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Go Back   Net54baseball.com Forums > Net54baseball Postwar Sportscard Forums > Modern Baseball Cards Forum (1980-Present)

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  #1  
Old 12-28-2018, 07:23 AM
eliotdeutsch eliotdeutsch is offline
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Default Need help with the super modern cards...

I can’t help but notice all the commotion going on over at other forums whenever a new product comes out... 2018 Topps Chrome Update or 2018 Bowman Draft or whatever the latest is...

I can barely follow the conversation, but it looks like guys are dropping thousands of dollars hoping to pull autographs and parallels of guys who aren’t even in the majors yet.. they immediately send off a ton of cards to be graded and post all the PSA 10s they get. somehow these cards are selling for astronomical prices over on eBay.

Is it just me, or is this a little insane? I can’t make sense of it.

1) is it actually profitable to rip open 2k worth of 2018 Topps Chrome Update?
2) Are guys really getting that many PSA10s or is there some bias going on? My hunch is telling me they send or hundreds of cards and post the 3 that come back as PSA 10?

I’d ask those guys directly, but this forum seems more friendly. I think they’d all just ignore me and assume I’m an old guy who doesn’t get the hobby these days.

Thanks.
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  #2  
Old 12-28-2018, 09:39 AM
ALR-bishop ALR-bishop is offline
Al Richter
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I only collect the Topps base set and any update set each year to keep my run going. I also do the Topps Heritage set each year in master form, which does not include Chrome or manufactured variations. The other stuff is a mystery to me as well.

There is a lot more discussion of new stuff on CU ( PSA) that I don't follow too closely. There is a guy , Arthur, who posts as a Cheeseburger here, that I would go to for info on new stuff info. If he did not know, he might know someone who does. There are surely some others here as well

The money being spent on some of the newer chase type cards is as mysterious to me as Bitcoin. If I don't "get it" or understand it, I avoid it.
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  #3  
Old 12-28-2018, 01:27 PM
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J0hn Raff3rty
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Busting cases of new products and grading for PSA 10s has been going on for a while, and is basically like playing the lottery.
Most of these autos next year will sell for $1-5 each. So a jumbo box with five autos could get you the couple of guys that sell for $100 each, or the guys that will be out of baseball in a couple of years after toiling in the minors.

Huge churn in the segment because a bunch of people give up on it after wasting money for years. Want to watch some serious money getting blown? Watch a case break of Topps Transcendant, the $30,000 a box product with 200 or so cards in it. So 200 people all throw $150 in a pot, the breaker buys the box, and everyone gets one card. A few of them win a card worth/selling for thousands, the rest get serial numbered cards that sell for about $30-50 each.

Kind of like what Vintage Breaks is doing with 50s-80s packs. They crack a $500 pack with 10 cards, selling each slot for $50. You get one card mailed to you randomly selected and opened live on Youtube/Facebook. Most cards won could be bought for $1 on eBay. Some will end up with PSA 8-10 HoF Rookies. Effectively gambling.
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  #4  
Old 12-28-2018, 06:49 PM
eliotdeutsch eliotdeutsch is offline
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It totally is gambling.

The thing that really keeps me away is the thought of how much real value in vintage I could buy for the same money being blown on this garbage.
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  #5  
Old 12-29-2018, 07:45 AM
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Hxcmilkshake Hxcmilkshake is offline
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Its not profitable, they are all chasing the big 1/1 cards, right now I believe its a Juan Soto in Chrome Update. I've been able to get the "rejects" for dirt cheap for my pc.

As far as submitting for psa 10s, yeah they go for big $ but unless you get it right most every time its a losing proposition. One or 2 PSA 9s or 8s in the batch makes it a loss.

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  #6  
Old 12-29-2018, 03:00 PM
Tennis13 Tennis13 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hxcmilkshake View Post
Its not profitable, they are all chasing the big 1/1 cards, right now I believe its a Juan Soto in Chrome Update. I've been able to get the "rejects" for dirt cheap for my pc.

As far as submitting for psa 10s, yeah they go for big $ but unless you get it right most every time its a losing proposition. One or 2 PSA 9s or 8s in the batch makes it a loss.

