Card Ladder Confidential #22: The Best Cards Aren’t for Sale — What The National Revealed About Collecting

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Card Ladder Confidential here on the Stacking Slabs Network, presented by none other than Card Ladder, the official data provider of the Stacking Slabs Network. Make sure you are using Card Ladder. If you're not, what are you doing? Excited to bring Chris and Josh back on the program, post the national. And yes, we're keeping the national dialogue alive. What changed and what only felt like it changed at the national is the headline. We get into some fun collecting topics. We talk about buying cards without sales history, talk about the interactions that we had and the conversations and a whole lot more. If you want to show your support for the broader Stacking Slabs Network, hit the follow button, tell a damn friend, run on over to the Patreon Group. It is Card Ladder confidential, episode number 22, and it's coming your way right now. We are back Card Ladder Confidential time. We are on a time restriction today, so we're going to hit the ground running. We're going to move fast. We're going to move furious. We're going to talk about the national and talk about it from a collecting card perspective. What change? What remained the same. We do things one way here on Card Letter Confidential. We always start with a cold open question. So I'm going to put up a card on the screen here for the. The boys. We've got a 2013 Brady Finite Prizm one of one, and a PSA 10 that at the time of recording will be. It's 17 days. It'll be 15 days when this drops. This card is at $906,733 with 15 bids on alt. And there's all this time left. And this card jumped all the way up to this point, almost a million dollars. And this was a card. When it hit, I got so many DMS from people that were like, hey, have you seen this? Have you seen this? And I haven't had time to, like, talk about it, so I figured, let's throw it to Chris and Josh to just get some perspective in the cold open question. How did we get to this point where we've got a Tom Brady card jumping to almost $1 million with nearly two weeks to go in this auction. Chris, what's your reaction to this? Very exciting to see that card come forth to the auction setting, but it Pandora I say, vortexing for a little while. Dang it. He stole my take. Give the take, Josh. Because mine. I was. I was gonna give on. No, it's the vortex. Yu-Gi-Oh this is. I'm not excited anymore. This is the third Time, it's sold in two months. So I thought I knew that this card had changed hands. But has this sold publicly? Has this been private transactions? What, what has gone on with this card so far? It's not Zebra private. It's been with a dealer, then to a flipper. Now it's at auction. So my guess is the flipper bought it thinking he could make more money sending it straight to auction because I don't think he had it for more than two weeks. Okay, so knowing that and that aside, is this just like the era we're in in collecting in the industry, post the national, with just all of this excitement and exuberance and we've never seen the 2012? Is there anything else that you can chalk up to the fact that this card is almost a million dollars with a couple weeks left? Any perspective there probably still got considerably higher to go. I would think the ceiling on this card isn't the desire for the card. I think this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It might be a little bit misunderstood. The ceiling on this card is very, very high. I think there's people who want this card as much as they want anything or nearly anything in life. The ceiling is the budget. The ceiling is how much money can people actually allocate to buying a card like this. And this is where I always find the multiplier so interesting to something like the gold. So the gold BGS10, which is a pop one granted, 2013 Prizm True Gold sold for 183,000 in April. And the Brady market is certainly up more since then. It's up like double digit percentage points since then. So that card might even be worth more today. And when that card is worth 183,000 or, or whatever that might be worth today, this card takes on a whole different complexion. There's, there's 10 of those golds. Granted this is the highest graded one, but this is the black finite 1 of 1 and Brady's second base at Prizm black finite 1 of 1. So, you know, I'm keeping an Yu-Gi-Oh on the multiple because I think that it's, it's tough to put a ceiling on a card like this from a desire point of view or from a demand point of view that the ceiling comes from the fact that people right now, as currently capitalized, only have so much money to allocate towards a card like this. But I think there's many people out there who would, if they could, they would love to pay much, much more than what it's currently at before we move off this, Josh, to you. I know you have been in a big mode where you've been buying a ton of one of one football cards over the last, you know, 12 to 18 months. When you see us like a card that is going to sell, like this card is going to sell, we, we've seen $2 million Josh Allen sales. Do those things operate kind of independently of like the general football card market or do you think like sales like the Allens and sales like this pulls the rest of the football card market forward? And when I'm what I want to maybe speak specifically of the type of stuff that you're buying like notable players, one of ones premium products. Yu-Gi-Oh I think it's probably a bit of give and take on that. I don't think that people are waiting for a sale like this to pay more for other similar type cards of different players. I think, I think we're just seeing, I said this to Chris the other day. I just think we're seeing prices go up on literally everything minus like some players who are struggling or like players falling out of popularity. Like in general, every card is just going up so much that it's really hard to say this card going up is causing that one to go up. Etc. It seems like people just have the appetite and the money or whatever to just keep paying more and more. This is, I mean this is obviously I was critical of the card because of the vortex, but obviously this is an insane card. You know, it's Brady's second prison black finite. It's a PSA 10. It's obviously going to do a huge number as it should. It's an amazing card. So, you know, no shade to the card itself. I would love to own something like this, but it's, it's obviously way out of my range at this point. I would say it's way out of most of our ranges. But Yu-Gi-Oh get your popcorn out. Wanted to dig into the national and