THWC 430: The National Vs. Fanatics Fest - Debate Over!

What's up, everybody? How About Cage episode 434, 3 0. We're getting up there with these numbers. Still got my news suit on for the day. If you haven't checked out today's Hobby News, go ahead and check it out. This episode number 4:30. The national verse, Fanatics Fest, the debate is over. Brought to you by Arena Club by card ladder use code, Cage, Save yourself a couple of bucks. And by the Philly show coming up soon. Before you know it. This is a fun one. We've been talking about this one for such a long time, right? We're talking about a Fanatics Fest versus the National. And this year we had Fanatics Fest. And then two weeks later, less than two weeks later, you went right to the National. I went to both. I know a lot of people went to both. I went to both. You know, I was there for multiple days for all of them. And I feel like that puts me in kind of a fun position to give you guys my, my thoughts on them. A lot of people at the national asked, oh, you know, what do I think? You know, And I'm gonna, I'm gonna say this right off the bat a minute in. This is not a. Is one gonna kill the other? That was the conversation, you know, hey, Fanatics Fest moved into the same month basically as the National. Right on top of it, you know, is that kind of a vulture? The, you know, the, the, the people, you know, are you going to have fatigue? Are people going to have to pick one or the other, you know, is Fanatics coming to eat the Nationals lunch? Okay. As often happens in the space, in any space, competition is a good thing. It winds up bringing out the best in both sides of the competition, right? Think of the national and Fan Fest, like Agassiz and Sampras or Nadal and Federer, you know, or Magic and Bird, you know, it's good to have competition arrival, if you will, because it raises the level of the game for both participants. And that's exactly what I would say has happened here both ways. The biggest complaint about Fanatics Fest for the first two years was the cards were an afterthought. That wasn't really a card show. I heard that dozens of times. It's not a card show. It's not a card. I even heard that from people talking about this one who weren't there. I don't need to go to. That's not a card show. Wrong. All right, well, Fanatics Fest realized by looking at the Nationals, there's enough people who will come for the cards, obviously there's more fanfare to it. It's great that, that you have the Fanatics games with Tom Brady and Bieber and all these people, you know, streamers and Whatnot. It is, it is an impressive thing to see. It truly is. But this year they really leaned on the cards. You know, it went from year one cards being kind of an afterthought in the back corner to this year, cards taking up the majority of the rooms and being interspersed. And it wasn't okay. That room is for activations. This room is for, you know, is for, you know, for, you know, leagues. And then in the back we have cards. It was. The cards were just front and center. You know what I mean? Cards were, I would say, the leader of the show. And the other booths were interspersed in with the cards. And Fanatics has gotten better at it too, you know, giving out more product, you know, having the players involved with the product, opening it, doing better with content. And so Fanatics learned from the national that you can be a card show, you can make the cards a focal point and people will come, people will come to make deals. And there were a lot of deals made. I think the thing that I heard the most about Fanatics Fest when it happened was, you know, people were surprised at how many cards came to the table for people to sell, how much buying and selling was done there. Because in the two years before, that didn't happen. Right. And likewise, the national obviously took a page from Fanatics Fest and from other shows and it's gotten better. This was, in my opinion, the best national that I've been to. I enjoyed Atlantic City. I know it's bad to say that, but I enjoyed the Atlantic City National. This one here, it had everything. It truly did. It took pages from different shows, took pages from Fanatics, Fest, took pages from the Dallas show. I've said this a couple times. The upstairs room that they put in was basically a small Dallas show. I happened to be walking around with a father and son, a 15 year old, and you know, we were walking around trying to sell cards, trying to look at cards and. And the way the national is set up, for those of you who've never been there, the main room is on one level and there's a slight little hill that you have to go up to get to the other two rooms behind it, you know, the expansion rooms, which are big. All right, so if you are in one of those other rooms and you're going to go back to the main room, you kind of got to Go downhill a little bit. And this, this will stick with me, right? This really will stick with me. The, the downhill. The 15 year old kid, once we were walking around looking for cards, trying to sell cards. We got to that hill, I was about to take a step down. He goes, no, you don't have to go down there. Don't go down past the hill. That's junk. There's nothing worth anything going down there. Basically, I'm not gonna be able to sell a car. I'm not gonna find any modern stuff down there. And that's not exactly true. I mean, there was some, there were plenty of tables