Interview With Ezra Levine, CEO of Mascot, On Creating a More Efficient Way to Sell and Manage Cards Online; 1979 OPC Hockey Card Case Back on Auction After Non-Payment; Playing "Blind Rankings" Again

You're listening to Cards to the Moon, a podcast about trading cards from both a collector and investor perspective. We hope you'll stick around for the ride as we take a deep dive into the state of the hobby, share some hot takes, hopefully some useful advice and fun stories along the way. Hey guys, welcome back to Cards to the Moon. My name is Clark from 5cardguys.com and 5cardguys on Instagram and YouTube, posting with me as usual, as John, and you can find him on IG at tradeyouatrecess. Hyung's away for this episode, but he should be back with us next week, and I forgot to mention this is episode 250. All right, and in this episode 250, we actually have an interview with Ezra Levine, the CEO of Mascot, which is a great online tool and platform that can help sell and manage your cards online. Now, we get into how Mascot does this in the interview, but I also had a chance to catch up with Ezra and get his thoughts on the hobby in general as well. And I mentioned this early in the interview, but if you've been listening to our podcast since season one, and we're about to wrap up season four this year, but Ezra, he was on our podcast before and he was our second guest ever, right behind Chris Costa of Costa Cards, who was our first guest. So John, I don't know if you remember those times. Those were early, early, that was three years ago, three to four years ago. It's crazy. Yeah. But yeah, and so, you know, what was surprising to me was that Ezra remembered chatting with us three years ago. And yeah. And he's like, hey, how's it going? We're just catching up right before we actually started recording. So that was kind of cool. And yeah, just we caught up with him during the interview and in particular how he went from being, back then he was CEO of Collectible to now being the CEO of Mascot. So yeah, stay tuned for that. But off the top, I know we've all heard of buyers not paying for a card after winning an auction, right? Maybe you've experienced this yourself like I have, but this story probably has to be one of the most egregious case of a buyer not paying for something he won. And that's, I don't know if you saw the headline today, but remember the guy who bid $3.72 million US for the sealed case of the 1979 Opeechee hockey cards. He didn't pay. And now it's going back up on the auction block. And what makes this story worse is that the buyer, if you remember, he was in the press talking about how he won and how he essentially wanted to flip it right away, except he was finding a hard time finding buyers to pay more than what he paid for, right? So I wanted to read this quote quickly from, it's from the Heritage Director of Sports Auctions. His name's Chris Ivey. And it was in the Athletic article. This is what he said. Quote, we've never had a situation quite like this where a buyer who went to the press and essentially announced that he was looking to sell the item prior to making any sort of payment for it. It's just unfortunate that this gentleman participated and appears to have either no intention or didn't have the ability to pay for it. End quote. All right. Any thoughts on this whole situation? That sounds pretty sleazy to me. You're clearly trying to take advantage of the system in one way or another. I'm shocked. How long has it been? It's been a while, right? Yeah. February. Yeah. Oh my gosh. To not receive payment. Yeah. I mean, if it's a $100 card, I'm sure you get dealt with it quick. We won't experience the same thing where we can not pay for months on end. But when we're talking millions of dollars, I'm sure it's a little bit tougher to obtain that money. But yeah, from the sounds of it early on, yeah, that is such a snake move. Yeah. I don't have any empathy or any feelings. Obviously, we don't know the individual. But if I had known him, I would certainly lose some respect for him. Yeah. I remember seeing an interview with him on CBC, which is a Canadian news show here. And he just didn't seem excited. He kind of seemed resigned. He's like, oh, shoot. I feel like he's tried to flip it. I think he name dropped Drake. He's like, hey, Drake, are you interested? He's getting desperate. And then you could almost see it in his face even back then during that interview. And now I kind of forgot about it. I can't remember who brought it up recently. Yeah. Someone said like, hey, do you remember that story about the OPG case? I was wondering what happened to it. And then funny enough, a couple of weeks later, this article pops up. But that's crazy. You had an interesting question. We were talking about it off air. But obviously, I don't feel like it's going to go for 3.72 or even close to that. Yeah. I was thinking, well, what do we predict it would sell for, right? Yeah. In any type of auction, traditionally, even if we're talking buying a house, if a house gets relisted, most buyers are a little bit more weary the second time around. I mean, what did it sell for? 3.72 million US. There must have been another buyer willing to pay 3.71. But clearly, maybe in the moment, got all worked up in the auction. And most people, you give them some time to cool off, especially eight months or whatever it's been. They'll come down to their senses and be like, oh my goodness, I'm so glad I didn't buy that thing. I don't know. I don't know. I don't even know if I would have a guess, but I would think way below 3.71. I could see in the twos. I could even see 175, something like that. I mean, the market also changed considerably as well. Maybe some cards have gone up, like Otani. But outside of that, I think most cards have kind of simmered down quite a bit. Well, we talked about this when the initial sale got made, right? Like, oh, was it a good price? And then I think what I recall from that interview is like, oh, that's a hefty price to pay because you're banking on a Gretzky PSA 10 Opeche, which is virtually impossible. Right. And I was looking, I mean, the last one that sold, according to CarLadder, PSA 10 was March 2021 for 3.75 million. You're not, you know, and the pop counts too. I doubt you're going to make that pop count three from this case. So you got to be realistic. Like if you look at PSA 9, then maybe, you know, that's what you're hoping for, right? A PSA 9. And, you know, we talked about this before, like it's whether it's off center or not. That's the big question. You have no control over that, even if, because obviously sealed and it's going to be right out of a freshly out of the pack. But whether it's center or not, that's the big question with these cards. Right. So PSA 9 last sold September of 2024. So a couple of months ago for $122,000. And then what do we say? How many? I can't remember. How many Gretzky's can you expect from a sealed case? I can't recall. I think you can get quite a bit though. 