have a little bit of a post mortem. The I've been on this train that there's still so much value that you can get from the national experience when it's sunset and it's behind us. Hoping that conversations like this can help kind of elevate this monster event that kind of comes and goes. So what I want to kind of dig into, obviously card ladder tracks the online sales data. We were all together in one room. It was crazy. It came and went. But I don't know, let's start here from that experience that we all just had at the national, what can like that in person? Like people coming up to the card ladder booth, sharing their cards, talking about things that they bought. Like, what can people gleam from that, like, in person event, like the national, that that online sales alone can't tell them? Maybe. Chris, we'll start with you. Yu-Gi-Oh I think it puts an oversized emphasis, appropriately because of the setting, on what story does a card tell? When you're in a face to face moment, it's so different from browsing ebay listings. It's so different from even walking around the show and looking at showcases when you're actually face to face with another collector, when you're showing your cards and they're showing you theirs very quickly, the cards that stand out are the ones that have a great story behind them. The ones that have meaning that can be readily made legible by the collector who's sharing it with friends and counterparts. That's one of my big takeaways from the national experience that I've always felt and noticed, but it really became concrete for me this year, especially as I was sort of looking for. It is the conversation piece of a card, the con, the way a card can be an icebreaker. It can be something to start a discussion, it can be a way to connect with somebody. But in the in person setting, it's so different because you have to really compress an elevator pitch and deliver it to make the cards, meaning stand out to somebody within their very short attention span of a loud room and people talking back and forth. So the cards that would stand out to me when I would talk to somebody, when I would see what their collection looks like, are the ones that readily present a story or that the collector could quickly tell me the story about them. And all of a sudden they take on a meaning that really makes them stand out from the rest of the room. The storytelling component, I think, has been something you've been hitting on a lot just within the HOJ cast that you have talking about, Yu-Gi-Oh you bought this card, but you're giving context and the reasons for you purchasing those cards. And I think that obviously bled over into the national. Right? People know you guys, they know they use card ladder, they know you appreciate cards. They come to the card ladder booth and they want to share off either what they bought or just what they came with, I guess. Josh, like through that storytelling component, you being at the kind of epicenter of the national, with all these people coming through, like, do you feel like there was maybe a special connection with people that you've been following online Interacting with, regarding, like understanding the cards that they have and like people actually like sharing some passion and some stories behind that. Do you feel like that exchange was happening for you at the show? Yu-Gi-Oh absolutely. I always greatly enjoy the national just because, you know, the shared connection over specific Topps of cards or players and then you get into actually like communicate that in person. It's. It's just so much better of an experience. It is online. And I have two thoughts about that are related to this, about the National. One is that the national has a great way of like bringing about deals that may not have occurred online. All four of my pickups were from collectors. I knew they had the card. I could have made them offers at any point. But the forcing function of being in person and talking about the cards and the energy of like, maybe I'm willing to pay more, maybe them see me, they're willing to sell it or whatever. And so I got a lot of deals done at the national that I wouldn't have done at home, which is great. The other thing is, I feel like, you know, people always say if it's, if you can't find it at the national, you can't find anywhere. I actually find it to be quite the opposite. I find the national to be a much more limited set of what you can see. And it kind of makes it feel like you, you gotta buy something, you know, but your, your choices are very limited. When I'm at home, I can see all of ebay. I can see every premier auction, every weekly auction, every alt auction. There's thousands and thousands of options, and there's so many options that I, you know, hit this point where I'll just save my money for the next weekly auction because there'll be something that I like more. But at the national, it's like, this is the best card I've seen this whole week. I have to buy this. I've only seen 5,000 cards. This is the best one. I gotta buy this. So I actually feel the national kind of shrinks things down a bit. This is a great topic and I'm gonna, I want to expand on it a little bit. I'm glad you mentioned it. And then speaking of which, I was, I was there at the card letter booth when you bought one of your cards from someone. And I'm not going to share it because I don't know if you've shared it, but it was like the individual came by and he's like, showed you the card, gave you the price and you were like, sure. And like, Just like, I think you sell them or VIN mode or whatever, like, right on the spot and it's just like, man, like, look at that. Like, that's how easy it can be to buy a card sometimes. So I thought that was pretty. A pretty fun moment that I hadn't thought about up until you talking about some of your purchases. But, Yu-Gi-Oh there's this narrative that is like, if it's not at the national, there's no way you can find that. And I agree with you both. Or not you, Chris, because you haven't said it, but I want your reaction. But I agree with you, Josh, because I feel like we're all picky and we're very, very focused in. Yu-Gi-Oh we might. There might. We might collect a player and there might be thousands and thousands of their cards, but there's not that one or two card that we want. So I don't know, like, Chris, did you find that, like, when you were sourcing based on your, like, zone that you're in in your collecting, did you find that might have been some cards, but it's just not as prolific as, like, these narratives that are said before we go to the show made it out to be for you. Absolutely. So I'll gladly receive the credit for