The Hobby Needs More Collecting Lanes, Not More Pressure

Foreign. Welcome back to another flagship episode of Stacking Slabs here on the Stacking Slabs Network. I'm Brett. I like to collect sports cards. I like to build things. I like to put out content around the mindset of the collector. Appreciate you being here. There is so much momentum happening across this hobby and industry right now. I'm still feeling a little bit of a post national hangover, but it is good because it is provided me insight into what I'm observing and that insight usually makes its way here on Stacking Slabs. Through the conversations that we have here, we are going to dig into a topic that is near and dear to my heart and that is around niche collecting lanes in community. Excited to share my thoughts and perspective. If this is your first time here visiting Stacking Slabs with a flagship episode, we like to talk about Collector mindset and psychology. Appreciate you being here. All of the OG loyal listeners. I do appreciate your support. If you're not already, make sure you hit follow wherever you are listening to Stacking Slabs. Tell your damn friends if you're enjoying it. If you want more, run on over to the Patreon Group. New and exclusive content every day from yours truly. Link is in the show notes and got to take care of some business Shouting out My good friends at Inferno Red Technology. They are the sponsor of the flagship episodes of Stacking Slabs and the engineering team behind some of the biggest names in sports and collectibles like DC Sports, 87, Comp C collectors, Upper Deck and eBay. From Yu-Gi-Oh powered solutions for startups to full stack platforms for industry leaders, their team can tackle your toughest technology challenge. They build awesome software for the hobby for leagues and fans and everyone in between. See what they can build for you and@infernored.com I want to start this episode by making my position clear. I am a fan of niche categories. I want more of them. I want more wrestling card collectors. I want more WNBA card collectors. I want more people collecting Soccer, Formula 1, Marvel, Disney fictional characters, entertainment cards, college cards and categories that do not have a clean label yet. I do not believe the hobby becomes stronger when every collector is chasing the same rookie, quarterback, basketball prospect, or the same five cards that show up in every piece of content. The hobby becomes stronger when more people find a reason to care. That belief is part of why I built the Stacking Slabs Network. The WNBA Card podcast was not created because WNBA cards had reached some approval level of market size. It was created because there were collectors who cared and deserved a place for their conversations. The wrestling show Beckett to last was not created because wrestling cards needed another price report. It was created because the people inside that category had stories, history, opinions and knowledge that the rest of the hobby was not hearing. At the National, I stood in a room with around 400 wrestling card collectors for wrestling card takeover. The room was not full because someone posted a comp and told everyone to buy before it was too late. It was full because people had spent years making connections, sharing cards, teaching history, debating products, and giving collectors a reason to feel like they belong. That is what category growth looks like to me. It is people before prices. It is participation before speculation. It is a collector finding a lane that fits who they are, then choosing to stay in it after the intention moves somewhere else. I'm passionate about this because the hobby is moving into a new phase. For a long time, most of the public card conversation centered around baseball and basketball. Football had its moments. Hockey had its base. Soccer had moved through cycles. The Formula one category gained attention. Marvel gained momentum. Pokemon grew into a force that the sports card side of the hobby could no longer treat as separate or small. Now the borders keep expanding. Pop culture is a part of the conversation. Disney is a part of the conversation. Fictional characters are a part of the conversation. Wrestling has more attention. Trading card games and sports cards share more collectors, more marketplaces, more grading infrastructure, and more content feeds than they once did. EBay's 2025 collectibles report made that change hard to ignore. Pokemon was the most searched collectible on the platform. Pokemon cards were third. Pokemon PSA 10 was six. Football cards was 10. That does not mean sports cards are disappearing. It means the definition of the card collector is getting wider. I think that's good. But support for niche collecting does not require us to support every tactic used to grow a niche. Those two things are very different. To me. There's a difference between building a category and selling the idea that the category is about to explode. There is a difference between inviting people into a community and creating pressure for them to buy your inventory. There is a difference between showing people why you care and telling them they will regret it if they don't act now. That difference is what I want to talk about today. Because every emerging category creates opportunity. It creates an opportunity for collectors to find something that means more to them. It creates an opportunity for community leaders to teach and connect. It creates an opportunity for businesses to serve a group that has been overlooked. And it creates an opportunity for people with influence, inventory and or financial interest to turn attention into urgency. The category is not the problem. The question is how we participate in its growth. When somebody says a category is growing, I want to know what they mean. That phrase gets used as it describes one thing it does not A category can have more content without having more collectors. It can have higher prices without having more buyers. It can have more products without having more demand. It can have one record sale without having a healthy