20 to 30. I think that kind of rings a bell. Right. That rings a bell. Yeah. Best case scenario, what? Three PSA 9s? I'm kind of just guessing. Right. But if that's the case, then that's 125 times three, you know what I mean? Like less than 400,000. And then I'm sure you get some PSA 8s. You do the math, right? It'll probably be worse than that. Like remember, we joke around. Opichi cutters were like butter knives. They're brutal. Yeah. You know, I ripped open five, like way, I'm talking when I was 10 years old. My dad, I told you like 81 Opichi. And I had three fresh pack pulled Gretzky's that I graded. Like I put them direct into sleeve top loaders. Even back then. Took them to PSA and I got four, five and six. Pack pulled, right? So even the nine, I mean, let's be honest. That's evil. It will be like super, even eights are super, super tough. I'd imagine. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's, that's a good comp in the sense like, oh, what can you expect from PSA? So let's say you got PSA five. The majority are PSA five. Right. Okay. 1600 each. I don't know. Is it, is that outrageous to say you'll get a million bucks for this? Unless I'm, I mean, the only way you're going to get a million plus for this is if you sell it by box, like sealed box. Yeah, for sure. Right. Yeah. That's the play. That's the play. A hundred percent. Don't rip whoever's buying it. Don't rip. And hopefully make, I don't, I don't even know how many come in a, in a case. Is it 24? 16. 16. Yes. Oh my gosh. I don't even know if the math makes sense. I would even think keeping it as a case, I could assume my images of it opened. Like it's not, it's not sealed anymore. Is it? Or I guess they could reseal it. It's a good question. I think, I think leaving it as an unopened case is probably the move. Cause I'd imagine it's probably the only existing unopened case of this product. Hmm. Let alone, I didn't even know how many of these boxes are floating around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I guess we'll see. I'm not sure when it goes up on auction exactly, but I guess heritage auctions is doing it again. Right. And then, then yeah, it'll be good discussion to have afterwards once it sells again and hopefully whoever the buyer is pays for it this time. All right. I think this is a good time. We'll play the interview now that I had with Ezra Levine, CEO of mascot. And please stick around because right afterwards we got another blind ranking segment that we'll do. And this one has a twist though. So stick around. We've got another special guest on today's podcast episode. His name is Ezra Levine, CEO of mascot, which is an online tool that helps to both manage and sell your cards on various marketplaces. And we'll get into how mascot does this exactly in just a second, but loyal listeners of this podcast will know that Ezra has been on cars to the moon before when, when back in the day when he ran collectible and I was just talking off air, Ezra was our second ever guest interview on our podcast. So that was about three or four years ago, hard to believe. So he's definitely, that's all to say he's definitely been in the hobby for a while, which is why I'm looking forward to catching up with him again. So without further ado, Ezra, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. I didn't realize I was a second guest. Honestly, you guys had me fooled. You guys are, you guys were quick learners then it's, it's great to be back in the show. And obviously, you know, I've been, I've been watching your growth and just, it's, it's awesome. Yeah. Episode just about so huge, huge kudos to you guys for sticking with the thing in the hobby as, as, as I have as well. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. So yeah, it's actually been three years or so since we last chatted, but I know in those three years I'm wondering if you could tell us what you've been up to in the hobby and specifically how you transitioned to becoming the CEO of mascot. Yeah. So for a little context, my first foray, at least professionally, I've been in the hobby for a long time as a collector and my father's hobby for a long time as a collector. So I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my dad. So I'll give him a shout out for, for introducing this world to me. I remember some of my fondest, fondest memories growing up or collecting cards with my brother. I always liked the joke. We had the best business arrangement of all time. My dad would buy us the cards. We would open it. We would enjoy it. And then we'd sell it back to him at a markup. So we had a zero cost of capital business and it was a guaranteed profit every single time. Amazing. Unfortunately, I've gone back into that collection years ago or years later. And unfortunately my retirement plan of having, you know, being able to retire in those cards has not quite panned out. Right. So I, so I originally found it collectible. We, we had a good run at that point. The business actually sold. I left prior to that. And I was really compelled by this idea of mascot. There's a group who was building a previous business. We actually transitioned it over to mascot. What appealed me about mascot really was the applications to everyone in the hobby, whether you're, you know, sort of, I guess as we classified and kind of an enterprise level participant, meaning you have a hobby shop, you do this professionally as a dealer, maybe you're in a company like a marketplace or a grading company. We work with all of it. Maybe you're a breaker repack or we have tools to support kind of all those players. Even if you're just a collector, we have tools to support you as well. Whereas I thought collectible was more of sort of an investment thesis. And obviously when times were good, collectible and fractional was very relevant, but I was concerned that it didn't always have, you