the forcing function idea, even though Josh literally just said it, but we can pile that up on my resume. Thank you. I like the four. I love the forcing function idea. I love this question because it certainly happened to me. The one card that I did pick up was largely driven by the fact that it was being made available in the context at this show. And I wanted some action. And I think that's a microcosm for what the show is on a larger scale. Like, Yu-Gi-Oh on an individual basis. It gives us a lot of encouragement and energy to do things that we might not have the total motivation energy to do when we're just sort of slouched over in our computer chair before we're about to fall asleep, looking at the last few ebay save searches that we still have to clear. It's a totally different energy. And that's sort of what the national is as a whole. You constantly hear people saying it refreshes their energy, it reboots their battery pack to be among all these people to sort of share in the, The. The excitement of the room and then you take that back with you and that tide you over really doesn't last a whole year, unfortunately, but it'll. It'll at least give you some hangover energy for months, I think weeks or up to months to come after the show. So I. I think the forcing function happens in the room, and then it happens outside of the room, too, as a byproduct of being in the room. What is it about the fact? Is it just because we are in proximity to cards that are similar, adjacent to existing cards in our collection, and we want action, so we feel like we need to buy those cards right in that moment, versus, like, that same card could be sitting on our watch list, and we just continue to patch auto and don't do anything about it, and we don't make the offer or whatever. Like, is there something to be said about, like, knowing the individual who has the card and then that card being available right there in the moment, that makes it easier to just acquire the card? Josh? Well, two of them that I bought, I just assumed they're from Chad. Black Hat cards. Great, great collector. I just assumed they wouldn't be for sale. And then he's like, walk up and he's like, hey, I know you really want these. Let's make a deal. I was like, of course I would have. I. I just don't. I just don't like to bother people, you know, Like, I don't want to, like, go through my Instagram and my ebay save searches and literally message every person every day like, is it for sale today? Is it for sale? You know, when you're at the national, it's like, I'm literally forced to negotiate this deal with Chad because he just asked me. Or we just. He brought the card out and it's like, okay, now we're looking at him and we're talking about a deal. So it's just. The whole premise of the show is that you're going there to literally only talk about cards with other people who collect cards. Whereas when you're at home, you got family stuff, you got other stuff going on. You're on your computer, you know, scrolling X or whatever. You're doing other stuff. You're kind of distracted at the show, the focus just really hones in on, like, cards and what cards am I after? And you start to, like, rethink what your current collection is, and it just. You just, like, reboot. Like Chris said, you're just. You're always focused on what's my next part of my collecting journey. Yu-Gi-Oh I love this. And I want to talk before we get off of this topic, I want to talk about price and cards in the room and what year both of your perspectives were on just, like, overall pricing. Obviously, we. We're going to probably keep it very general, but just to get like a state of the state. Chris, I'm like, I think 30 minutes through your first, your most recent Hoechcast and you were talking about a Jordan one of one that was offered to you, and you went back and forth on like, if you should or not, and you thought maybe, like, this card is certainly great, but it's a lot higher than it was last year and maybe it's not a right time for me because I, you know, have only so many resources. And so then that card ended up selling. But like, that was one example that I thought about as I was thinking through this. But like, what it was your general perspective on just like the room and the prices. Like, I know you're both very aggressive when it comes to like there being cards that you want and paying up for those cards. But like, Chris, like, what was your perspective of the environment and like the stickers and willingness to negotiate? Yu-Gi-Oh prices were very high on certain things and were being paid like, so. Yu-Gi-Oh the moral of that story that I told is that I hesitated and then the card was sold an hour later. So, you know, that's, that's how. That's a good recap of how the show went as a whole. I wanted to backtrack to that last topic, just give one last little thought on it, which is this. I think there's a. There's a really subtle distinction between saying that, like, the show sort of gets us to do things that we otherwise wouldn't have done versus saying the show environment brings out something that already was latent and already was there and already was something that we wanted to do. But whether because of fear or hesitation or lays or just a lack of energy, in a different environment, we don't do it. And in this environment, we do. It's the nature of the environment. It's not like the environment is creating something that wasn't already there. It was always there. The environment just produces the right context for it to come to light. You know, it's like, it's like, you know, somebody who like, becomes a great, like a great comedian who, like, when they might be funny backstage, but when they get on the stage and the lights are bright and the audience is there, that energy just comes out of them and they actually are performing at their highest level. Something about the context and the environment brings out the. What's already naturally latent sitting underneath the surface. You just need the context to bring it out. And I think the national brings out something that we all want to tap into something that we all want to do. But it's easy to procrastinate or patch auto to the side or not activate that energy when we're just sort of sitting there and there's a million things going on in our lives. But when we're in that box of the called the Donald E. Stevens center or whatever it's called, when we're there, that's when the energy gets activated. But it was always there, I think mostly. And then, Yu-Gi-Oh prices. Prices were very high, Brett, and it was tough to pay any. That's why I only came away with one card. That's why I didn't even grade any