Sent from my SM-G935P using Tapatalk
As long as we are on this topic......I collect primarily one set of vintage and one type of modern team set. From what I can gather, buying is a whole lot easier than selling: these hits don’t sell, but have a high book value. It’s like a house that sits on the market for $1.2 mln: you may value it there, but it doesn’t get any interest there. That’s been my feeling—I have the power with the cash and buying, but not in a remotely equal way. It feels like guys flipping houses in a bull market, but long term liquidity is suspect at best and someone is definitely holding the bag with an expensive museum piece.

Some players/cards seem to sell: LeBron, Judge, Trout, Curry, Jordan, Brady. Like the ultra high end of the great players. However, I am not so sure that an Adrian Beltre or Nolan Arenado sells to many people, or even a Kris Bryant, as crazy as that seems. It’s literally less than 10 guys that have any sort of inventory turnover, it seems like.

So I went to The National last year with some of my cards. You know, maybe I would try to sell them or see if there was interest, but not really, because I collect. I have never sold a card as crazy as that sounds. Also, I am a trader by profession, so I have a unique interest in markets. I just wanted to understand the bid/ask spreads and market liquidity.

What I could gather is that if you can magically pay to set up a glass case and a table, suddenly the amount you will pay to a seller is 70% of last sale on Ebay. If you have one that hasn’t sold, well, good luck. They can’t benchmark it. The magic of that plastic case and table is worth a 30% haircut. In addition, if you have one of those magic cases, you have this insane desire to switch your PSA holders to the new hologram holders version. You always ask 100% of offer side, and justify it in any number of qualitative reasons, which may or may not hold water to a buyer. Also, there’s a bunch of middle aged men on their cell phones checking last sale and trying to move their cards, and it’s like an old trading floor. It’s really weird, and what I concluded is that I love my modern collection, which is good, because I am probably stuck owning it at 25 cents on the dollar. It was like an epiphany watching these people run around and do business.

I have some great modern cards. I mean, top of the line, sniped on ebay by people who mispriced them. One I bought for $1,700 has had a seller reject Buy it Now offers for $12,000 according to Flippertools. I showed it to a few people at The National and they “had no idea” and “you would need to find someone who collects that team or player” were the respones. These guys had $20,000 stickers on their cards and could not have cared less about even paying me $5,000 for the card, which I threw out as a question to see if they would nibble. Zero interest. So I concluded as a seller you likely need to pay the 20% auction fee to move “good” cards because unless you find the 1 guy that wants it, you need to open the market up. This applies to modern and vintage, of course, but it was worth noting.

It definitely feels like a shell game if you are “investing” here in modern. Maybe the high end real estate holds its value, but ultimately the next financial crisis will see a massive liquidation of this stuff. That’s my hunch. I buy what I buy for the emotional attachment, and hope to never have to sell. If I were buying for the hits or the $400,000 Trout card, I would worry. A lot.

I think this stuff is getting saturated and is tough to move, as a whole. There is a ton of short term, emotional demand that moves the product every year. However, at some point the garbage disposal will back up and then there will be no place to dump the new stuff.

That’s just my 2 cents. I could be completely wrong.

Last edited by Tennis13; 12-29-2018 at 03:04 PM.
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  #7  
Old 01-01-2019, 08:07 AM
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Is it profitable? I mean, I'm sure it's just like every other release in the history of baseball cards. I don't think it's ever been consistently profitable to open boxes and sell what's inside. If it were, the market would push the price of the boxes up.

The lottery aspect has been mentioned but there's also the adrenaline aspect. We definitely didn't have the opportunity to pull a $2,000 card out of a $20 box when we were kids.

Setting aside the hobby for a moment, the sport of baseball has seen an unprecedented amount of young players enter MLB in the last decade and immediately succeed. It's been written about and pondered and I'm not sure there's been an explanation for it. Kids are debuting at 19 & 20 years old and becoming All-Stars. It's unheard of. Just look at 2018: Ohtani, Juan Soto, Ronald Acuna, Ozzie Albies, Gleyber Torres, and Miles Mikolas. Studs. All with their rookie cards in 2018 product.