know, kind of broad based applications for people day to day. So really excited about the work we've been doing at mascot. We launched mascot at the 2023 national, and we actually launched it on Gary Vee's podcast, which was sort of a fun way to do it. And then since then we've, we've experienced really tremendous growth and really kind of got in the brand out there and got a lot of great users. Some of the biggest hobby shops, breakers dealers, repackers are powering their entire business through mascots. We'll definitely talk about that as well. Yeah, that's you know, I didn't realize you guys launched in 2023. Like I feel like you guys have been around longer and maybe it's just because the exposure has been increasing in terms of what you are, what you're, how you're contributing to the hobby, but that's yeah, that's crazy to hear. You kind of already mentioned this briefly, but one major benefit to mascot is the ability to list your cards on multiple marketplaces like eBay, whatnot, and even Shopify for some sellers. I guess, you know, I wanted to start there. Can you tell us how mascot works at that basic level of how you list your cards, how easy it is to list your cards? And second, other than saving time, which is a huge plus of using Mascot, how else would you say Mascot can help those looking to sell their cards? You know, we've had really amazing stories that I hear. I have the benefit of working with every single account that we bring on. I'm a bit of a micromanager in that sense. Anytime someone creates a demo with Mascot, I'm the one who takes it. I love real-time feedback. I think it's probably the most important thing that a CEO or when you're a CEO of a startup, oftentimes you wear every hat and, you know, some more glamorous, some a hell of a lot less glamorous. But, you know, it's very important just to kind of hear from your customers, hear their real pain points, figure out ways you can solve them. And then obviously the most gratifying aspect is to have solved the problem and to really see tangible results. You know, we've had a lot of customers who've come to us and said, since I've been using Mascot, my sales are up, you know, 520%. Other people, I was just with a customer at the Dallas card show who said sales, you know, for his shop, you know, up 120% in the first few months of using Mascot. The biggest thing that Mascot does, two things, right? One is it makes it very easy to create online listings. Which are we part on graded singles, for instance, we partnered with PSA, Beckett, SGC, CGC, TAG, Mike Baker, PSA DNA is another one. Even, you know, TAG, ISA, AGS, or pretty much any grading company of relevance, their CERT database is fully integrated into Mascot. If you have graded slabs, all you need to do is provide us with a CERT number. Based on the CERT number, we can essentially create listings for you. At that point, all you have to do is price it out and you can shoot it off to multiple marketplaces. The benefit of being on multiple marketplaces is fairly obvious, more eyeballs on your listings. You can do really cool things on the pricing side. Oftentimes, a lot of marketplaces have different fee structures. So you can incentivize buyers to buy from you at perhaps cheaper prices that are still, you know, net more profitable to you when selling. Common pain point of being on multiple marketplaces is without a tool like Mascot, there's a lot of manual labor associated with that. You have to remember that, first of all, you have these items in multiple marketplaces and they sell, you have to delist them. And it creates a lot of labor and time. What Mascot does is we automatically and instantly delist the items from all of the marketplaces. You can have more exposure, create listings faster, but when items sell in one marketplace, we remove them from all other marketplaces, essentially eliminating the burden of getting more eyeballs and creating more listings while you get all the benefits of it. Yeah, no, that's very useful. When I first heard about that, that's, yeah, that's almost a no-brainer that someone didn't think of this sooner, but I'm glad something like Mascot exists for that reason. One other thing that really caught my attention, I think it was a video Mascot put out on their social media and it was filmed at one of the local card shows and it featured the, I'm just gonna get this right, trade show inventory discovery tool. And I thought that was really interesting. So I was wondering if you can get into that a little bit and how, in my opinion, at least, I think this could really change the way we approach card shows. Yeah, it's been fun. So the quick backstory, and I'll keep it quick, was at the 2023 National, not only were we launching Mascot, but one of our partners as a big collector, a set builder, and so he was looking for something very specific. And he spent four or five days, whatever it is at the National, walking around the entire trade floor. He was not able to find his item and he was frustrated. He said, I can't believe that I've been here for four to five days. There was hundreds, if not thousands of tables here. There has to be a better way to discover inventory when you're at these trade shows. Anyone who's been to a trade show knows what we mean, especially the big ones, there's a lot of tables. And oftentimes, even if you find the right vendor or the right exhibitor, sometimes it can be buried behind stacks of cards or sometimes they don't even put out all their inventory, or sometimes the dealer can't bring all the inventory. So he's only showcasing, he or she is only showcasing a small percentage of it. Anyway, so we said, there has to be a better way to do this. And we all kind of thought about this and said, well, actually a lot of the inventory management capabilities and the ability to create listings on Mascot, we're about 80% of the way there. We have to curtail it to work for trade shows and build sort of a discovery of inventory for it. So at that point we said, okay, this is a good idea, but we need a launch partner. We need a show who's gonna sort of give us a chance, who's gonna be forward-looking and progressive enough to allow us to try this. And it won't be a small show, it's gotta be a big show where finding inventory is difficult. So at that point I called Joe Drelick, who's a good friend, Joe Drelick, and his partners run The National. Joe Drelick also runs The Philly Show and