Box Prices Are FALLING FAST… This Is GREAT for Collectors

It was just a month ago that the hobby's frustration with box prices was at an all time high. Negativity about the high cost of sealed product and the overall direction of the hobby had reached a peak moment. As I talked about on this channel, social media was filled with collectors saying that they would never buy a new box again because prices were so far out of control that it was beyond comprehension and these collectors had a reason to be mad. Topps Chrome Football had just come out and prices were skyrocketing and it was impossible to find a hobby box anywhere for less than $1,000 or more. And of course, Topps Chrome Basketball prices remained in outer space as well. But since then, things have started to change. Over the last month, Topps Chrome Football box prices are down more than 20% and new releases since then are peaking, but then falling back quicker than ever before. What happened and what does this mean for the future of wax prices and the hobby? I'm going to tell you what I think now. The Jeff Wilson show is brought to you by Arena Club, the official home of Slab packs. Now available every day, Slab packs offer an exciting way to collect graded cards with confidence. Plus, every pack comes with an instant offer to buy your Slab. Don't miss out. Explore the latest Slab packs and more by downloading the Arena Club app. Just search Arena Club in the App Store and use promo code SCI for 20% off your first purchase. Here we go from the Arena Club Studio Inside Cards hq. Man, it is, it is something to reflect back on what April was like in this sports card hobby. Guys, I'm talking only a few weeks ago, right? It was the best of times and it was the worst of times. And honestly, I think as we go into the months and years ahead, we might actually look back at April of 2026 as kind of this peak moment in the hobby. And in a lot of ways, some good and some bad, but a very impactful month that in, in some ways may have actually shaped the future of what the hobby is going to look like. So what happened in April? First of all, there were a lot of people in the hobby that were feeling great in April. If you had a high end collection of cards, oh my goodness, your cards were at an absolute peak moment in April. And I'm not suggesting that those peak moments are necessarily slowing down. There's been record prices in May as well. There's really no sign right now that I can see that the top end of the market is cooling off. It seems like it's hotter than ever. So These peak prices may continue for some time ahead, but April was a moment where it just seemed like the headlines were bigger and bolder and stronger than ever before. You had record prices being set practically every day. You had so much conversation about where prices were and where prices were headed. It was just a, a big moment for those with big collections. Also, card shops and breakers were having a big moment as well. In fact, most card shops and breakers likely had a record first quarter. And going into April they were feeling great about their businesses. And of course, April was the month where Topps got the NFL license. Breathing new life into football cards. Coming out with the first licensed Topps football card product in a decade. With Topps Chrome Football, which released of course in April, Topps marketing was in full force. The hype was crazy. So much buzz on social media and even in the mainstream media talking about the release of the new Topps Chrome Football. You had giant billboards in Times Square. It was crazy how much attention was being paid to this product. It was an exciting month for high end collectors, an exciting month for shops, an exciting month for breakers, an exciting month for the industry. And meanwhile, the average hobbyist was feeling shut out by a lot of this, because while all the excitement was there, so were peak prices. And as that average hobbyist walked into a card shop like Cards hq, when the new Topps Chrome Football came out and tried to buy a hobby box, they had sticker shock prices as much as $1200 at their peaks for a hobby box of Topps Chrome Football. The peak moment was definitely in. It was a combination of so much excitement for the new Topps Chrome Football, so much momentum that the hobby had early in this year. Overall you saw grading, hitting record numbers, everything hitting record numbers. And of course you had the Topps Industry Conference, which timing wise, took place in early April and just fueled the hype and the excitement. They brought content creators to the TOPS Industry Conference this year, so you had more coverage than, than ever before. And of course a lot of the Topps Industry Conference was focused on the release of Topps Chrome Football. You had record hype, you had record marketing, and you had card shops and breakers really buying in. Card shops and breakers bought as much of the product as they possibly could. And of course none of them got that much on the initial wave 1 release from TOPS, which means that they were both buying on the secondary market and they were buying