The Junk Slab Era is fundamentally different than the Junk Wax Era, and that will have an impact on future generations of the sports card hobby. IG: simon466cards #sportscards #thehobby #whodoyoucollect
Great video. I am a set collector especially in my era (75-90: all 4 major sports) but yeah, my sons aren't as much into set collecting. They wanted the slabbed RCs of Jeter, Curry, Durrant, etc. I've made sets for them (behind the scenes) so hopefully they'll remember the other teammates or random athletes fondly. Like Coco Crisp who gave them signed baseballs before a game worth nothing dollar wise but a great memory.
Investing and making money has always been part of the allure but the collecting/hobby aspect was also important. Now it just seems like a side hustle to the younger generation. I also think living in the digital age will render this boom short lived. We had time to sit with our cards without distraction and really soak up the hobby during simpler analog times. I have a feeling the kids will just move on to the next hot thing and there are many.
🤯 Thanks for putting this out there, definitely a great view on where the hobby was, where it's at today, and hopefully WE and Fanatics can steer it in the right direction. Unfortunately money and profit has been and always will be a factor in this hobby. I've been in the hobby/business for 40+ years and what I see that is hugely different and probably the most exciting and could definitely be a catalyst for hobby change are these huge trade nights, I've only seen, never participated, I think there's something there that could change the hobby too.
I agree with your assessment 100%. The fuzzy nostalgia that we who collected in the “high pop wax” era (those cards are not “junk” to me), does not feel like it will be as present for those young collectors today as it is for the late 30 - mid 40 somethings now. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we knew about card values - heck, we had to know in order to make fair trades with friends, but the monetary aspect seemed secondary compared to filling in more cards for a player run, or completing a set, which was more of the purpose and fun back then. Here’s a fun sort of litmus test: imagine that tomorrow all cards go to zero. Who stays in the hobby? Many today would leave in disgust. Others would rejoice at how we are now able to pick up previously unattainable cards for our (albeit, now worthless) collections. Which are you?
Great points. One can only hope the youngsters have moments that linger, obviously fewer and farther between then 80s/90s kids. They'll remember the Doncic Prizm, Bedard YG, etc. And hopefully some positive interactions with dealers/stores/etc. Otherwise, this is spot on, and seriously worrying
I collected as a kid in the early 90s. I was pleasantly surprised when I found out you could still get $2 packs when my 5 year old wanted to get some baseball cards. (I assumed basic card prices got out of control with the way people talking about them) We live in an interesting time.
61 and have an 11 year kid, and its about sharing a hobby understanding its fun and valuable. As a kid I used cards for games and clacking on my bike. Mint is now the norm, and Gem mint is the ultimate chase. Using penny sleeves and toploaders for keepers is the behavior we share now.
There were plenty of kids, teenagers and early 20s adults in the Junk Wax era who approached it as an investment. This was the era when people would buy hundreds of Todd Van Poppel cards, trying to hold for the medium term and sell. There wasn't a full understanding of the massive print runs until the early 1990s. 1989 Upper Deck baseball had huge hype and most people thought these cards would hold up in value the same way 1960s Topps cards had. There was no grading, so no pop reports to give you a feel for print runs. The bubble burst around 1993 when everybody finally understood that these cards were massively overprinted.
Great video. Playing devil’s advocate, in the Cardboard Dreams documentary Dustin frequently references, dealers talk about how all kids want to do is make a buck. Given, the reach of “investment” content is much more available and popular now, so I agree with your premise!
happened in TCG too, and toys. its flippers. treating everything as investing bordering on gambling. value what you collect, don't collect for value. for some its an entry point to investing really when my generation (millenials) have been priced out of housing market. great vids! something to chew on really, different from hype/breaking channels
The author of the video must be thinking more of the early 80s when referring to Junk Wax Era as an idealic time of set building. By the late 80s it was all about the money and “chase cards” like Canseco rookie. That’s how we got the Junk Wax Era bubble that eventually burst! I see direct parallels with the bubble we’re in today - just this time there’s 1/1s, slabs, TCG.
Good video. You got my attention early tho when you kentioned the ‘junk parallel era’ id like to know more on that. I’m a guy who enjoys collecting #’d parallel sets. The set building I did inherit from my father who taught me when i was young in early 2000s. When covid hit and govt was paying me handsomely to stay home I got back into the hobby. The atmosphere changed. Watching a video of a kid making five figure card deal gives you part proud to see a youngin doing well but partly disturbed that that kid is just 1 doing well represently 100s or 1000s not. Find your niche and have fun. If you can profit cool, if not just dont go broke trying.