cards. Even grading feels exorbitantly expensive to me. And granted, part of that is because, you know, there's these backlogs and service levels are shut down and stuff. So I even brought a pile of cards to grade that I didn't grade. And I just. I made one relatively small pickup at the show and that was it. So that's the behavioral testament. Outside of just my opinion, quite literally, my behavior matched the idea that cards were just bright. The stuff I was looking at was pricey. Based on what I think I'd be comfortable paying. No doubt about it. It's great perspective. I want to get into, like, the scarcity Illusions of it all. I think there's no other environment that I can think of or that I'm in where you can go and spend four or five days in a space and just see incredible card after incredible card, rare card, one of ones Jordans, the best football cards ever. It's just like, that's all you're seeing because people, you know, come up to you and talk to you and it's like, you don't need to go around and like, go try to find these cards anywhere. They're everywhere. And so, like, I think I've had a little bit of a come down off of that where it's like, dude, I'm like scrolling through like all these marketplaces. I'm just like, man, like, I just saw all these, like, incredible cards. Like, they're not as cool as what I saw. So I don't know, like that environment, does it do anything for you? Maybe, Josh? Like going from a space where you're just like, only see your cards at home when in their your collection. And obviously you can look at your showcase and card ladder, but then you're in this space where like all the best of the best cards and these are cards mostly not for sale, just like that people have. They bring and they show. Does that, like, what does that do for you, like, after the show? Is that, like, does it become normal again? That, like, those cards aren't probably going to be listed and available? Like, how do you come down off of, like, that? Regular seeing just the best of the best cards for nearly a week straight. It gives me hope in this, in the space. It gives me faith that the stuff that I see at these shows, this is kind of what you're hinting at, I think the stuff that I see at the shows are with friends, with collectors who bring them to our booth and we share them. And I know I one-of-one see them for sale because they're. They're like very personal items for these people. They've spent a lot of time building up their collections. There's cards that, like, you know, I haven't seen this card in a year, and it was when you showed it to me last year. It's like this. They keep the same cards a lot of times. And the cards we see for sale on the auctions over and over are a very different set of cards than what we see, you know, walking around in people's backpacks at the shows. The auction cards are more similar to what you see at the booths at the shows. And it's a cliche, but the best cards are the ones that people don't want to sell at the National. They're walking around in backpacks, or they're literally behind the dealer tables, like in their backpacks behind where they. They have them because they want to show them off, but they don't want to sell them because they know they're trying to sell the stuff that they want to sell. Right? And so that. That always gives me hope that, like, the noise we see from Instagram, the noise that we get as a flood of sales and auctions and card ladder sales. History isn't necessarily a true representation of the hobby. It's what sells in the hobby and what, you know, is pushed by a lot of people in the hobby and the influencer influencers and such. But the real hobby to me is kind of what's walking around. Like, there's a collector, I one-of-one name his name, who came up to our booth, the most unassuming person at the national, and he has the best collection that I came across the entire show, and he would never know it because he's not on Instagram showing them off all the time or he's not auctioning them. We just. We don't even know that he has all these things, right? We know we had some of them, but then it's like, oh, he's showing us all these extra cars that we didn't know about. And that sort of lane in the hobby is my favorite part of it where there are like a lot of genuine private collectors out there that just go about their business. And this is like their one show of the year where they get to kind of really enjoy their collection and we get to enjoy it with them. Josh used the word hope when he's talking about this, Chris. And I think this is just a very interesting thing to dig into and I would love, I feel like this is a hoesh topic and I would love for you to maybe just like share some perspective where it's. The mainstream of the hobby is reporting on the big auction. We started this freaking show off with one of those. That's what everyone's talking about, the cards that are selling. But for collectors, most of the time the story is the cards that are locked away in the collection and if we can get access to the person to not try to sell us the card, but to share what that card means to them and why it's been in the collection for so long and why it's so special. Like, that's the stuff like we salivate towards. But that's not what like the broader market is talking about. They're talking about the big sales, the record breaking sales at card ladders. Reporting the biggest cards at the auction, like is, do you think there's more opportunity for those stories to be told or is it better that they're left untold and maybe just shared in these onetoone conversations once a year at shows like the National. Well, how's this for a formulation? Price is an opinion on the importance of a card. And as opinions go, it might be right and it might be wildly wrong. And if the total context window for understanding a price is only being able to look at other prices of other cards that have that people have been willing to sell, then I think it's going to end up missing a tremendous bulk of what matters. Exactly. For the reasons that Josh laid out, which is that people are much happier to sell. Like, think about it, Brett, from the consolidation point of view, when you're consolidating into a grail and you have judgment day and you there's a list of cards that will get sacrificed first and you can sort of think of the national as like this giant judgment day of cards being willing that are the first to get sacrificed and those are largely what populate display cases and what are dangled as trade bait and what are made available. And then as Josh pointed out, the stuff that's not set out, that maybe if you're really friendly with the