[BobC]

Isn't this mostly why the modern stuff gets sold through online Breakers? The people buying in can often focus on a particular team to go after cards of more desirable players and increases their chances of getting some better cards. Plus, when was the last time you heard of someone buying a box or pack on their own and actually pulling a big card? I know of no one that's ever done that. Always seems it only happens to people that get lucky on breaks, or buy from a dealer/distributor who buys wholesale and opens cases for the top cards. I've often wondered if the "better" stuff isn't saved for the big wholesale distributors/Breakers, and the stuff you get at Target/Walmart is filled with mostly crap, on purpose. Just like some TPGs tend to cater to their big customers, I've often wondered if the "better" product isn't often steered towards those bigger customers. When a lot of those new products come out, my understanding is that the really big cards that are going to be available in them are pretty much known in advance. So when they first hit the public, especially product sold through Breakers where everything is shown online, those big cards are often known when they get pulled and the info gets out there. So possibly dealers/distributors start letting the balance of that product they have left go to the general public once they'd heard most of the big pulls are already found and gone.

Like a few years ago when Ohtani was a rookie, I forget the specific issue, but there was going to be a 1/1 special rookie card (auto if I remember correctly) of his in this specific issue that was going to be coming out. A few weeks before the actual release I seem to remember there was an offer made online (I want to say through Blowout?) that supposedly some Japanese fan/investor wanted this card, and was offering to initially pay $60K to whoever pulled it, providing they sold it to him/her by a specific date after the product was first released, and that the card would grade no less than a 9.0 by a specified TPG. Needless to say, everybody wanted to buy this product. Once it came out, I had heard that the special 1/1 rookie wasn't found right away, but didn't follow up to see when/where it eventually was found, and if whoever did find it took advantage of the $60K offer originally on the table.

Had discussed with a friend and we wondered if this "offer" wasn't actually money being offered by/through the card manufacturer to boost product sales. And even with all the hype, the fact this card wasn't immedialtely found would make you wonder if the card manufacturer didn't somehow delay it's actual distribution to keep up those sales. You know the Breakers were selling and opening this product as fast as they could, fearing that once that Ohtani rookie was found and word got out, interest in that product would quickly start to drop, along with what people would be willing to pay for a spot in the breaks of that product going forward.

As Adam noted earlier, one of the biggest things involving modern card sales, especially through Breakers, is the gambling aspect. And for a huge portion of these people that buy into these breaks, that gambling aspect is like an uncontrollable addiction. And now with the pandemic surge in card values for cards like Trout, Brady, Lebron, and other rookies, it is going to fuel these "gamblers" to keep going after these rookie cards every year to hopefully hit their one big lottery ticket pull. On one level, it is kind of like how people would hoard Gregg Jefferies, and other '80s rookies cards, with the plan that they'd be able to retire when they'd go to sell all those rookie cards in 20-30 years. (And we all know how that ended up working out!)

Remains to be seen how things go forward in the new/modern card part of the hobby, and how and when they change. If you look back at this hobby of ours over the past 50-60-70 years, the changes have been ongoing, and often dramatic. So it is definitely not a question of if it will change again, but when.

For now, the current card producers have learned from mistakes of the '80s and '90s. They still produce a ridiculous number of products each year, but now instead of producing a million of all the exact same Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, they've learned to produce limited numbers of new rookie cards that won't lose their value over time (like a 1/1 Ohtani rookie auto). They were smart enough (or maybe just dumb luck) to recognize on the vintage side that the fewer examples of desirable cards out there, especially rookies, generally created a higher value for such cards due to low supply of those cards to meet the demand. This in turn keeps the perceived values of these limited quantity modern rookies up there, so as to keep attracting the "gamblers" to continue going after these (what I call) manufactured rarities. It also means they still have to throw in a lot of worthless crap to make these limited edition manufactured rarities look that much more rare. So for the time being I guess you can expect to get mostly crappy cards when you buy and open new products yourself.

For now, the current model is working well for the new/modern card part of the hobby. Curious to see what may happen once Fanatics takes over card production in just a few years. Will they try to continue what Topps and Panini have been doing, or will they go in a different direction? Will Breakers (and even TPGs) continue to be as big a part of the hobby as they currently are, or will Fanatics try to take over everything? And then factor in what the effects might be once we finally start to get past this pandemic and things start to return to normal, or whatever the new normal ends up being. This should be interesting to see unfold.