I pitched him the idea. And to Joe's credit, he's been a huge supporter of Mascot all along. He said, sure, if you guys build it for The Philly Show, I'll give you a chance at The Philly Show. This was probably three months after The National. So we spent a couple of months building it, kind of tweaking it, making it work for it. And we launched it at The Philly Show in December of 2023. The biggest challenge with it sometimes, I'm sure everyone can relate to this in some way, shape, and form, is that oftentimes dealers or vendors are so busy just trying to prepare for the show and oftentimes they're not sure which inventory they're gonna bring and some things can get lost in the shuffle. But we annoyed them enough where we got about 60% of dealers to participate. We got almost 100,000 items in Mascot's trade show tool. And then we took the success of that and we did it at numerous shows, including Burbank and The Dallas Card Show, The Philly Show, The Chantilly Show. Now we have a two deal partnership with Fanatics for, excuse me, I'm just gonna call, for Fanatics as well. So we did it at Fanatics Fest in New York City and we're gonna do it at their second show in Orlando whenever that show is. Nice. Yeah, that's amazing. Because we got the Sport Card Expo coming up this week in Toronto, the largest card show in Canada. And I was thinking about this, I'm like, I wish something like this existed at the Sport Card Expo, especially at a large card show. And I had another guest just a few days ago and we're talking about how going to these card shows, that's one of the frustrating things when you're looking for a specific card, but you just find yourself wandering around. So just to kind of, just to dive deeper into that, when you get the vendors on site and part of it, like how does it work in terms of, from the buyer side of things? Like can they tap into a online database or how's it work? Yeah, and just quickly on Sports Card Expo, I love Steve Menze, he's one of my favorite people in the hobby. Nice. So I promised Steve that when Mascot fully supports the Canadian market, which hopefully will be soon, that we will bring this tool to his shows as well. Yes, please. So it's a sort of extrapolating the idea, right? So once vendors upload the inventory, and we've made it very easy for vendors to upload the inventory, they essentially have to earmark it or tag it with a specific show that they're attending. Okay. In that portal, they also put in what their booth number is or where in the show they might be located if they don't have a specific booth number. At that point, essentially Mascot has kind of a front end search, right? For collectors, for buyers, whether you're at the show or not at the show, you can still use it. Go on to Mascot, there'd be a tab on our website. So it'd say, okay, with Mascot's trade show tool, Fanatics Fest New York City, you can click on the tool and essentially all the dealer inventory will be uploaded there. We have simple search features, you can browse by dealer. There are all different ways to sort of filter and sort the inventory. You can click on an item, see it, see where the vendor is located, click on their website or their Instagram to contact. We don't have the ability to actually purchase it off Mascot yet. That may or may not be coming. But as of right now, you can stop by their booth to find the inventory if you're there in person and browse the show when you're there in person or you can contact them over Instagram, click on a marketplace link that they've embedded, click on their website, which they've embedded and then actually purchase inventory there. Okay, got you. Yeah, that makes more sense. You know, speaking of vendors, how easy or difficult has it been for vendors to adopt, you know, this new technology that Mascot's offering? You know, in particular, I'm thinking of those dealers who've been around a while in the hobby and, you know, maybe technology is not something that they're really comfortable or used to. I'm wondering if that's been a challenge for you guys. Yeah, I would say it is one of the bigger challenges, right, for sure. You know, oftentimes people have a process and while they may know that process can be imperfect, it's a process and sometimes, you know, that behavior can be hard to change. You know, I think I've adjusted my philosophy, we've adjusted our philosophy a little bit. You know, some people, you almost have to put them in the too hard pile. It's a big enough industry where, you know, there's a lot of people who understand, you know, kind of where the industry is headed and, you know, the need to digitize inventory, the need to, you know, be on multiple marketplaces, the importance of e-commerce, the importance of having your own marketplace or having your own website, right? So there's enough people like that who get it where it's almost not worth kind of investing the time and the effort for ones who are always listening to it. Our view is that, you know, ultimately in due time, you know, the things we're doing, while maybe a little progressive today, are gonna be things that are mandates or things that, you know, are must-haves. And so for that, you know, when we do these shows, we used to be like, we're gonna get every single dealer to participate. And now it's more like, let's get 60%, let's get 65%, let's get a number where you get a really good feel of the inventory and it serves as a benefit, both from an engagement standpoint and a liquidity standpoint for the ones who take the time to do it. And again, when we're talking time, you know, it can be as little as five minutes. And we've built a tool in a way where kind of creating listings or importing listings is even easier. And obviously if you have your inventory already on Mascot, which we highly encourage everyone to do, obviously I'm fully biased to saying that, but highly encourage you to have your inventory at all times on Mascot, it's really as easy as clicking about it. Yeah, no, that's absolutely fair, yeah. You know, I think even recently the National announced that they're allocating new tables for first time, you know, vendors. And I think a lot of those vendors might be more, not as resistant, I guess, to using new technologies to help sell their, sell whatever their product or whatever cards that they have. So, yeah, I already see the trends changing a little bit in terms of who's presenting at card shows and what