market. It can have a Beckett event without having enough transactions to support the number of cards being produced. It can have a social media engagement because three accounts keep posting the same claim to the same group of people. These are different forms of movement and we hurt ourselves when we blend them all together. I think there are five separate questions hiding inside the phrase the category is growing. Is the audience growing? Are more people watching the sport, following the character, playing the game, or paying attention to the subject? Is the collector base growing? Are more people buying cards with intent to build a collection, learn history, and remain involved? Is the market growing? Are more buyers and sellers completing transactions across more cards and more price points? Are prices growing? Are a small number of cards selling for more money than they did six months ago? Is the product supply growing? Are manufacturers releasing more sets, more parallels, more boxes, and more cards in that category? Those five things can move together. They can also move in opposite directions. That distinction matters because price is the easiest signal to promote and one of the weakest signals to use by itself. If a card sells for $10,000, that proves one buyer and one seller agreed at $10,000 on that day. It does not prove 10 more buyers exist at 9,000. It does not prove demand reaches the rest of the set. It does not prove new collectors are entering. It does not prove the category will retain people after the next release or cultural moment. The sale is evidence. The problem begins when somebody asks that one sale to prove more than it can prove. WNBA cards are useful contrast because the evidence is broader than a single trophy card. According to ebay, the number of WNBA cards sold grew 650% from 2020 through 2024. Searches for WNBA rose 480% during the first four months of 2025 compared to the same report in 2024. Caitlin Clark was part of the growth and her effect was huge. Yet ebay also reported search growth for Asia Illusions Bird, Lisa Leslie, Diana Taurasi, Cheryl Swoops, Kelsey Plum, and other players from different eras. That breadth matters. One star can create attention. A category starts to show depth when the attention moves into its history, its current stars, its role players, its teams, and its collector communities. The best evidence is not the highest card sold for more. The best evidence is that more people found a reason to participate. Here's the standard I keep coming back to. Good growth increases the number of people who have a reason to stay. Bad growth increases the number of people who feel pressure to arrive before somebody else sells. Good growth builds knowledge. Collectors learn what came before. They understand the products. They know which cards matter and why. They can identify the people who preserve the category before the attention showed up. Bad growth moves context. Everything becomes a population count, a print run, a comp, or a prediction. The subject on the card becomes less important than the claim attached to it. Good growth creates access. It shows a new collector where to start. At $20, $200 or 2000, it makes room for a team collector, a set collector, a character collector, a player collector, and somebody who wants one meaningful card. Bad growth turns the expensive end of the category into the entire category. If the only cards receiving attention are the cards held by the loudest people, the community is not being built. A portfolio is being marketed. Good growth creates infrastructure. There are podcasts, newsletters, checklists, databases, collector groups, trade nights, shows, watch parties, educational posts and events. People can participate without buying a card that day. Bad growth creates a campaign. The same claims appear across multiple accounts. The language gets tighter. The deadline gets shorter. The upside gets larger. Questions get treated as negativity. Good growth can survive lower prices. Bad growth needs prices to keep rising because rising prices are the main product. Disney Laura Kana gives us a case worth studying. One year after launch, Disney reported that more than 1 billion Loricana cards had sold. More than 100,000 players were participating in organized play. More than 76,000 organized play events had taken place. That is not one signal. It is a mix of product demand, active participation in physical community infrastructure. Then the launch surge cooled. Reporting on Ravens burgers 2025 results said buyers focused on the investment side withdrew while the core group of players and collectors kept growing. Sales fell from launch peak, but the later sets sold out and organized play continued. Think about what that tells us. The exit of speculative buyers did not prove the category. It failed. It separated two groups that had been counted together during the surge. One group wanted exposure to a rising market. The other group wanted to play collect and remain part of the community. If your only measures was year over year sales growth, you might call that loss of momentum. If your measure was the quality in staying power participation, you might call it maturation. This is why a growing category needs more than cheerleaders. It needs people willing to name what is growing, what is cooling and what remains unproven? Before we judge the tactics, we need to understand the desire. Why do people care whether their category grows? I think the first reason is connection. Collecting can be personal and private. But most collectors want somebody who understands why a card matters to them. If you collect a player that receives no hobby attention, finding five other collectors can change the experience. You now have people who notice the same details, know the same history and understand why the card in your hand matters. That desire is healthy. The second reason is validation. We want other people to confirm the thing we chose deserves attention to. There is nothing strange about that. Our collections reflect our taste. When more people care about