Wave two, Wave three, et cetera, releases from Tops. With the prices escalating and escalating and escalating in terms of the wholesale that card shops and breakers were having to pay. And of course in the back of everybody's mind was the success that Topps Chrome Basketball had had. Let's not forget that Topps just got the NBA license last October and they came out with Topps Chrome Basketball last December. And that was a very successful product where prices shot up. But with that product the prices stayed relatively high and in fact have continued to escalate. Some so people, so the breakers, the card shop owners, the sealed wax investors said to themselves, Topps Chrome Football is going to do the same thing. And they bought and they bought and they paid the high prices and they stocked the showcases. And now they, and even we here at Cards HQ are facing an environment where those prices are declining and money is actually being lost by a lot of people, a lot of card shop owners, a lot of breakers and a lot of flippers on this product and other products right now as prices are starting to drop. Now that comparison by the way of Topps Chrome Football to Topps Chrome Basketball, that wasn't the best comparison for people to be making. There was a big difference there, a couple of big differences. One was timing. Topps Chrome Basketball came out during the NBA season. And as the NBA season continued to unwind in the months after that product came out, the interest in everything going on in the NBA continue to help fuel that product. Topps Grown Football released in the dead of the off season. Topps Chrome Basketball as well, especially fueled by some incredible rookies. Cooper Flagg, Con Knippel, Dylan Harper, we got to see those rookies careers develop and their incredible rookie year achievements build after that product was released. So the excitement about the rookies in that product actually built after the product came out. Not to mention that you had veterans such as Wemby and Shay Gilgis Alexander in that product as well, and LeBron who had great years and they had autographs in the product that a lot of people wanted to chase their first licensed Topps autographs, Topps Chrome autographs in some cases ever. And they wanted to chase those as well, they were actually in most cases ever, they were excited to chase all of those players too. So a different time when Topps Chrome Basketball came out versus Topps Chrome Football and that's some of the reason why the Topps Chrome Football hype died a lot quicker. And now prices are falling, prices are falling pretty hard for a lot of people. So Topps Chrome Football when it first came out, it hit ebay in early April, presale for people who had bought it, who had been able to order the boxes online, had hit ebay for around $600 a hobby box. Actually a, I think a relatively reasonable price for the product. But a couple of weeks later it was peaking on ebay for over $1,000 a hobby box. It was PE peaking in card shops for as much as $1,200 or even more for a hobby box. 12 to $1,300 a hobby box. Now in card shops and on ebay, it's the down to around $800 a hobby box. So it had a big ride up, but it is down well over 20% in fact 30% plus from its peaks that it was at just a month ago. It's a pretty hard fall for that product. It's not the only product that has been falling over the course of the last month. How about 20, 25, 26 Bowman basketball. Bowman Basketball came out a few weeks ago. It actually peaked at presale when that box first came out, it was the highest it has been. It has dropped consistently since the product's release. It released at around 600. That's the price you could find it at in card shops and online. Right when the product came out and hit store shelves. Today, it's closer to $400. So that product is down close to 33% since its release. And it didn't go up after its release. It pretty much just started to drift downwards. 20, 25, 26 tops cosmic Chrome basketball, similar story. It is down 25+% since its release a few weeks ago as well. 20, 26 Topps Chrome Black Baseball. It has been more stable, but it is also down slightly from the prices that it came out of the gate at. So that's interesting. Four major new product releases in the last 30 days, football, two basketball and a baseball, that have all actually been going down. And in fact, in the case of the more recent ones, the two basketball products and the baseball product, they started going down as soon as they hit store shelves. They never went up after they hit store shelves. They just started to come down once they hit store shelves. This is different than what we've been used to the last several months. This is not the pattern that we saw with Topps Chrome Basketball releases last year. And this is not the pattern we've seen with a lot of releases, even a lot of the baseball releases. Over the course of the last year. We've tended to see a pattern of wax prices come out high and they go higher and they go higher and they go higher. But that's not what has happened the last 30 days since the hobby hit that peak frustration moment with where wax prices