kind of vendors we have. I want to kind of pivot a little bit, and, you know, it's obvious to me anyway how this could benefit sellers and vendors, but I was just reading some of your testimonials on the Mascot website. And regular collectors seem to be able to use this to manage their own personal collection. I was wondering if you can explain in a little more detail how Mascot could possibly benefit collectors in general. Yeah, great, great question, Clark, because yeah, I think a lot of times people think of us as sort of an enterprise tool. You have to be a hobby shop, you have to be a power seller, you have to be a dealer, a repacker, a breaker to use it. And it's really not the case. We have a lot of just collectors who perhaps don't even have the intent of selling at all, who are getting a ton of value on Mascot. I could probably name, you know, 50 of the biggest collectors in the market who are using this really just to keep track of their collection. So a few ways to do it. One is, again, if you collect graded cards or something like that, we made it very easy to digitize your collection, right? So just by putting in the cert number, you know, oftentimes we'll return, you know, really beautiful front and back images, all the metadata that's associated with it. There's ways where you can keep track of how much you paid for items and when you bought items. We even have an automated tool where when you buy something on eBay, for instance, it gets automatically sort of inventoried and kept in that way. We have ways, they're called custom tags in Mascot. If anyone's used Mascot, you'll know what I mean, where you can, you know, create sets. So we have a lot of set builders and set collectors who keep track of, hey, I'm building this 1986 Fleer basketball set, writing to track how many of the cards I have and which cards I'm missing. We have tools like that that are very much applicable to just the collector. Oftentimes when you say just collector, you know, they'll sell an item here and there. Some occasionally they'll wanna, you know, free up some money or they've had an item in their collection for a while and they wanna let it go. So we have easy ways for them to do so, but even if you have zero intention of selling, you just want a way to sort of digitize your collection, enjoy it, understand what you own, figure out what pieces of the collection are missing. We have a lot of tools for them to do that as well. Nice, yeah. No, that's really appealing to someone like me. You were kind of mentioning set collectors. I do subset collecting because there's, you know, sets are becoming larger and larger and they're harder to complete sets, but you could do these mini sets and it'll be a great way to digitize them and just to kind of keep things in order. So that's, I was really interested in that feature. Before we go on to talking about like, I know there's different tiers and plans that you can sign up for, but before we get into that, is there anything like you guys are working on that might come in the near future? Yeah, I mean, I always say Mascot is, it's a platform. And what we try to do is eliminate as much of the pain points that are associated with collecting or dealing in this industry. So anything that, you know, are common pain points, right? So this whole idea started with, hey, the creating of listings is just too cumbersome. It takes too long to create listings, right? So that was sort of the first issue we tackled. And I think you can speak to a lot of Mascot customers. You know, a lot of people will say, hey, I used to be able to do 10 listings a day and then I'd be tapped out and emotionally spent and exhausted. Now we have people who are doing hundreds in five minutes. So we're really looking to tackle pain points of the industry, right? And so, you know, one thing we just built recently was a whole breaker and repacking solution. So a couple of things, right? One is, you know, just for breakers and repackers, oftentimes there's just the amount of inventory that comes in and then goes out. It's just so overwhelming. And some of these are pretty big sized operations. And so we built a lot of tools for them to sort of marry the physical and digital inventory, everything from shipping tracking to barcoding and QR coding solutions. So all things like that, which may not be applicable to the, you know, just the average collector, but are applicable to some of the large businesses in this category. And we continue to bring on more marketplace partners. Everyone has, you know, their own preference of where they like to sell and how they like to sell and various fee structures and auction versus buy nows. And so, you know, we're looking to that very actively. We had a lot of people who were using us for credit cards, but said, hey, you know, I need a better raw card solutions. We built. and recently released our first AI raw card kind of bulk scanning tool, which seems to be doing really well, at least by comparison standards. A lot of people will come to us and say, hey, already, it's actually one of the best, if not the best tools in the market. So really happy with ways that we can find just to speed everyone up, allow them to focus more on the aspects of this, whether you're a collector, just the pure enjoyment of collecting. If you're a business, obviously the goal is to sell more and to make more money. And so we try to facilitate that actively. Yeah, cool. Yeah, and then this kind of segues naturally into what I wanna ask next. Can you quickly go through all the plans that are offered? I know there's a free basic one and all the way to an expert plan. Just go over how much it costs and what type of collectors and or sellers should consider each of these plans? Like what would benefit them the most? Yeah, so four tiers. First tier is a free tier, right? So if you're just a collector, we give you all the inventory management tools for free. The only time we'd start charging is once you start doing listings, right? So you would get 20 listings per month across all marketplaces free, right? So that's, we have a lot of people who are using it just purely for inventory management. It's an amazing, amazing tool. You should definitely capitalize it. And so that's completely free until you do your 21st listing. At that point, once you do your 21st listing per month, we have what's called mascot hobby. Mascot hobby is unlimited inventory, unlimited listings