there that had modern. But for the most part, when you walk in that room, this is something I think the national probably will change. You walk in the room, you would expect massive fanfare, you know what I mean? You walk in Fanatics Fest and there's, you know, the, the, this huge AT&T stadium was there. It's kind of big actually, right? You know, Bleecker's got an activation and a setup. You know, they, you know, previously they had the 40 yard dash right there, right. You know, there's this FIFA set up, this big setup. The TOPS booth is right there. It looks like a big brick building. It's right there, front and center. And you know, you walk in and it's boom. In your face. You walk in the national, the main entrance of the national and it's the guys who have been there for a long time. And it's like, you're like, oh, I got in the door. Boom. You know, you walk in Disney World, you see the castle, you know what I mean? And you want to go towards it. You know, you walk in the national and it's kind of guys who have been there for 30 years and I don't really see too many people around the tables. I don't really see too much excitement, too much, you know, fanfare. And you know, I think that's one thing they'll probably change. But to say that it's junk in that room, no way. But they're obviously not going to get rid of that, right? That's the history of it. That is, you know, that is a part of the national that makes it different than everything else, right? There are a lot of people who like vintage cars. There are a lot of people who like that stuff. Stuff. I spend a lot of time doing that, you know, walking that show and looking for cool things. Ty Cobb, bats sitting around and, you know, just cards that you don't see all the time. Pretty Awesome. I enjoy them. Not everybody does. And what I will tell you, and you know, we're seven and a half minutes in. The makeup of the people at the show was very different at national this year. And I think a lot of it is because of what they've done, because they added that little Dallas area upstairs with buying and selling. The average age of the Whatnot of the national, if it was something they were able to track, it had to be 10 years younger than it was a couple years ago. Has to be. And probably 40 pounds lighter. Yu-Gi-Oh because the, the, the, for the most part, while they were fat old guys like me walking around, for the most part, you had teens walking around. And they will know each other, they know each other from other shows, they say hello to each other. You know, they got their cases, they're making deals, they're wheeling and dealing. And obviously it is a new life and a new energy that's being pumped into the show. It really is. You know, if I were to throw, I don't want to call it a negative out there. I mean, psa, they are, they are, I mean, what an amazing company. But they have so much pent up demand for them that it is hard for them to actually meet the demand of the hobby. We're talking about $700 million in sales per month. And the thing that generates the most value in the modern space and you know, vintage too, are those PSA grades. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it. You know, we can talk about, you know, someone had to pay $15,000 a graded card. Well, guess what? That card had to be at least a half a million dollars, maybe a million dollars. You gotta, you know, I understand everybody wants to complain about that, but you know, they also provide some insurance for that car. They ensure the grade. They ensure that that car that's in there is now authentic. And that matters now, that matters with people 3D printing cards and you name it. But one-of-one that's a whole thing for another, a whole nother episode. I got there on Thursday and by that time, you know, PSAs, you know, lowest level, the $300 level was done, you know, to grade a card with them. You were paying, you know, six and change to grade a card at the open and then that closed and I had cards with me to try to grade with psa and I, I Goldin do it. I wasn't able to do it. And because I was only there for, let's call it three days, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I didn't want to waste all of my day there. I didn't want to go there Friday and stand online. I didn't want to, you know, spend so many hours. I'd rather hang out and talk to people. I'd rather go look at cards. And that's difficult because, I mean, listen, they took in more cards on the first day than they took in all of last show. It's very difficult to prepare for that. They only have the capacity that they have. You know what I mean? I can't really even fault them, right? You got to think about it. You can't really complain, right, because their product is so good and so in demand that they can't keep up with the demand. They have a 15 million car backload, right? Backlog. So, I mean, it is. That's one thing I would love to see fixed somehow. And we'll get there eventually. But, you know, in national, years past, that has been, you know, a real great thing for me, was one of the reasons a lot of people go to national, one of the reasons I went to national was to grade cards, to get autograph grades added to my cards, to have a second look at a card. You know, even Beckett, I wanted to try that, too. And Beckett was, like, almost overwhelmed. You know, I didn't want to spend all my time. You know, I would have loved to have gone to