were? And by the way, these drops on these recent products that I just mentioned, there's a lot of hobby shops and breakers that are getting hurt by these drops. There's a lot of flippers that are getting hurt by these drops. And I could tell you from personal experience at Cards hq, we took a fairly large position in these products. And with a product like 2025 Topps Chrome Football hobby, we're what we're selling it for today in some cases is not profitable for us compared to how much of it we bought, or it's kind of barely profitable for us at this moment. What will this product do in the future? We'll see. I think there's a chance that that product might kind of stabilize and maybe it will tick back up down the road. But there are a lot of hobby shops right now and a lot of breakers that in each of these products took a big position and were surprised to see prices come down as quickly as they came down. But as I look out towards the future of the hobby, I think actually this is a good thing. And I think that this is going to make the hobby landscape more sustainable for collectors and hopefully for everybody, hopefully for business owners as well. As we look out over the next year, two years and beyond. What we saw in recent months before this last 30 days is we saw so much hype driving the price of these new products and so many flippers getting involved in the market. We saw hobby shops and breakers buying into these products at really high wholesale prices on subsequent waves of these products being sold, in part because there was so much hype around these products and the secondary market prices had gone so high that the wholesale prices had raised along with them. But hobby shops and breakers wanted more because it seemed for a while there like everything was just going up and would continue to go up. But the last 30 days have taught us all a lesson that that is not the case. And when you get into an environment where flippers are selling to flippers and your everyday collector is getting priced out, you get to an environment where it's not going to be sustainable. And I think that has caught up with the hobby when it comes to sealed product prices over the course of the last 30 days. The idea that a lot of flippers and card shop owners and breakers had in the back of their mind over the last year, that if you buy it, it's going to keep going up, pump the brakes on that. Because the last 30 days has only has shown us that hype will only take things so far. And ultimately you have to have the collector base that's willing to pay the prices for the product to sustain it. And when the prices get too far up into the stratosphere, where the average collector walking into a card shop sees those box prices and winces, and I can't possibly buy that box and feel good about it, that's the moment when you have to worry about whether the price of what those products are priced at is really going to be sustainable or not. And we've seen over the last 30 days that some of those prices were simply not sustainable. And by the way, Topps warned everybody about this at the TOPS industry conference. They put a big chart up on the screen that showed the escalation in price of some recent wax products. And they kind of identified on this chart showing like, here's where it was released at, and then here's how it went up and up and up. And it said it got into phases of prices where things became unsustainable. And they said at the industry conference they like some secondary market appreciation after release that shows that demand is outweighing supply and that shows that people are really interested in the product and that they did a good job of putting the product together. Some escalation in the secondary market after a product is released is healthy, but only within limits. And we saw too much escalation in recent months. And of course, it is worth noting that as Topps said this on this stage and they said, look, we don't want wax prices to get too high because they get unsustainable. Well, TOPS was also at the same time wholesaling the boxes for prices that were up there at the unsustainable levels. But in fairness to tops, they were doing this because that's where the secondary market held had taken things. And so they were wholesaling based upon the secondary market at the time. But the last 30 days have showed us that there truly is a level of sealed product pricing where prices can become unsustainable. And if the prices sit up there for too long, the hobby's gonna respond by just not buying and paying those prices. And when you have flippers selling to flippers and there's not the hobbyist, there's not the collector at the end of the chain who's actually buying the box to open it and consume it, then the prices aren't going to stay that high. And by the way, the same thing holds true for breaks if people aren't buying the break spots at the prices that they need to pay for the break spots in order to sustain where the break spots are price wise, then break spot pricing will fall as well. Well, it's the same thing, you know, you're going to see, you see. And we've seen breaks, we've