetime. It's not a card my son needs to have. And if I need to go buy a three now, I'll go buy a three. I'll buy a raw one. I don't care. For $200. That makes sense. For $1,900. That is crazy land, people. But even if it's not right, one of the things that we have to be able to educate people on instead of just getting the pom poms out and cheerleading is we need to educate people on how to figure out which cards might not be the ones to buy at the current price. You know, when new people come in, send them to me so I can tell them, go look up what has happened with a card in the last two months, because I don't believe that this is something that's sustainable. And they're not going to know this coming in. But part of the reason why you've had a little bit of a run on these is repacks. But part of the reason also is people, for the most part for the last couple of months, have not been able to grade scoring king cards or any cards like this. It's not a card. You really wanted a grade if you thought you were gonna get an 8 one-of-one because up until this year, it was less than 200 bucks. But now if an 8 is gonna be 2 grand, people will send that in for grading, but you can't really grade it. So what's gonna happen now? At two grand, someone will pay 80 bucks to grade one of these and the pop will go up. And when PSA opens, more of these will go in and the pop will go up. And even if the market's doing well, there Will be more supply of these if the market's not doing as well. I don't believe that a PSA 8 scoring Kings Shaquille O' Neal is a card that should be selling for $2,000. I believed that it was a good buy for me when it was $200. But the reason that I bought it was not because I thought it was a bargain. It was because I wanted to own one. I wanted to own a card. Now, do you guys have any idea in your brain how many of these there are at PSA 8 today? And this is without any kind of growth. Morning before I recorded this, which means while I was doing this episode, another one of them graded an 8. That's crazy. It makes my point. And guess what? There's 250, 54 copies higher than that. This is a card that made sense at 200, 304, 500 at 1900 dollars. One of the things that the hobby has to fear is that the new people coming in one will be misinformed and think that it's always going to be as good as it is now. And we have people here who have to do a better job of being better stewards for them. And number two, what happens when they buy a card and put it under the pillow like this shack at this price and if they look at it in a month or two and it's 1,400 or 1200 and they're not sleeping as soundly, they don't have that number two dopamine hit of being a genius, they feel like a Fleer Let's not make new people come in feel like failures. Let's educate them. If they still make the decision, it's not on you, it's on them. one-of-one my thought today of what will kill the hobby, I don't want to be pessimistic. I'll be as optimistic and as bullish as I can and so should you. The hobby is in a great place. We have never seen the type of abundance in this space as we are seeing right now. The numbers are. They're through the roof. And there's no reason to think that they one-of-one continue that way. What Fanatics has done to the space is simply amazing. The support that what Fanatics is building, this huge building on infrastructure that I don't know whether or not it can hold what Fanatics is building. And that is what may kill the hobby. That is what we have to fear. Hope you like this one. It's another episode447 this will kill the hobby Yu-Gi-Oh scary. Hope you guys are liking the titles. And you know, I'm Pokemon. Vacation. I'm back. This has been a hell of a week. I hope you guys are enjoying it. If you're not, just tell me what you want me to change and I'll ignore you. Or send me a comment. Send me a dm. I love talking to you guys. So that's another episode. That's 4. 47 on September 4th. Friday. We'll see what kind of time I have this weekend. Maybe I'll get a weekend episode out and kill the viewership numbers, kill the momentum because you guys are busy on the weekend, which is good. You're going to shows you living your lives. I like it. This was brought to you by Arena Club. Buy card ladder, use code cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and be able to do research like I do in the episodes and be able to educate yourself and save some money. And by the Philly Show. If you're coming, send me a message. I want to see you there. I think Iverson's gonna be there. That will be cool. I may have to buy an extra Iverson jersey for one-of-one His. The one that he has his blue one that everybody likes getting a little small on him. I might have to buy him an extra Iverson jersey and see if we can meet Allen Iverson and maybe take a picture with him. Talk to you guys soon. Take care, everybody. It's a little bit of a long one. I've been accused of being long winded. I think that's a lie.