dealer, you can sort of request, hey, what else do you have back there? And maybe they'll show you. You probably one-of-one be able to offer on it, but they'll show you. Those are the cards of great interest and great consequence to the most seasoned collectors generally, I think. And a lot of times there's. The only way you can even fully appreciate and understand them is by understanding card collecting on a much deeper level. And if your only reference point is just price histories, you're. You're going to just breeze right by some of the most special and meaningful cards just because you don't. You don't have the context to know what they are. This is a fascinating topic, and it's actually a segue into this topic of price discovery that I want to dig into. And there is this movement. And maybe it's. Movement's an aggressive word, but I try to surround myself with collectors that I feel like I can learn from and understand the way they move and the way they operate. Because at the end of the day, like, we're trying to all land cards that are meaningful to us. But then there's also this, like, the part of the game is like, we want to find value. We don't want to overspend on a card and then be pissed at ourselves because we move too fast. And there is this movement. I'm going to use the word movement. There's this movement from savvy collectors that are attracted to rare and scarce cards that have significance and meaning and don't have a sales history guard ladder. It's like, if you don't have a sales history and card ladder, it gives you like, 100 bonus points because that there's opportunity there to, like, dig in and negotiate. And it's fun because you can spend $10,000 on a card, but that has no sales history and feel like, man, I got the deal of the century. And I just think it's fun. And not a lot of people are talking about it. Maybe they are privately, but I don't feel like anyone's talking about it from a podcast perspective. Josh, when you're, like, thinking of, like this, no recent comps, like, rare and scarce, no sales history. We've already started this episode by saying, like, we don't like the flippers vortex, like, because we've seen a card too many times. It makes the card less appealing. Like, how do you think about kind of the no clean comps and no sales history when you all you have are left to your own devices where you're like, I gotta make an offer and I'm just gonna make an offer on this card because of my intuition and what I've seen or how I piece data together. Like, how are you thinking about kind of this no sales history buying in your collecting operation? Yu-Gi-Oh the initial reaction is I think that you prefer that because then it kind of gives you a clean slate to figure out the price as opposed to just like following the comps and just blindly just paying exactly what the last one was, plus or minus, you know, however the dealer works. But I think of it in terms of how easy or hard it is to find a card and acquire it, because as a seasoned collector, someone that's been in this a long time, the cards that I don't want want are the ones that I can get at any time. And so if those have a large sales history, then I'm just not going to be interested interested in it. If it has no sales history, that means the card is hard to find and it's, you know, it doesn't sell because there's not that many of them or it hasn't been a card that's been pushed by a lot of people. And I haven't seen it on Instagram 5,000 times. So those are. I just think of it in terms of that, like, as a collector, I just want stuff that other people don't know about or hasn't been unearthed or it's been sitting with a private collector for 10 years. Nobody knew they had it. Those are the cards we're all sort of like actually chasing. And then sometimes they do pop up on auction and, you know, you just sort of have to like, suck it up and outbid the person. And then now you've got this public comp that you have in your, in your collection, then sometimes that's just the way it works. Chris, when you were off, you know, let's say 12 months ago, like on this, like MJ one of one quest, you know, we. You've been very public about the fact that, like, no one was really talking about it. These cards existed, they were in collections. Maybe there wasn't sales history. You were just like, you're a Jordan collector, you collect one of ones. But then there's this like, uncertainty of value. Like, was that attractive to you during this? Like, the fact that Like a lot of these cards didn't have comps. And if they did, maybe it was from like 2008 or something. Like, how do you consider making an offer on a card that's going to get the person not to run away, but get them to respond when there isn't any clean comps around the card? Are you familiar with the idea of dynamic pricing? I am, yes. Okay. Basically the nature of that being like, different customers get a different price depending upon their particular situation. Or like in the setting of like. Or maybe a better example of dynamic pricing is like, in certain urban settings, the toll or the fee to use the road fluctuates based on how many people are using it at that time. If there's more demand for the road, it costs more. If there's less, then costs less. Also that this works for like Uber. Like you'll have to pay more if you're trying to get an Uber. And it's, it's supply and demand economic. But I thought about dynamic pricing as the metaphor when you were talking there, because that's how it works when trying to procure cards that don't have a cleanly legible price. And even if there was recent sales history, it still might be difficult. So instead my tactic as a buyer has to be tailored towards what is the price. That's the lowest price that I can pay. That will still induce them to sell me the card. So I have to sort of treat instead of just this being totally transactional. Like, well, the last one was this. And they're the average of last five is this. And that means I'll give you 90% of that and then I can maybe sell it to somebody else for 110% of that, which is fine. But this is a very different art than that. This is the art of understanding who owns the card. Understanding what it would take for them to separate from it, understanding if that price is above what I should be paying for it or if it falls within the range of what I should be paying for it. And then finding a way to reach an agreement where we land on a number that makes sense for them and makes sense for me and it's tailored to their situation. When you're playing this game, you really have to understand the owner of the card. You have to understand the collector. You have to