seen breaks go down in price. You know, at Cards hq, our breaks, we do these random team dollar auction breaks. So we don't set firm pricing. Rather we kind of let the market decide, let the people in the stream decide what they're willing to pay for a break spot. And what we've seen is that with these products I just mentioned, people are just simply paying less today. They're willing to pay less today than what they were willing to pay a few weeks ago or a month ago. And the breakers that price their break spots at a fixed price, like a pick your team fixed price, a lot of them have had to lower their break spot pricing on all of these products I just mentioned over the course of the last month because they're not filling their breaks anymore. They're not selling out at the break spots that they used to be at. So we've all, everyone, everyone within the industry to a degree has taken this on the chin a little bit over the course of the last month. And it's really collectors saying we're not going to pay those prices. So prices are starting to fall. Hype can only carry prices so high. And where hype takes prices to can become unsustainable. And then prices come down when collectors are not buying and collectors haven't been buying. And now prices are coming down to a level that's starting to get more reasonable now. Personally, I would love to see Topps Chrome Football and Topps Chrome Basketball hobby boxes at a price of maybe 6 to $700 a hobby box. I think that is a good price as to where those products should be. Now some of you listening are still going to say that's outrageously high. It's still high, that's still an expensive product. And look, I totally get the fact that there's a lot of collectors that don't want to drop 6 to 700 for a hobby box. But to me that feels more attainable certainly than twelve hundred dollars a hobby box felt, which is where the price of that product was a month ago. Six to seven hundred a hobby box. And then what that then means, you know, hangers would be at, blasters would be at, mega boxes would be at which would be also, you know, a lot more sustainable. Than they, than what they were a few weeks ago as well. That to me feels decent. And it seems like the product is readjusting in price down towards that. I don't know that it's ever going to get quite down. I don't think it's probably going to go all the way down to 600 a hobby box. But we've got it. We have 20, 25 tops chrome football in our showcases at Cards HQ today. For $825 a hobby box, it may continue to go down. We may get down to closer to 700 or $750 in the not too distant future. Time will tell, we'll see where it heads. But that's starting to feel a little bit better to me for the value that you actually get out of the box. And ultimately what this comes down to is collectors want to have a fighting chance to open a product and to get their money back. And with Topps Chrome Football, when those boxes are up at $1200 plus, it's real difficult to open one of those boxes and get your money back. You're basically hoping for an ultra low numbered top rookie parallel or like a Jackson dart out of 10. Or you're hoping for one of the super short print case hits and you got to get one of the best like the Kaijus or the Tecmos. Because even like an Ultraviolet or a Genie which are still hard to hit, those are still case hits. Even those aren't paying for your box. So the chances of opening up a box of one of those boxes at twelve hundred dollars and getting your money back out of it are so slim. If Those boxes are 6 to $700, you got more of a fighting chance. A Jackson Dart auto will get you close to that range. Even a base one. You know, a reasonably low numbered card of one of the top rookies is going to get you up there a case hit. Most of the case hits are going to get you up towards that. So you've got a reasonable chance of getting your money back out of one of those boxes if they're closer to $600 than closer to $1200, which they were not too long ago. For the ecosystem to be healthy for box prices to be sustainable for for collectors, we need collectors to have a reasonable chance of being able to open up a box and get some good value in return. And that certainly doesn't mean that they will every time. Look, opening sealed product is always going to be a losing proposition as a whole. It just is. And that's okay. That's really how it has always been going back decades and decades. But there's a tolerance that collectors are willing to take. There's a, there's kind of a risk tolerance that people are willing to invest. If people believe, hey, I'm going to pay $700 for this box and I've got a 25% chance of getting my money back out of it, that's probably going to be fine. For most collectors, that is probably within their risk tolerance of saying, yeah, I'll give it a shot and maybe I'll hit something huge like a $10,000 card and just have a wonderful experience, right? But if it's more like, hey, I'm going to open up this box and I've got a 5% chance or less of getting my money back out of it, that's when we're in that unsustainable territory, in my opinion. So giving