Beckett and try to re slab one of my cards. You know, I got old slabs I would love. You know, they're charging like, 85. You know, I would have loved to put my cards in a new Beckett slab. Why not? You know, the old one's scratched. You know, it's worth the money alone, right? It's worth the 85. I Goldin even do it. And that. I'd love for that to be fixed. But, I mean, the flip side to that is you have to take that for what it is. And the reason why I can't get there, the reason why PSA is so overwhelmed, is because there are so much demand, there's so much going on in the space. There's so many cards being bought and sold, so many cards being graded, so many transactions happening that you have to, you know, you have to avoid or it's okay if you watch content, you know, calling out PSA for it or attacking psa, but you have to understand the reason why they weren't able to grade your card or mine was because the demand is so high. Which, if you take a step back and realize that's a good thing for anyone who's participating here, Right. You always want more demand, you always want more participants. You always want people who want to be involved in the hobby, want to have cards, want to buy cards and want to grade cards, right? So sure, I would have loved to have my cards graded. But I take away from this, I mean the amount of stuff that PSA graded amazing. The cool cards, they graded amazing. The cards that were on display at the national, another great thing. See like Fanatics Fest, I. There were some nice cards in the room, right? But this is something that the national has over Fanatics Fest. Fanatics has tried to do it. Last year they had some of shines cards on display, right? But we're talking about booths who have this stuff, right? We're talking about cards. Alt brought their cards and they had a Kobe green, you know, Kobe PMG green. They had, you know, Acquire was there with multiple seven figure cards on display and available for sale. You know what I mean? All of the major auction houses were there with items. There were Wagners in the room. I mean some place had a Superman costume. I don't know. That's a little weird. I mean, you know, that's like right there when you come in, you're like what is going on with the Superman costume? But I guess some people like that stuff. Not for me. That's a fake. one-of-one I'm the real Superman. You know this. I'm kind of a Batman. But one-of-one you. You get what I'm saying here, right? I mean the. The national had some crazy and amazing stuff there on display. So you get the museum, you get the ability to look at this. And if I were one of these young kids, right, I would take a minute to look at that stuff. Because we're going to talk about the next debate. The next debate is what's the future for those guys and does there need to be one? Because they're buying and selling cards. Do they actually want the cards? I don't think so. I think they want to be able to find a card that costs an amount and then sell that same card for more. It is an impressive thing to see. One thing that the national has over Fanatics Fest and I'd love to see Fanatics Fest do a little bit better. Although I don't know how it's possible given the venue, given the location is Fanatics Fest. They learned this year and they had a trade night. They had one trade night of all the days they're on property. Right. Used to be that the national didn't have trade nights on property. Right. The national trade night they had one, right? Sort of. You know what Fanatics Fest did this past year and then there were hotels, you know, now the hotels don't want people trading because the national had three. I mean, it's not the fault of the national, but they had three different nights of trade nights. Boom, boom, boom. When the show ended, boom. You roll into the trade night. That's huge. That is a huge thing. Fanatics Special do that every night. Just like the national grew into that. Fanatics Fest should have trade nights every single night. I mean everyone, not everyone was there on Friday, right? I know my son wanted to go to trade night. He wasn't able to make it to trade night. It's great that they had off site of, you know, trade nights at Bleaker. It's a smaller place. It's great that they did that. But you're talking about like, you know, with it being a card show, you need some space for it, you know what I mean? And that will grow into it. I think the national can even do a better job with their trade nights. You know, the, the volume of people trying to get in. I'm going to tell you this because, you know, if you weren't there, you don't realize this. There was a lineup at 1:00 for bracelets to get into the trade night and people were starting to line up like 10, 10, 30 to get bracelets because the bracelets were a flip. One person told me they sold their bracelet for $250. They got online, got a bracelet and then sold it to someone who didn't want to wait online so that they could go up to the trade night and get in there and, and, and, and you know, sit in the room. The bracelets for the trade night, if I had any kind of say at the National, I would set up a trade area, a big, almost the size of the trade night and have it running the whole time during the show. I'm not talking about Jeff Wilson's little kid zone, right? That's a little odd. I would set up tables. So like a trade night table. Now, it's difficult, I understand while the show's