the category, it can feel like they are confirming our judgment. This is where identity enters the conversation. You do not own wrestling cards. You become a wrestling card collector. You do not own WNBA cards, You become part of the WNBA collecting community. The category becomes part of how you describe yourself. That creates commitment. It also creates makes criticism harder to hear. Because a question about the market can feel like a question about the group and your place inside it. The third reason is access. When a category grows, manufacturers invest. Auction houses take consignments. Grading companies build checklists. Dealers bring inventory. Events add space. Content gets funded. Collectors get more chances to buy, sell, learn and meet. Category growth can improve the experience for everybody already inside it. The fourth reason is status. Every early participants gain credibility. When category grows, they were the first. They know the history. They own the cards that new collectors want. They become the people others call when they need context. That status can be earned through years of contribution. It can also be manufactured by claiming expertise while attention is forming. The fifth reason, of course, is money. We need to say that without acting offended by it. If you own cards in a niche and more buyers enter, the value of your collection can rise. If you sell products, run breaks, host events, create content or operate a marketplace, Category growth can support your business. Financial benefit does not make somebody dishonest. Hidden financial benefit changes how we should evaluate their claims. The same person can love a category, build a community, own important cards, run a business and benefit from the rising prices. Motives are mixed. That is normal. The responsibility is not to prove that you have no interest. The responsibility is to disclose the interest and speak with enough care that your audience can separate your enthusiasm from the evidence. When I talk about wrestling cards, I'm not neutral. I collect them. I own some nice cards. I host content around that category. I benefit when more people pay attention. I also know why I care if prices never rise again. That last question matters. Why do you want the category to grow if your cards do not become more valuable. If the answer is that you want more conversations, better products, deeper history, more events, and more collectors to share the experience with, you're describing community growth. If the answer disappears when price appreciation disappears, you're describing a market position. There is nothing wrong with having a market position. There is something wrong with presenting it as community service. Collectors in a forming category face a hard problem. The information is always incomplete. There might not be enough sales. Population reports can be thin. Checklists are messy. Category history might not be documented. Private transactions can carry more weight than public sales. A few people might own much of the important inventory. Uncertainty creates room for leadership. It also creates room for influence to replace evidence. One piece of research helps explain why public excitement can feed itself. In a large randomized experiment published in Science, researchers placed an artificial positive or negative first rating on online comment. A positive first rating increased the chance that the later users would also rate the comment positively by 32%. The effect accumulated over time. The first signal changed the signals that followed. That matters in cards, because collectors rarely encounter a category with no context around it. We see likes, repost, view counts, sold labels, auction headlines, reaction videos, and comments from people we know. Those signals do not only report demand they can help create demand. Economists call one version of this an informational cascade. You see two respected collectors buy into a category. You assume they know something. A third collector sees the first two and reaches the same conclusion. A fourth collector now sees three informed people moving in one direction. Each decision appears to to add independent proof, but the chain might lead back to the same first claim. 10 people repeating one piece of information does not give you 10 pieces of evidence. It gives you one piece of evidence with distribution. Confirmation bias makes the problem harder after we buy. A 2022 study found that people actively sampled more information from from the option that they had already chosen. The more confident they were in the first choice, the stronger the bias became. That information search made them more likely to stick with the original decision, even when it was wrong. Think about what that looks like in a collection. You buy a card, then you follow the accounts that talk about the card. You join the group centered around the category. The algorithm notices what holds your attention and serves you more of it. Every post feels like new confirmation. You're not lying to yourself. You're searching from inside a decision you already have made. Ownership adds another layer. In classic market experiments, researchers randomly gave some participants coffee mugs, then created markets for those mugs. Owners demanded more to give up the mug than Non owners were willing to pay to acquire it. We tend to value what we own more than we valued it before we owned it. Now apply that to a card carrying identity. Scarcity, money, time, community, status. The owner is not in the same position as the prospective buyer. That does not disqualify the owner's opinion. It means ownership is part of the opinion. Then we add authority. Somebody with a large audience, a large collection, a job description, or a record of strong purchases says this category is next. I think we've heard that a lot recently with fictional characters. The listener does not need to evaluate every part of the claim. The speaker's status becomes part of the evidence. Trusting informed people is not irrational. None of us can research everything from the start. The