For an explanation of junk parallels, I have a 3 part series called "Prizm Print Runs", and also a video called Panini Select: Death by a Thousand Parallels: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8FPx2JTVdak.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-D4gCt6w4hFI.html
Well, maybe its just me, but Im actually grateful that value has boomed in the last several years. Theres even still some sectors of the hobby that have yet to take off, but theres actually people taking this hobby seriously nowadays, and thats NOT a bad thing!! Im glad I have items of value that I can cash in if times get too tough. I dont care if Im looked down upon for not just collecting for pure "enjoyment". Do you know why? Because if my favorite player to collect is someone like Mark Grace, how can I cash that in? Theres no collector base of Grace like there would be, for say, Ken Griffey Jr, right? And what's going to happen if something happens to you? Your family will be stuck with collectibles nobody else wants. Who wants to "collect" just to buy players that nobody else wants or in hopes that value plummets or stays stagnant? Wheres the excitement in that? Ironically, it no longer sounds very fun to just collect for fun, does it? If something happens to you, your family sure won't appreciate you leaving them stuff that they can't even giveaway neither. Sure, I get the nostalgia, but why stay in those phases in life where all you do is relive your childhood memories? Investing opportunities are being missed, because all anyone wants to do is reminiscence of how it used to be or how times have changed so drastically. Times change, so change with the times, and move on.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think I said it was a good thing or a bad thing in the video, just that things have changed, and that it is less likely to create a new generation of people who want to remain in the hobby.
@@simon466cards Whether you said it or not, it was definitely construed that way. Everyone has their own opinions. I just feel like people are too narrow-minded to appreciate the fact that there are valuable collectibles in this hobby. What if the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card was only a two-dollar card? I don't think that card would be talked about, do you? What if the prices stayed flat and never returned, so everyone could just collect and trade for fun? What if prices over night went to nothing, and you were out hundreds to thousands of dollars on the hobby? I don't think many would be happy; I also don't believe any card would be talked about at that point. People would then be trading their way out of the hobby. You know what that's called? A dead hobby. I don't think anybody wants that, so be grateful there's value in the hobby to be had.
@@simon466cards People will always come and go with hobbies. The hobby has changed and evolved, but because of that, it has become more mainstream in recent years. Look at all the record-selling prices for alot of cards covered on news channels nowadays. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we used to see that. Nobody cared years ago about this hobby like they do today. That's a good thing, in my opinion. This hobby is now taken more seriously and has even become its own asset class with particular collectibles. There's always going to be greedy people, but that's with any hobby. Go your own way and find what makes you happy. Stop worrying so much about the newer generation. They're going to do whatever they want anyhow.
I'm curious, how old were you in 1992? It might be that you were in Canada, but you have extremely rose colored glasses on what the hobby was like from say 1988-1992.
That might be the case. There were only a few LCS in the city I grew up in, and the only other people I dealt with for cards were my friends or kids at school.
Interesting take, but I think it can be both. At least it is for me… I use profits from investing to fund my collection. Making money brings joy; and owning great cards does as well! Think about it, if it was all about investing, none of these “investors” would have a PC.
I think there are too many cards for collectors to own. PSA is grading over half a million sports cards each month. There’s no way all those cards can find a “collector” home
I’m new to seeing your videos as this is the first one I’ve seen. I will say that soon people are going to see that the rarity claimed in this ultramodern class of cards is a smoke and mirrors show. They called it the junk wax era because of the volume of cards that were printed. I will use hockey as I also grew up and live in Alberta but back in the late 80’s to mid 90’s we had only a few major sets. Mainly o-pee-chee (topps in the USA), pro set, upper deck, bowman and o-pee-chee premier. So yes they printed tons of copies of them. But today they use serial numbered cards or sp (short print) and ssp (super short print) in their vocabularies to make it sound like cards now are very rare and to try to justify the outrageous prices for packs, boxes and eventually the singles sold after being ripped from packs. But what most people don’t realize or understand because it’s not talked about much if at all (the smoke and mirrors aspect), but I finally saw a video that showed this and they used 2022 baseball as the example and it’s got worse since then. But in 2022 baseball alone there were over 100 different sets of baseball cards put out and over 60% were different versions of topps/bowman which are now basically the same company. So the rarity and the excuse for the higher cost which is sometimes in the many 10’ of thousands USD for a single card is based on the single set. But when you put all 100+ sets together it makes the junk wax era seem like a rarity in comparison. I cannot see any cards made after maybe 2010-2013 being able to hold any kind of value long term. Right now it’s flippers selling to flippers and repackers who are the only ones that are keeping the price from plummeting in the few rare cases that they haven’t already plummeted. And then the repackers selling eventually finding a way back to flippers and the cards just getting recycled in this way until they plummet and become