meet them at their level. You have to understand what it would take for that card to get right out of their collection. Oh, baby, this is such a fun topic. It's so completely opposite of the way where the hobby is promoted in this just transactional mindset of buy, sell, trade, quick volume, move, move, move, where it's you want the card bad enough that you're willing to get a deep understanding of not just the card, but the individual who owns the card to understand their motivations, desires, and what makes them tick. We can figure this out through discovery, asking questions, and they could not be like buying questions. It's just questions about like, what they collect, how long they've owned this car. It's just all this data we can get from these people and then using that to our advantage. Josh, I know you have been a part of like some massive private deals both on the buying and the selling side over the course of your collecting career. Like, how important is that? Like, customization, like, getting to deeply understand, like, what makes the person on the other end tick in order to get a card to move in your direction or you to sell a card in another direction. Like, how important has that been to your, like, buying and selling success when there isn't clear data and it's not on a platform? Oh man, it's like everything to the success or Fleer of the deal. Earlier, Chris was saying something like, you know, you're talking to that private collector that comes over to the booth and you're like trying to figure out details about the car and you're asking them about them. The one thing you do not want to ask that person is what's this worth? Because that's going to immediately put them on their heels and potentially offend them to that. All that you're thinking about when this person's showing you this card is either you're trying to like buy it to make money, or you just, you want to like, put this person in a box of how much they're worth. What's this card worth? You know, how much is this? What did you pay for this, Et cetera. When the real question is like, when did you buy this card? Why did you buy this card? How does this fit inside of your collection? So I think this topic and those Topps of questions are very important when you're first trying to navigate this space we're talking about, which is not the high volume transactional space. This is more of like the collector to collector space of communication and understanding each other's collections. I think a lot of it is like avoiding the price for a while and trying to figure out, you know, why does this person have this card? You can pretty much tell. I think the three of us could tell just by looking at someone's Collection whether you should be asking them about prices and values. They'll even have like stickers on a lot of them with prices. Or you should be asking, like, how long have you had this? Would you trade this? A lot of it is trying to figure out whether you need to figure out that bottom or that price that will get them interested. And it's like the lowest that you think will get them interested, but it's something you're comfortable with. But also, like, you'll probably figure out this person will never actually just sell this for cash because they, they want something similar to come back to them. So now you have to start moving into trade mode. And that's where, you know, lately we've become more willing to take on cards that we might not have forever. Because you need the trade bait. Especially like really nice, rare, scarce pieces are great for trade bait. So I think a lot of it's like figuring out, am I trying to navigate some sort of price that gets them excited or a trade a card I might have that we can go back and forth on and, you know, share the commonalities of our collection. So I think a big part of it is not minimizing that person's collection down to, like, how much it's worth. I think that's a big part of it. Those are great thoughts. Before we move off of this topic, I wanted to ask you, Chris, about just the offer price on cards and like, the buyer's price or their seller's price, even if they don't have it like in their head. And like, how do we find like, common ground? Like when you are making an offer on a card and you don't want to them to not respond or them to run away. Like, what are the things that you do? Obviously you mentioned, like, I'm trying to get this card for the lowest possible amount that you can afford and you're trying to land it. And if they agree to it, then you feel good about it. But like, is there anything you're doing outside of like, your own research before you make that offer? Because I feel like the offer in us getting to the point where we need a card, we're always intimidated by like making that offer price when the offer on the card when it's not available. Because one, we don't want them to like, negatively impact them where they don't respond to us. Two, we don't want them to accept it right away. Cause then we're like, did we offer too much? Like, you've done a lot of these. Like, is There any feedback that you can share just based on like what has worked or what has been successful for you in the past? Josh said it. Which is when you're dealing in cards like these, money usually isn't going to be the lubricant that facilitates the deal. And you can even make very generous cash offers and the person still will come back to you and say no thanks, but if you can find this card that I really really want and it even might be worth less than the cash offer, if you can find that card, then we can transact. And that's totally different from cards that have a regularity in terms of how often they appear for sale publicly. That also will influence how cash liquid they'll be privately too. Like if I have a card that I know is going to sell at least once every few months and somebody makes a cash offer over the last comp, why wouldn't I take it? Because then I can always just go buy another one. The cash lubricates those Topps of deals. But when you're dealing with one of ones, when you're dealing with like historic cards that come from very important pieces of the hobby's history that are just loaded with stories that give the owner so much more than a number on a screen to be proud of at that point. The thing that facilitates those deals is really giving them something that they really, really want that they quite haven't been able to find or haven't had the time to go out and find or just don't have. You know, for whatever reason they haven't been able to find it. And so I was thinking to myself what percentage I've accumulated about 40 Michael Jordan 1 of ones. What percentage