This makes your safety net pretty wide; more chances to hit a card that covers your expenses.

As far as the PSA 10s -- the quality control is extremely high with the modern products. I'd say at least 50% of the cards come out of the pack in PSA 10 condition. The manufacturers have vastly improved their methods, which makes sense considering the amount of money they're charging for their product.

It's funny this got brought up as I find myself getting pulled deeper and deeper into the 2018 baseball line of products. There's a handful that I really like and who doesn't enjoy opening a box of packs every now and then?

Arthur
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  #8  
Old 01-02-2019, 01:49 AM
G1911 G1911 is offline
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Not a fan of the speculating or this collecting style myself, but I don't think anything funky is up with the 10's. I build base sets for almost nothing as people almost throw away the base cards these days, and it is pretty difficult to find a Topps/Bowman Chrome card that isn't perfect. Quality control is high, doesn't surprise me they are getting so many 10's
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  #9  
Old 01-02-2019, 01:25 PM
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Originally Posted by G1911 View Post
Not a fan of the speculating or this collecting style myself, but I don't think anything funky is up with the 10's. I build base sets for almost nothing as people almost throw away the base cards these days, and it is pretty difficult to find a Topps/Bowman Chrome card that isn't perfect. Quality control is high, doesn't surprise me they are getting so many 10's
Yea, probably at half or so cards grade a 10 out of the pack these days, just a guess. I don't know if any modern guys have real stats on that.

That's one thing I really hate about new cards, Mint condition "9" cards are almost seen as low grade these days. Just stupid in my opinion. Big premiums for 10's when 9's look the same and many times are/were the same card and were resubmitted. Too much silliness.
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  #10  
Old 01-02-2019, 06:46 PM
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Originally Posted by HasselhoffsCheeseburger View Post
I don't think it's ever been consistently profitable to open boxes and sell what's inside. If it were, the market would push the price of the boxes up.
This is spot on. The market sets a price on modern boxes where it's more likely than not that the cards in the box won't rise to that amount.

Anecdotally, I do some flipping on COMC and in the past two years have used some proceeds to buy boxes of Topps Heritage through Blowout Cards. I got very lucky and had some good hits, because otherwise, I would have come nowhere near recouping the cost of the boxes from the card proceeds. Of course, my costs for the boxes also include submission fees for putting the cards for sale through COMC, too.

On the positive side, part of why I have done this is because I think there is some emotional value in ripping open a box of cards. It's fun to get a chance to be a kid again - although I'm not ripping open cases and cases like the guys who chase the big modern parallels, etc. I think opening that much product would become a chore.
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  #11  
Old 01-03-2019, 10:11 PM
ls7plus ls7plus is offline
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It's best to remember the new and old card markets are not independent of one another, IMHO. Instead, they are and will be inevitably linked, as today's stars and super stars become yesterday's heroes. Their cards will then be subject to the same criteria that those of the HOF'ers of the '50's and '60's on back are, and adjustments based on supply and demand will be made. What was big money in the new card market in the early '90's took a nasty fall by the mid to late '90's. Either the astronomically priced newer cards will take a huge dip in value, or the vintage market will be blessed with a big surge, or a combination of both. A lot of the new card big bucks is based on speculation and transient demand, the latter moving on to the newest and latest big thing.

Buy what brings you joy,

Larry
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Old 01-04-2019, 06:56 AM
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It's best to remember the new and old card markets are not independent of one another, IMHO. Instead, they are and will be inevitably linked, as today's stars and super stars become yesterday's heroes. Their cards will then be subject to the same criteria that those of the HOF'ers of the '50's and '60's on back are, and adjustments based on supply and demand will be made. What was big money in the new card market in the early '90's took a nasty fall by the mid to late '90's. Either the astronomically priced newer cards will take a huge dip in value, or the vintage market will be blessed with a big surge, or a combination of both. A lot of the new card big bucks is based on speculation and transient demand, the latter moving on to the newest and latest big thing.

Buy what brings you joy,

Larry
The '90s market is doing pretty damn good for itself these days. Third party grading has shot a lot of that stuff higher than it's ever been.

Arthur
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