risk appears when we borrow somebody's conviction without borrowing their time horizon, their cost basis, their access, their income, their relationships, or their ability to absorb a loss. You can copy the purchase and still have none of the conditions that made the purchase reasonable for them. This is why buy now or miss out works. It compresses the time available for the collector to notice those differences. It changes the question from does it fit me? To what happens if everybody else gets there first? The collector stops evaluating the category and starts evaluating the pain of being late. That is not conviction. That is pressure. The worst category building tactics tend to follow a pattern. The first tactic is urgency. Without a real deadline, by now the window is closing. Do not say nobody told you. People are going to wish they listened to what changed in the underlying category that makes today different from next week. Sometimes there is a real catalyst. A licensing change, a product release, an event, a media deal or supply constraint can matter. If the deadline is real, it can be named and examined. If the deadline is a feeling, its job is to stop examination. The second tactic is cherry picking. One card rises, one auction runs. One buyer pays a record price. One search term spikes. The advocate presents the strongest piece of data and leaves out the base. Cards that don't sell, the listings that sit collecting dust, the cards that close lower, or the fact that the buyer Blue Ice very concentrated. Good evidence includes the part that weakens your case. The third tactic is confusing scarcity with demand. A card can be rare and unwanted. A population of three does not create three buyers. A one of one guarantees a supply of one. It guarantees nothing about how many people want it, what they will pay, and whether a second buyer exists. When the first buyer leaves, scarcity can support value. After demand exists, it cannot substitute for demand. The fourth tactic is using price as proof of cultural importance. A high sale can attract attention. It can cause more collectors to research the category. It can mark a change in how the market values a card. But price does not create history. Price does not create meaning. Price does not tell a collector why the card belongs in their collection. When the sales number becomes the whole story, the category is being introduced as an asset before it is being introduced as a collecting experience. The fifth tactic is undisclosed positioning. The loudest advocates own the key card, has boxes to sell, is consigning into the next auction, receives product, has paid relationships or benefits from increased attention. Again, the interest does not prove the claim is false. It tells the listener that the speaker has a preferred outcome. Disclosure lets the collector account for that. Silence removes that choice. The sixth tactic is punishing disagreement. Somebody questions the data and gets called negative. Somebody asks about liquidity and gets told they don't understand the category. Somebody points out a weak sale and gets treated as if they want the community to fail. A category that cannot tolerate questions is not protected. It's being made fragile. Strong communities can examine weak evidence without interpreting the examination as betrayal. The seventh tactic is moving the claim. First, the category is about to explode. When prices do not move, the claim becomes long term potential. When participation does not grow, the claim becomes hidden strength. When product underperforms, the claim becomes proof that the market does not understand. Yet there is always another reason the original prediction has not failed. If no future outcome can prove a claim wrong, the claim is not useful to a collector. So how do you distinguish genuine evidence from confirmation bias when you already care about the category? You do not remove your passion. You build a process that keeps passion from answering every question. The first step is to separate your collecting thesis from the market thesis. Your collecting thesis answers, why do I want this? Your market thesis answers, why do I believe more demand will exist later? Those answers can overlap, but they're not the same. I watch wrestling with my dad is a strong collecting thesis. It's not evidence that the card will rise. The wrestler has more buyers across more products and eras with repeat public sales. That's market evidence. It does not tell you whether the card means anything to you. When you keep the two thesis separate, the card does not need to become an investment winner to remain a collecting success. I think the second step is to define what would change your mind before you buy. What evidence would tell you the category is not developing the way you expect. Repeat sales might not appear. The buyer pool might remain limited to the same few accounts. New products might create supply without bringing in new collectors. Event attendance Might fall after the main personality leaves. Interest might remain concentrated in one card while the rest of the category stays flat. Write the answers before ownership gives you a reason to move the standard. The third step is to measure breath. Do not only answer whether the top card rose. Ask whether more subjects sell, more errors receive attention, more price points, transaction and more collectors appear in public and private spaces. One buyer spending $50,000 on a card can create a headline. 