of those were cash transactions versus what percentage of those were facilitated by trade? I think at least 75 to 80% are trade where I just happened to have the card or I was able to go out and locate a card that the person on the other end of the deal had really wanted for a long time. I think it's, it's, it's at least 75 to 80% was that and then the rest which were cash deals. Almost all of those were situations where I was giving somebody a cash payments that either was just very strong, very generous for what the perceived market value might have been at that time and or because that person was going to take that cash and then just use that cash to go get a different card that they really really wanted. So it's a very different transactional landscape. Josh, any closing remarks before we move on? To the next topic. Oh, Chris was saying he's Beckett up 40 MJ101s, and I think we're just gonna gloss over that part, which is insane. But, like, I think he. He can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's slowed down since he's lost some of those other things to trade for them. And now he's hitting a point where it's only cash that he can. And he. Or he's having to trade some of those one on ones, which is. Which is like, a really fun thing to watch. And I'm listening to his latest episode as well, and he's sort of like, weaving through. Like, how do I get more of these without giving up what I've already built? And it's just like, I just love this hobby. It's just so great watching. Just watching, like, the collection completely turn over and, like, trying to figure out how to navigate. It's just like this constant forever marathon of trying to improve your collection. Like, all we're trying to do, literally, is just make our collection better every day. That's all it is. It is all it is. And that is actually, like, since you're at this pivotal point and Chris will. Will put. patch auto back to you where it's like, I think, like, you've been very apparent. I don't know if it's apples to apples on this, but I feel like you had this mission of taking your very, very strong Michael Jordan collection that had the Topps of cards that anyone who knows Jordan desire. It was. You had a collection of that, and you turn that collection into a Michael Jordan one of. One of collection. And my thoughts are probably like, people are like, trading. How's he able to do this? It was probably because Chris had, like, some of the most desirable Jordan cards and was able to turn that for cards that no one was really talking about. But Chris had conviction. You've run those plays, and the defense knows it now. And you can't run that again because you're. You're out of luck. So your desire to acquire more of these Jordans has not gone down, I would imagine it's intensified. Like, this is where you're cooking. You love this stuff. Like, knowing that these cards are expensive and your money doesn't grow on trees. Like, how are you thinking about. And maybe I should just listen to the rest of the Hoechcast, but how are you thinking about making sure you're not saying no to opportunities on cards that you really want just because you don't have Stuff to trade. Yu-Gi-Oh that's definitely. I ran out of the things that were above the fold on Judgment Day and now everything is below the fold. So that's tough. I'm still making trades right now. And actually having Jordan one of Ones makes it, I think, on balance, easier to get other Jordan one of ones when you can make that type of swap. But, you know, but also you'd be surprised at what people might actually want. So there is a collector who's tucked away in the mountains of the Netherlands who had and has several great Michael Jordan one of Ones, some of which have been traded to me for other Michael Jordan one of ones. This is a guy who would only trade. So I actually employed a concierge to fly over there to make a swap and he had to like drive up mountains for hours to get to these at this guy's house. Just crazy stuff. But it been very cool and I'm very grateful that he was able to do this with me from across the globe to make these deals. But one of the cards that he was looking for, so most of the time he was like, for one of the first deals we did, he was like, if you could go get these Jordan one of Ones, I'd be willing to trade them for these other ones that you want. And that's what we did, but for a different deal, which was like very close. We were almost to a deal. There was one more card that I wanted, and we were just trying to figure out how to make it work. And he was like, here's what I want. I want. I one-of-one say what the card is, but he said, I want a Patrick Mahomes card. And he told me what the card is. I was like, oh. I was like, it wasn't even a numbered card, but it's an expensive card, but it wasn't a numbered one. And he was like, if we can add that to the deal, that will get this deal done. So I just went out and I bought that card and then I had it hand delivered to him and that's what he wanted. So, like, I would just say, you don't assume that we know what the other side of the deal wants. Sometimes it can be just a Patrick Mahomes card that, that he really wanted that he just wasn't able to find near him. And that he. And that, that's. That. That's something interesting. Dealing with the international trade counterpart is that they don't have nearly the same confidence and ease of access to cards that we do, because domestic shipping and just Our experience, we can go to these local shows, we can do in person deals. It's much easier for us to transact all the time. But people who are overseas, you know, who have to sort of rely on the shipping system and honestly many of them, I found are distrustful of it and they really want the White glove service. They, if they're going to do a trade, they need somebody to come meet them and do this Sepia had that happen three, four, five times. So when that's the case, you know, sometimes it will be a card that might surprise you. Oh, that's the one. All right, I can go get that one. HOJ is employing people to pick up cards in the mountains of the Netherlands. Nothing ceases to amaze me with you, good sir. I want to round out the conversation by just talking about like influence and going to a show like the national and not necessarily like seeing brand activations or like walking the Fleer and seeing what's in dealer showcases or watching people create content and share stuff. I'm not talking about like influence from that perspective, but it's mostly like these one to one conversations with people we know and respect from the Internet who are sharing their collections and we're having dialogue