affordable for the average collector and this trend goes into the next year and then the next year. With the price being charged for the box or pack, the only one who is really gaining is the manufacturer and the first tier of sellers. After that 99.95% of the cards are not holding the value to justify the initial cost and then the only way to make a profit is get it graded but once that’s done and sold, cards of this era just continue to drop. This charade can only last so long before people lose enough money that the illusion will become mainstream that the cards aren’t rare and/or people just quit buying cards because it’s a losing game. I will use one other example and do the research of any new hyped prospects that have come out but this particular one was on a hyped basketball player for 2019. I apologize I forget the players name because I don’t follow basketball and I watched the video a bit ago. It was about how much value can ultramodern cards hold. The guy only counted panini products only with sp and ssp cards serial numbered to /99 or less and/or rookie patch autos for all the sets in 2019 and for this rookie using the parameters as stated there was 2200 and change rookie cards of the single player put out in 2019 basketball sets. To me when you include the base cards the hundreds of parallels and inserts and insert parallels and all the different combinations that are in ultramodern sets and the sheer number of sets that each company puts out that weren’t included in this panini sets only, if you included fanatics and all the sets they put out with the same parameters you would be closer to about 4500 or more. This illusion of rarity and the prices they justify by not thinking about just how many different sets are put out in any given year and it seems to be increasing every year. I don’t see any long term value in collecting. It’s about the same or worse than the junk wax era and I have proven it over and over, just wait a year or two before you buy anything and you will see it is going for pennies compared to the original cost. I hope my comment added a bit of transparency for your video to explain the illusion that the junk slab era had any long term way of holding value. The only sad thing is that the majority of people don’t have the money to get the joy of buying and opening a box of cards anymore. 🍻
Thanks for the comment. A lot of what you have said are included in my other videos. My most recent video does something similar by counting all the PSA 10 cards of a 2019 basketball rookie.
It's speculative investing. Collecting is just a different way of speculating around the value of things that don't actually have much inherent value beyond what people "believe" it's worth. It's NFTs, except you actually OWN the cards, so less dumb than NFTs...but the same desires are motivating the primary collectors/speculators.
There are collectors who want cards with minimal interest in their value. I have cards that have minimal value, but I still enjoy having and don’t care about their value. There are other cards that I both enjoy having and also care about their value. And there are some cards where I only care about their value. There is a full spectrum of why people collect. It’s not necessarily always about the money all the time.
I disagree. The junk wax era and the junk slab era were both about money. During junk wax people were realizing that vintage cards like the Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams cards were suddenly selling for a large amount of money. Most people in this era were there for the potential profit. This drive demand so high that card companies printed to the moon to try meeting that demand. Beckett price guide started around this time so for the first time, you could get monthly price updates. Most people left the hobby because it was found to be no longer profitable. Now history is repeating itself, just a little different.
Maybe this didn’t come through in the video, but I am referring to kids/teenagers in both eras. Not adults. The other major difference I didn’t talk about was back then, only vintage cards were worth lots of money, while ripping a pack might get you a $50 or $100 card at best. Now you can rip a pack and have a card worth life changing money. That changes incentives significantly.
@@simon466cards I get you. I know for me growing up in the 80s it was about collecting, and set building. The cool thing for me was that I could look at m my collection and watch their prices in Beckett and feel even better about my collection over time. I just remember a lot of my friends after turning about 11 or 12 turned into investor mode and thought about flipping cards back then. This was about ‘90-‘92ish. All the old timers would shake their heads at us youngsters buying just to sell a few months later. I was one of the few that held to this day, but it wasn’t…..it wasn’t entirely about the money for me.
You’re mixing up different age groups. Lots of adults in the 90s wanted to make money and that’s all they cared about. Thats still the same today. Kids in the 90s only cared about collecting. Kids today see these losers buying and reselling for money is all what kids nowadays care about. Kids now don’t care about collecting. I’m not saying all are like that but most are and that’s not how it was in the 90s. I do agree that things 20 years from now won’t be the same as it is now. As much as I don’t want it to, the hobby is dying.
I was referring to the mindset of kids and not adults, but perhaps that didn’t come through well in the video. It’s kids then vs kids now that I am comparing.
There was not nearly as much money to make in the 80s & 90s due to the lack of internet and artificial. You had to go get a Beckett guide etc. to know values and you were only talking to people on your community. Today, there are a ton of RU-vidrs who are creating artificial demand through creating excitment to a global marketplace. Pump.and dump mentality.
Prices were significantly more easily known back in the 80s. It’s excruciatingly time consuming to find values now. This alone makes the hobby exhausting now because no one wants to buy or sell any card without having a good understanding of its value.