500 collectors spending $50 can create a base. Both matter, but they tell you different things. The fourth step is to look for retention after the catalyst. What happens after the show ends? The product releases? The athlete cools, the movie leaves theaters? Or the influencer moves to another category? Do people keep collecting? Do conversations continue without a price spike? Do events get a second year? Do new collectors become contributors? The weeks after attention fades often tell you more about the category when the attention arrives. Fifth count Independent signal. Five posts based on one sale are one signal. Three podcasts quoting the same collector are one source. Ten buyers who reach the category through different paths are stronger evidence. Sales across different marketplaces are stronger evidence. Growth across current stars, retired subjects, affordable cards, high end cards, digital groups and physical events is stronger evidence. You want evidence that does not lead back to one person, one product or one moment. Sixth step is to inspect incentives. Be an investigator. What does the speaker own? What do they sell? Who pays them? Are they buying after making the claim or selling after the attention? You are deciding how much weight to give a claim based on the speaker's relationship to the outcome. The seventh step is to seek one informed skeptic, not a person who hates the category. Find somebody who understands it and does not share in your conclusion. Ask them what you are missing. The goal is not to let the skeptic make the decision for you. The goal is to give your conviction something stronger to push against than your own feet. The a step is to ask the zero appreciation question. Is the card worth the same amount five years from now? Do I still want to own it? Every purchase? The answer does not need to be yes. Collectors can take market risk. They can speculate. They can buy because they believe demand will rise. But you should know which game you're playing. If the answer is no, do not dress the purchase up as passion. There's a lot of that in this space. Call it position, size. It like position. Accept the risk like a position. The honesty protects both the collector and the community. If you have a voice inside of a niche category, you are more responsible as the category grows, not less. The audience is Making judgments with less information than you have. They might not know the history. Ownership, concentration, private sales, relationships, product risk. Responsible leaders give people context before urgency. They disclose what they own before they benefit. They distinguish a personal belief from a market fact. They show the weak data with the strong data. They explain who the category fits and who it doesn't. They create affordable entry points instead of using high prices as the only proof the category matters. They celebrate collector stories, research sets, histories and relationships. They do not need every listener to become a buyer. They keep contributing when prices fall. They revisit old predictions. They let questions improve the conversation. They build stages for other voices instead of making themselves the center of the category. Most of all, they understand that trust is part of the category's infrastructure. You can get attention through pressure. You cannot build trust that way. I think about this with stacking slabs. If I want WNBA cards or wrestling cards to receive more attention. My job is not to convince every collector that prices will rise. My job is to make the category more easier to understand. It is to introduce people to the work. It is to record the history while the people who lived it can tell it. It is to create conversations where collectors hear why somebody cares not only what they paid. It is to help collector decide whether the category connects with them. They are allowed to decide that it doesn't. That freedom matters. A person who enters because they felt pressure will leave when the pressure moves somewhere else. A person who enters because they found something that fits them has a reason to stay. I want more categories to grow. I want the hobby to make room for more forms of fandom. More history, more art, more characters, more sports and more reasons to collect. I want somebody who has never cared about a baseball prospect to find a Disney card that brings them back to their childhood. I want a wrestling fan to learn that cards have documented more than a century of the sport. I want a WNBA fan to find a card that connects to a current star, to the players who built the league. I want Pokemon collectors and sports card collectors to share more knowledge instead of protecting old borders. The future is good for collectors. It's good for card shops. It's good for manufacturers. It's good for marketplaces. It's good for creators like myself. It is good for the long term health of the hobby. But more attention does not always mean more health. We need to know the difference between category being introduced and a category being promoted. We need to know the difference between evidence and repetition. We need to know the difference between scarcity and demand. We need to know the difference between a community leader sharing conviction and an interested owner creating urgency. And when we are the interested owner, we need to hold ourselves to the same standards. The goal should not be to make every niche big. The goal should be to make every niche honest enough, informed enough, and welcoming enough for the right collectors to find it. Some categories will remain small. Small is not a Fleer A category can have a few hundred committed collectors. Healthy transactions, deep knowledge in a culture people will value that can be stronger than a category with 10,000 short term buyers who arrive through the same price. Prediction scale is 1, outcome scale staying power is another. If you care about a niche, create something people can stay in. Share the history, teach the cards, Invite new voices. Host the event. Make the introduction. Talk about the weak signals with the strong ones. Disclose where you benefit. Let collectors reach their own conclusions. You do not need to tell people they will miss out. Give them enough context to to understand what they might want to be a part of. This is how a niche becomes a community. This is how a community becomes a category. And that is how a category grows without losing the collectors it's supposed to serve. Appreciate you Tuning in to another flagship episode of Stacking Slabs. More content coming each and every day right here, consistently on the Stacking Slabs Network. Happy building. Happy collecting. Talk to you soon.