and were excited about what they're doing, we're telling them about what we're doing and there's just, it's like a great marriage of just card conversation and it only really happens at the National. I find I'm curious like did anything kind of change your perspective of like what you're collecting, how you're collecting, quantity of collecting cards specifically through the experience at the National? Josh, like maybe share a little perspective on just like if anything changed or not for you after that week. Probably just once again that I'm not aggressive enough, I'm not buying enough cards, I'm not getting all the ones that I want quick enough because every time, every year they just get more expensive and harder to get. So, you know, I wish I would have bought more five nationals ago. And so each national that comes up I'm like, I need to go home and like get more of this type of card or whatever that card that's been. But I haven't dan this person. But I need to go back and do it. So it's always like a reminder to like kickstart and get my, get me going to like add more to the PC or sell the car that I've been trying to sell to get the cash to buy another one, etc. It's just a Good. Like, kick to get me going on buying more, you know. Do you have any cards specifically in your history of the national that you still think about today where you're just like, I should have bought this card. Not like at the national specifically, other than like just every card in the. Every dealer case. And I'd just be like the richest person ever, you know, if I just, like, cleaned out 2019 Nashville, then I would just be Zebra rich and I could buy any card I want. Rose colored glasses. Chris, what about you? Anything change for you at the show, like, desire to do more of what you're doing or change moving another direction just based on people having conversations with you that you know and trust? No, not really. But I think that we're seeing right now something that did sort of stand out to me as I happened to find out who a few buyers were of rather high profile cards that sold was that I was like, oh, I know these people. These aren't like some mysterious, shadowy new figures with infinite bank accounts who are suddenly buying all the cards? Like, no, these are people who have built up large equities in their collections or as people operating hobby businesses. And this timing, this energy, this season, this peak or part of the cycle has induced these same people to pay much more money now for these same cards that might have been available two or three years ago, and they might have had the money on hand to buy them then, but they didn't. So that's one thing that I took away is that. That the. You know, it's just. It's interesting to me to see that it's the same players but playing to kind of like to Joshua, but playing the game more aggress right now. Absolutely. All right, before we get out of here, I want to give you both the space. If there's any recent cards, whether you acquired them at the national or not, any pickups that you want to share and add any context to why you bought the card. Josh, we'll start with you. Well, I'll keep this specific to national, since that's the main topic. And these are my three, like, graded pickups. I had another one, but I cracked it out because I like. I'm a psycho and I. I like a lot of. There's certain cards I prefer raw and I cracked it out. And Alex hidden away. This is a 2020 Todd Gurley Black finite. He's on the Falcons. I may have, like, shied away from this before because he's not in the Rams jersey, but I'm so deep into girly Cards that Chad was nice enough to sell me that I'm like, well, I have to. I might as well just get them all. This is the one you were talking about, Brett. This is the 2021 Optic Gold Vinyl Tyreek. I now have five Tyreek Optic Vinyls. And it's mostly just. It's just random that it turned out that way, that just. They just keep coming up and I just keep buying them. And that was a fun deal. Like, the seller you mentioned was like, off to the side. And I was like, in another conversation, he's like, thousand bucks or I can't remember what it was. I was like, it was a thousand. I remember. And then I was like, I'll venmo you in a minute. Let me finish this other thing. And then also from Chad, 2016 select black, number three in the set. So this is the first appearing in the set. Todd Gurley 101. And he one-of-one this at auction. And I, like, Beckett off the auction because we sort of like, go back and forth. And then he was feeling generous that day and sold it to me, so now I gotta sell him something. Cool. Awesome. It's always good to do deals with pals. Good. True of cards. Congrats. Chris, what about you? Well, it wasn't too long ago that I showed a PC player that would resonate very or a pickup of a. That I Beckett up of a PC player of the other half of the football card podcast, that being a Priest Holmes ultra masterpiece that I Beckett up. Well, so now this one's for the other host. All right, this is the 1999 FLIR Focus Masterpiece, one of. One of Peyton Manning. And then I got that pretty recently. And then I got this pretty recently too, which is the Emmett Smith from the same set. I have never seen that before. That's the best. I love that. Yep. Very excited about these. The design is very subtle, but it has that purple masterpiece, one of one foil that Flir used in the late 90s and the early 2000s. Is it the exact same, like, purple? It's the purple. I don't know. It's. It's. I. I didn't like, drop it into Photoshop and say, like, what's the color gradient here? It's like, Roy, it's like royal purple. Yes. There you go. I would describe it as like, a royal color. It's not like a flat, like, sun's color purple. It's more royally blue purple. So were those those deals at the National? No, no, both those I got before the National. Awesome. You know what? I felt like I wasn't quite done talking about the National. I knew you both were going to be here joining me today. I felt like there's a lot, a lot of good conversation and dialogue from that, and hopefully the listeners got some good perspective here. This was Card Ladder confidential, episode number 22. Appreciate everyone tuning in. Talk to you next month. Maybe next week I'll be done talking about the National. Maybe not. There is so much we can learn from being at an event like that, and I think having these sorts of conversations, especially with collectors like Chris and Josh, are certainly helpful. That was a great chat. Appreciate all your support. Go sign up for Card Ladder. Go hit the follow button. Support stacking slabs. Appreciate you. Take care. Talk to you soon.