going on, you don't want that competition. You don't want that. But the kids are gonna do it one-of-one Might as well provide a spot for him because it's bet the, the, the younger dealers understand the value of it, okay? The grading companies understand the value of it too. The older dealers who think, oh well, if you let these people buy and sell here, you know, and I PA table, they're taking money away from me. Dude, they weren't buying your cards one-of-one All right? They weren't buying your cards at your prices. They weren't buying your cards at any prices. But set them up in the upstairs and that extra area you have there near the Burkus stage and let kids do some trading. I mean, they're doing it one-of-one Then they're going to take the card back over and sell it. Buy, sell. Unit. I mean, that is the, that is obviously the, the, the lifeblood of the hobby now. That is the way the hobby is going. You know, those young kids, for as long as we have them, these, you know, these teenagers who are out there with their cases buying and selling stuff, I would provide as many opportunities for them to do what they're doing as possible and make this as accessible for them as. As possible. That'd be kind of, you know, my addition. But I express could do a better job of that. I think national could do a better job of that too. And Yu-Gi-Oh I mean, listen, here's the summary of it. And I have, I wrote down a list. I have 11 different episodes to talk about. But I want to close the door on this. This is no longer a competition. They're both going to be here. They're both going to survive and thrive. Right? The national has added days. Fanatics Fest has added days. They've both gotten bigger. I haven't heard, you know, attendance numbers from the national yet, but I'm sure it's 200,000 people. Just like Fanatics Fest was. The space that we're in right now, there's no reason why both can't thrive. And what I love is that they're obviously learning lessons from one another now. I guess we'll just see whether or not the national goes in pickets at the next Fanatics Fest outside. I doubt it. Oh, man. I mean, what an interesting marketing move. I mean, it worked. People are talking about it. A lot of people were talking about it. And it made my news, which is important too. And we're going to talk about fan cash and the 0% fees and who that benefits and why. That's an interesting thing. In another episode. It's one of my, one of my topics, but I just, I don't want to talk about this, you know, the national versus anymore. But so many people asked me because they knew I was at both. So we're like, okay, well, what do you think? Well, walking around some parts of the national, you could tell they took their cue from Fanatics Fest. I mean, Courtyard had A great setup. It was a basketball hoop, you know, and you can go and take a shot. Boom, everybody exciting and you one-of-one you know, you one-of-one with the basketball shot. I mean, that's taking a little Fanatics fest kind of games away. And you know, here you go, full on basketball hook. Take some shots, you know, make your shot and one-of-one You know, that was, that's great. You know, it could be a little more than that. I think Whatnot had, you know, like an F1, like a driving simulator. I gave away $5,000 a day for whoever had the fastest lap time. I'm whispering that because my son hears he's gonna want to fight me for not taking him because he would love to do that. You know, the breakers were there a lot of energy in that pavilion. So backyard doing their thing and just everybody doing their stuff. What I take away from this and kind of the summary and it's going to be almost the same takeaway on almost all of these topics that I have coming out of the national is. And we come out of this really energized a lot of energy in the hobby. A lot of youngsters, you know, buying, selling, you know, making deals, throwing cash down on the table. I don't know how many of them actually want the cards that they bought or sold, but I don't know whether or not that really matters. I asked, you know, one of the, one of the kids that, you know, that was in the area, we were talking to, you know, what do you collect? You know, I'm modern and you know, case hits and I say, you collect them. How many of you have? He's, oh, I don't have any of them. I collect, I buy them low and sell them. You know, I trade them to try to trade for cards that I could sell for more money than what I put in. That was the definition of collecting. And I think once everybody starts to understand that, we kind of realize what's going on here. How you and I collected is not the same as how this next generation of people collect. The flipping is collecting for them. And I hope it goes on for a while because, man, there was a different energy at the national this year. A younger energy. Don't get me wrong, there was still pockets of old, including myself, but the national starting to kind of get it a little bit, I think. And you know, it definitely was a younger crowd, a lot of younger folks doing business, making buys, sells and trades. Yu-Gi-Oh national versus Fanatics fest debates over, they both one-of-one And that is episode 430 brought to you by arena club by card ladder. Use code. Cage. Save yourself a couple bucks and buy the Philly Show. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the Hobby with Cage. Take care, everybody. I'll see you tomorrow.