across four marketplaces. So the four marketplaces are eBay, whatnot, TikTok shop, and my card post, right? So a really great way of, hey, I don't need every tool Mascot's ever built, but I do need the ability to kind of list through Mascot, right? So that's a really good one. It starts at $29 a month called Mascot hobby. The next is Mascot Pro. We have a lot of accounts who have their own e-commerce presence. And most of the time it's a Shopify powered website. And so they want the ability to list across multiple platforms, but they also want the ability to list on their own e-commerce site, oftentimes connected to a point of sale solution. Usually it's Shopify, can be Square too. So that's also included in the Mascot Pro feature, along with kind of advanced analytics, dashboards, marketplace specific performance, things that are probably more relevant to a business in this industry, but could be relevant to you as well. And then finally we have what's called Mascot Expert. I'd say the biggest difference today with Mascot Expert is it includes a lot of breaking and repacking solutions. And so those are, you get everything that's in pro and hobby and regular, but you also get other features we've built, such as ones for breakers and repackers. Okay, awesome. That's great to know and very helpful. Yeah, the last thing I want to ask, and I'm not sure if you remember, but last time you were here as well, and with many of our guests since then, we asked what they think about the hobby, what it could look like over the next year or even in the near future. I'm just wondering if you have any new predictions when it comes to the state of the hobby. And I asked, I kind of laughed too, because the things we predicted even two, three years ago, things went sideways and then other new things happen, like fanatics taking over. And then there's new storylines. But yeah, do you want to have any thoughts in your head right now? Well, I mean, one thing that I've always been impressed with and I continue to be impressed with is just like the amount of intellectual capital like the people continue to come in who are really bright and who have big ideas for the future of the industry. I remember just from my personal experience when I previously was in the world of finance here in New York, and then I left finance to work in collectibles. And I remember telling people that and they almost looked at me like I had three heads. It was a really big change and people didn't realize that there was industries and a career that you could have in collectibles. And that perception has completely changed. And when you look at some of the people who are fanatics are bringing on board, other companies bringing on board, these are really, really bright, sharp people who are all trying to move the industry, trying to move the hobby forward. So I'm incredibly excited about the future this industry has in store. There's a lot of really smart entrepreneurs and really talented people at big companies who are building technology to be able to assist and to kind of help alleviate a lot of the pain points. As what we see in mascot, I can just speak to a few big trends that we see in mascot. I would say a very big trend, candidly that surprised me a little bit was how much people wanna control their own destiny from an e-commerce standpoint. A lot of people now with the ability to create YouTube channels or have Instagram pages or break, right? And they accrue followings, right? And networks because of that, as opposed to kind of utilizing third-party marketplaces to sell items where they have to incur fees. A lot of them are saying, hey, I can have my own website. I can have my own sales channel where fees are essentially zero and I can take inventory and I can put it there as well. And then perhaps offer incentives to people to buy off my own channel, use trade shows to market that channel, use YouTube channels to market my channel. So we're seeing a ton of that where people in particular hobby shops or breakers or just people who can kind of use their network, leverage their network and their following to create their own e-commerce destiny, right? Almost like these little micro marketplaces. So that's a huge, huge trend that we've seen at Mascot. And I know there's a lot of big accounts who are doing quite well off of that. Yeah, no, that's really interesting to hear and come to think of it. It's totally true because even on the content creation space, like what we've been doing for the last three, four years, there's been a lot more content creators and a lot of them are business owners themselves as well. Like you're kind of alluding to, just to market their own inventory and I can see all that coming together. Yeah, Ezra, as always, we appreciate your time and all the work you do to helping grow the hobby we all love. So to close, do you want to tell our listeners where they can find more information about Mascot? Yeah, so we're on all social media channels. We're at With Mascot, W-I-T-H, Mascot. And our website is withmascot.com. If you're new to this, it's Mascot, you just heard about it in this podcast, you can sign up on Mascot. If you think you're gonna be a free tier, terrific. If you think you want a paid tier, we do offer a 30-day free trial. If you subscribe to any of the tiers within the first seven days, so just something to consider. Once you get going, also, you can feel free to reach out to either me directly or our support team and we would be very happy to assist you. Awesome, thanks, Ezra. Thanks, Clark. I appreciate the time. All right, thanks again to Ezra Levine for coming back on the podcast. We enjoyed having him back and just to catch up. And yeah, I have a feeling, you know, our paths will cross again in the future as we're all continuing to grow this hobby together. All right, so like I teased before that interview, we did a segment called Blind Rankings last week. And that's when I gave you, John and Hyeong a few tips on blind rankings. I gave you, John and Hyeong, five hobby-related items and you guys had to slot them in your top five list one item at a time without knowing what the next item would be. So there's some strategy involved there, right? And you know, we thought that was pretty fun and so we decided to do it again. But the twist is that I'm not hosting this segment like I usually do. It's gonna be John who's the host and I am playing the contestant this time. So