collectors a 5 fighting chance, some chance doesn't have to be a huge chance, but like a 20, 25% chance of getting the value back out of the box. That's where we need to be for this thing. In my opinion, to be sustainable, we also need slow and steady growth. Topps was right about this at the industry conference. The sign of accurate pricing and a healthy market is a product being released and then it's slowly escalating in value. That's what you want to see. You want to see a hobby box of Topps Chrome Football come out of the gate at $599 a box. And then because of the, the interest in the product and the fact that Topps did a really good job assembling the product, it's got a good autograph list, it's got good case hits, all the makings of a good product. You want to see it go from $599 a box to $650 a box to $700 a box. And maybe eventually, you know, a year after release, it's still going well, maybe it's up to 750 or $800 a box. That's what you want to see. That would be the sign of healthy progression. Slow but steady growth after a product release is a sign of healthy progression. What is unhealthy is what we saw with Tops Chrome football, where it's $600 a box pre sale on ebay. I mean, and then all of a sudden it's, it's, you know, up to all the way up to 12 to 13 hundred dollars in hobby shops a few weeks after release. And now all of a sudden it's back down to $800 and may be going lower. That's not the sign of a healthy product. And when that happens, everybody to a degree gets burned. The collectors who bought boxes at 1200 bucks, now they feel silly that they could buy a box for $800. The hobby shops and the breakers that bought a bunch wholesale based on wholesale pricing, that was above where the boxes are now. That's not healthy for those hobby shops or their. Or those breakers and their businesses whatsoever at all. And the flippers who participated in this whole thing and flipped the boxes up from 600 and kept flipping them and flipping them and the secondary market got them the way up to $1,200. Will those flippers who were buying the boxes at $11,000 and $1,200 and now they flip out of them for 800 bucks. That's not good for them either. Everybody loses in a scenario where you have big swings up and big swings down on products in the sports card market. And by the way, this is also the same is true with singles. The same is true. Like I hate seeing, you know, the. The single prices that shoot up because a player gets super hyped and then fall back hard. You know, as soon as the hype on the player dies or they get injured or, you know, whatever happens, their team gets eliminated from the playoffs. That happens a lot in the singles market. And it's something that people get hurt on those types of huge hypes up and huge falls back hurt people. Slow but steady growth, everybody benefits from. Everybody wins. Collectors win, shop owners win, breakers win, even flippers win. Everybody wins. If prices come out of the gate for boxes for singles, whatever they are, at a certain level, and then you see slow and steady growth in the months ahead from that level, that is sustainable, that is healthy. That is what I want to see as a business owner. I want to be able to confidently buy boxes at wholesale, knowing that I'm paying a reasonable wholesale price. And I think the product is going to be steady with some. With some slight growth. That, as a business owner, is great for me. And as a collector, that should be a good feeling as well, knowing that you can buy a box on release day and it's not going to drop 50%, you know, or 30% in the weeks after release day. That should be a good thing for everybody. And I hope that the lessons that have been learned from the last month will actually lead us back there. And I think that it might, because here's what's happened. Over the last 30 days, there have been a number of card shops and breakers that have been hurt by the fact that they bought into some of the products that I mentioned before at high prices. Topps Chrome Football, Bowman Basketball, Topps Cosmic Chrome Basketball. They bought in at high prices and prices have been coming down and there are going to be card shop owners and breakers that are going to be upside down on these products. And I think what this will do flippers as well. And I think what this will do is I think this will make everybody a little more cautious. I think this will make everybody realize not every product, even though the hobby is as hot as it has ever been, that doesn't mean that every new sealed product is going to be a winner. And that doesn't mean that the hype fueled incredibly high prices are actually going to be sustainable. Even though the hobby's hot, that doesn't mean that sealed product that is priced so high that collectors can't get value out of it is going to sustain at those prices. So I think you're now, after the painful lessons of the last 30 days, I think you're now going to see a more cautious group of card shop owners and breakers that are going to be a little bit more mindful as to what they're willing to pay for for sealed product on the wholesale level. I think you're