let's go. Excited. All right, Park. Nervous. I'm gonna continue from your topic last week of hobby joys but blind rank these five hobby joys. And this is gonna be ASMR version or ASMR edition. Okay, first one. Watching a breaker slice a box and tear the wrapping. I personally like it. I don't know if this is something for everybody, but. That doesn't do it for me at all. But I feel like I would, do I take the risk and put it at five and then thinking you got something worse? You know, like. You know what, I'm gonna play it safe. That's true, it's the first one too, damn. Okay, I'm gonna put four. I'm gonna think that there might be one worse than that. But that's low on my list. All right, next. 10 second countdown in an auction, you're winning. Oh, here we go. Yeah. This is mixed feelings. Cause I'm like, I'm kind of anxious too at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could be super nervous rather more so than Joey. Like someone's gonna slight me, you know? Like me? Usually it's the other way around. I like to be the sniper, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I should have probably done a sniper question, but I know some people don't like that as much. Think of it as frowned upon. So this is a ranking of hobby joys. What gets me, what's, yeah. I'm putting it at five. I'd be anxious. I don't like being in that position. Just waiting, just waiting to see if I get sniped. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's five. All right. Slightly spreading your cards and seeing color. Ooh, now we're talking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got one, two, three left. I don't wanna fall into the trap that you guys fell into. Just leaving number one and then just hoping for the best. But I'm like, is there something better? Oh shoot, that's hard. Cause I have to choose one if I don't wanna be in that situation. Right. Right? Yeah. No, no, hold on. I got one, two, three. You know what? I'm gonna do two actually. Two. All right, all right. Yeah. We got the handshake in an in-person deal. Damn, I should have done the other one one. Cause the handshake's cool too. I like it, but I don't like it as much as. Right. You only got three. I know, but then that's the swing right there. Yeah. You just, you did what you didn't wanna do. I did exactly what you guys did last week. I'll put that one. You put out one? I'm gonna play conservative, yeah. I like it. Okay. It's close. It's close to number two, but yeah. I'm playing it safe. We have the all time ASMR classic, the sound of a pack ripping. Okay. Yeah. No, that's, I like my list. That's a good three because you know, like I've ripped and got nothing 99% of the time. So it's, it's mixed feelings as well for that. Oh, this was, this wasn't bad. This was kind of fun. And I like. I like to come up with some more so that you're not always the one asking questions. Yeah, perfect. I could do more of this. I know Hyun suggested next time we could even do like, you know, all the, all these cards are 1000 bucks and then you gotta slot them. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. That's a good value. We need Will, we need Will on here. I think he would come up with some fun ones. You and Will, you guys think outside the box. Yeah, no, you guys definitely need to do more for sure. All right. That was fun. We'll end off the show with our regular weekly segment we call Pick One. All right. Hyun usually starts things off for us, but since he's not here, do you got one to start things off for us? I do. In honor of you guys going to the expo tomorrow. Yes. I have my 1v1 is, I get, I give this to you for free, Clark. $1,000 to spend on a single card at the expo or $2,000 in wax, but you have to rip it on the spot. Like you have to rip it there. So $2,000 in wax or $1,000 on a single card. I like this because I feel like it'll be harder for a lot of people, but for me, it's kind of easy. I'm ripping. Well, I actually didn't expect that. 2,000 in wax. I think it would be a lot of fun. I feel like, and we talked about this last week in terms of our strategy, like I just want to buy wax to rip and the excitement of getting a hit, especially in some of these boxes that are, relatively speaking, a little bit more affordable, $200 to $300. That's kind of the benchmark these days for what affordable means, but you could still get potentially $1,000 plus cards in that, probably not, but I think the chase is part of the fun. Whereas $1,000 for a slab, that's, I'm sure you could find a nice card for it, but for me personally, when I go to the sports card expo or large, I like to make bigger deals. Like I like to see it and I'd rather buy a $2,000 slab and with that $1,000 you gave me, I'll add another 1,000 just to get a better card. So yeah, but yeah, that's kind of easy for me. What would you do? Yeah, I thought about this one. You know, I'm not as optimistic as you are as much as I have, you know, and I talked about ripping last week, but it came down to earth when I started watching some YouTube videos of people ripping future watch. It's just, it's so brutal how little you get and the odds of you, it's like 90, it's like, what's Bedard's number, 98? Like it's like 98% chance you're getting nothing. You're getting like $10 worth of cards, even in a $500 box. So yeah, as much as I love ripping and it's fun, but the feeling of ripping such an expensive product or whatever, $2,000 worth of boxes and most likely coming away with not much, that is a horrible feeling. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with 1,000. I'm gonna stay smart and go with $1,000. I still enjoy, you know, like picking up cards and or even a single card at the show. And $1,000, I mean, for most, it's not nothing to sniff at. It's a pretty big card. So I'd walk away pretty happy, you know, over ripping. Although if we all got this question and we all had the opportunity to get to 2,000 at once and you and Hyung picked 2,000 in wax, I would be forced at that point, I'd be like, okay, I gotta go with the ball. We're gonna do a massive rip together. So, but yeah, it's gonna be $1,000 single. Yeah, no, that, what you said was right. That is a smart thing, smarter thing to do, but I can imagine Hyung and I are like, ah, we're gonna go $2,000 worth of boxes and then you come back with the. nice Juan Soto-based PSA 10 rookie card. Like, yeah, that's fine. But it's like watching a Twitch streamer playing video games. That's you, John? While we were doing the- Yeah, yeah, for sure. Having fun. Yeah, let's go. You know what? Another point I'd like to say. If you want to really sober up yourself in terms of like, you know, what potential hits you can get in a hotbox, watch those case breaks. You're going to see a lot of garbage. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Okay. I got a super high end one, of course, for my pick one. So recently the Shoei Otani Orange Refractor, the batting one, the 2018 Bowman Chrome, sold, the black label sold for 533,000. It's the highest sale. I'm sure you heard of that. Right. Black label, orange refractor, number 25, 2018 Bowman Chrome. Okay. So that's the highest sale of any Otani card, $533,140. Would you rather have that card or the same orange refractor card? Right. Not the exact same, but. So the black one was what? Number eight of 25. There was another one that was sold in a private sale, BGS 9.5, 10 Auto, for $200,000. And it was numbered 17 to 25, jersey number, serial number match, which we talked about last week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 200,000 for that card sold in October of 2024, just last month, or this pop one black label of the same card. Yeah. For more than double. You know, black label is cool. And I'd imagine that's probably the highest graded, high end Otani card out there, right? So if you are looking for like a black label Otani, this is probably the grail, right? Cause I don't think, or maybe there is, I don't know, but I doubt there's like a red, you know, black label. I don't know. Black label was a couple of years back. It was a huge thing. It was a big deal. You know, even I think the three of us were like, oh, black label is awesome. I don't know. It's not as, I can understand why the price is the price and why somebody went crazy for it. There's still people who love it. And I don't doubt it. Like it's great, but I don't know. I like the Jersey number, man. I don't know. Maybe I'm a sucker. I actually, you know, before I had the thousand, $2,000 one V one. And my question was going to be, I don't know, maybe I should save it, but it was going to be Bedard Future Watch inscription auto versus Bedard Future Watch 98 out of 999. Which would you choose? Ooh. Yeah. It would have been funny if I did that. Cause we would have had like related questions, but yeah. Yeah. Like I take the, I don't know for me, the Bedard New Jersey number, like in this situation, it's a little different because the orange refactor is not like, it's not like Future Watch. Future Watch is like the, you know, set. That's the card to get the orange refactor is, no, it is the card, but I don't know. Yeah. Anyways, sorry. I'm going on a tangent. Let's make it clear. It's 17 out of 25 orange refactor. That's the one for me. And it's just the values there for sure. Well, I was laughing. Cause when you're going off on tangent with the orange refactor, it was kind of like our blind rankings. You just, you put that in your five slot, whereas Hsiung put it in his two slot. So you value orange refactors differently than Hsiung or even myself. I think it's true, man. I used to really like orange refactors and now I'm like, ah, it's okay. Okay. I think it's pretty amazing. But anyway, you go with the Jersey number mats for 200K. For sure. Yeah, it's going to be a sweep. Like, honestly, I don't like paying premiums for grading. And this is the ultimate premium you're paying for a black label, right? Right. And like, if the 200,000, if the BGS 9.5, wasn't a Jersey number match, right? I would still rather have that than pay an extra 233,000. And obviously if it wasn't Jersey number match, it wouldn't be 200K, it would be probably 150, 140. You know what I mean? But still, if it was still 200K, I would rather have the BGS 9.5 and then spend that, the rest, the 250K that would have left over on another card. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I love black labels, but I don't want to pay that kind of premium for one. Yeah. And you know what? Therein lies, that's the great, that's the point actually. That's a great point to bring up because I think therein lies the issue or the caution. Because 17 out of 25, I think that's just going to, Hobby Logic for time is probably going to be a thing. Like, I don't think you can see that changing. But how people feel about BGS, how people feel about black label, PSA 10, the brand versus SGC 10, like these are all moving question marks. It's a flux. It can flux, right? And it's no guarantee that 10 years from now, the black label, like already, even now, sitting three years after the fact, I think a lot of people, like the two of us here, are like, I don't think I feel that strongly about the black label. You know, like opinions can change. Hobby Logic can change, especially on grading. So it's a great caution for those out there like chasing a card because of the grade. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And don't get me wrong. I still like the look of the black label. I think it's the highest grade that you can get, even obviously greater than a PSA 10. Right. But you know, I'd be happy with a thousand dollar black label card of a lesser known player, like a PC collection. You know, that'd be nice just to have. Right. I'm not paying half a million for one. Yeah. Or could I? But if I could, I wouldn't. No, I mean, even if you had the question as like, you know, the Shohei Otani Orange Refractor PSA 10, but it's a hundred grand or whatever it is, 95 grand. I think if you pose that question, majority would probably pick the PSA 10. PSA. Yeah. I think that would be pretty easy. That's kind of shows where people's minds are at about black label. Yep. I think we're right. Well, I'll put up a poll on when this episode comes on. We'll see. Maybe we'll be surprised. I think we're right on this one. All right. Thanks again for tuning in to Cards to the Moon. We appreciate you guys. And yeah, we'll have a brand new episode for you guys next week. Talk to you then. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to Cards to the Moon. We'd really appreciate you subscribing to our podcast, wherever you listen to your podcasts. And you can also connect with each of us on Instagram at 5cardguys, or you can follow Hyung at Integrity Sports Cards or John at TradeUatRecess. You can also check us out at 5cardguys.com. Thanks again and hope to connect soon.