going to have flippers that are going to be a little bit more cautious as well. And I think as a result of that, you're not going to see products coming out quite as hot as they had been for the several months prior. I think prices are going to settle down a little bit at release and you're not going to see the big escalation after release that we saw with Topps Chrome Football. And if that, if I'm right about how that pattern is going to look as this year goes on, that's going to be a lot healthier overall for the market. Now, of course, this will vary on somewhat on a product by product basis. Some products naturally are going to be more hype coming out of the bat because they have one particular rookie everybody's chasing, I'm sure. For example, when Topps Chrome Update Basketball releases later this summer with the Cooper Flag and the Concanipple NBA Debut patch, that product, yeah, that one's probably going to be driven wild by hype. And that product, until that Cooper Flag patch is pulled and the Concan Nipple patch is pulled, that product will probably kind of do the Topps Chrome Football cycle of shooting up to the moon. And then once the, you know, once the big cards are pulled, it's probably going to fall back pretty hard again. That will probably happen with that product. But outside of that product and certain products that are just unbelievably hyped because of a particular chase, hopefully those are far and few between and hopefully for most product releases. Card shops breakers flippers will remember the lesson from the last 30 days and will be a little bit more mindful about what they're willing to pay wholesale for these products. And hopefully this will lead to more slow and steady growth and prices coming out at sustainable levels out of the gate with these new products as opposed to products coming out hot and high and then quickly dropping off, as we have seen. And by the way, even if you are still out priced by box prices, even if you're hearing all of this and you're like, well that's fine that prices dropped 25% on some of these products, but they're still too high for me. Couple of words of advice. First of all, retail products have actually gotten better. Topps has done a good job of putting some quality cards and quality hits into hangers Blasters mega boxes. Consider those products. There was somebody who did an analysis that I saw on Twitter not too long ago where they bought 20 hanger boxes for the same price as a single hobby box of Topps Chrome Football. And they opened all of it and they showed that the 20 hanger boxes were by far a better value in terms of what they got out of it than the one hobby box. So there's actually some good stuff in retail. So don't sleep on retail. Second of all, there's actually a lot of good breaks right now that are pretty good value. I can tell you right now some of our breaks here at Cards HQ you can get into some of our breaks at low prices on some of these products. Now is actually a pretty decent time to be buying into breaks because there's a lot of breakers that took big inventory positions in some of these products and you can actually find some pretty good value spots now in breaks. So consider checking those out. And third, buy singles. The singles market right now there's a lot of great deals to be found on singles that are coming out of all of the products that I just mentioned. You can find some awesome Topps Chrome features football singles on the market right now at reasonable prices. The price of a lot of the key autos in that product and the case hits, they've all been coming down as well. And if you want to pick up some really cool case hits or or autos of your favorite players. You can find some pretty decent deals right now if you look around online or if you look around at a card shop like Cards hq. Whether it's Top Scrum Football or Tops, Cosmic Chrome Basketball or Bowman Basketball, there's a lot of singles right now. They're actually pretty good value that are worth checking out. So there you go. It's going to be interesting to see the effects that all of this has in the long term on the hobby, but I'm hoping that what we've seen over the last month actually leads to a more sustainable future for collectors, better sealed product prices. And hey, as a collector myself, I'm hoping to be able to pick up a few more boxes from the showcases of my own store of Cards hq, take them home with the kids, rip them at night, and not worry quite as much about the price that I paid. Because hopefully those prices will look like a little bit of a better value going forward. I think they will. What are your thoughts? Let me know in the YouTube comments what you've seen in terms of wax prices over the last month and where you think things go from here. And don't forget the full length episode of these Jeff Wilson Shows are available on YouTube on the Jeff Wilson show channel on YouTube. They're also available on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts. So please make sure you you subscribe to the Jeff Wilson show everywhere. Thanks for listening. I'll see you soon with my next one. Take care.