Passion to Profession: Why Bryan (@thzsportscards) Bet on Wrestling Cards

Foreign. Welcome back to another episode of Passion to Profession sponsored by ebay. Here on the Stacking Slabs Network. It is that time of the week where we dig into the entrepreneurial journey of someone in the sports card industry building something cool. And today I am joined by Brian Schaefer at THZ Sports Cards, someone who I have done deals with. We talk about the path to going full time building a sustainable card business, selling on ebay and a whole lot more. I think you are going to really enjoy this conversation. If you are looking for more content about the industry, about building businesses in this industry, make sure you are subscribed to Hobby jobs. Link is in the show notes in the newsletter. I put out each and every week and we have new episodes every Sunday of Hobby Jobs on the Stacking Slabs network. If you want to show your support for the broader network, hit the follow button, tell a damn friend, run on over to the Patreon group. For now, we got my man Brian. THZ Sports Cards coming at you. All right, we are back with another episode of Passion to Profession, brought to you by my good friends at ebay. Excited for this conversation. I love making deals with individuals in this hobby, especially individuals who are building their career in this hobby. And I've made deals with today's guests and this is really our first time chatting. So today I'm joined by Brian. He goes by THZ Sports Cards everywhere. We're going to be talking about kind of his career path in cards, talking about kind of how he's making dealing cards as sustainable. We're going to probably talk a little bit about wrestling cards because we're both big wrestling fans. But without further ado, Brian, welcome, man. How are you? Good. Thank you very much for having me on today. I appreciate it. No doubt. Let's talk about maybe your just career in the the hobby. Like, I know you're a collector. I know you buy, sell, trade, but when did you start kind of getting serious about making dealing cards kind of your professional path? So I've been collecting since I was a little kid. I was born in 86 and Shaq was a rookie in Orlando. That's when I kind of got into it. A lot of my friends were collecting cards in the early 90s and so I started collecting. Basketball was always my favorite sport. So started collecting then and then as a teenager, the, the catalyst for realizing like, oh, this is fun. You can make money. You can have fun and collect and still have this be profitable. I was, I want to say, 15 or 16 years old and I bought A box of Tomb Raider trading cards from Ink Works, the Angelina Jolie movie. And I pulled her autograph and was like, wow, this is amazing. And then I went and looked early ebay days what it was worth. Saw it was worth like $700, which to a 15 or 16 year old that wants to go to movies and out with his friends and stuff, that's a ridiculous amount of money. So I created a fake ebay account, said I was 18 because you needed to be 18 at the time, put in a false birthday, sold that card and it's kind of just been from there on. I've been collecting and buying, selling, trading since I was a teenager. That's the just through all of that and through just the history of you being in and all of the cycles, certainly there's been some ebbs and flows and just like the demand, the market, what people are interested in, how, how have you navigated or maybe adapted to those conditions during your run. So I've always done the sports cards for the longest time, especially like when I was a teenager I was doing a lot of non sports just because I learned that market. And it was, it was hot at the time, but not like it is now. It was just hot as in, in demand. But there was, everything was available. So for the longest time I did that. I did a lot of non sports ink works, written house archives, art box. Anybody that used to do non sports, they're going to know those, those companies, one of them still around, the other two are out of business. But I did a lot of that and I just kind of went with it. And there's definitely been times when I kind of stopped jumped back in A lot of times it would have to do with just what was going on in different leagues. I got excited the year that Russell Wilson was a quarterback was drafted and I bought a bunch of his stuff really early on, a lot of his college stuff. I just thought that he had the possibility of, of being a good quarterback in the NFL. So I bought a bunch of his stuff cheap and waited till he won rookie of the year if I'm not mistaken, and then sold it, then did the same thing with Sam Bradford. So it's just kind of jumping back in when you. It's always been for me doing something that I know and that I collecting or buying and selling somebody that I like. And that was the case like with those two guys or with the non sports. I know it, I like it, I'm a nerd. I love Star Wars, I like all that kind of Stuff, so I know it, it's easy. I already know that, that space anyways. Have you, have you always been kind of buy, sell, trade at the level you're at now, or have you been navigating kind of dealing sports cards and working another job? Like maybe talk about just like how you've the mix up of, in the makeup of like, you know, dealing cards and just other work on the side and how it's all shook out over the years. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. I'm nowhere, nowhere close to where I am now. I, I've always done it, but it's always been, and it still is purely a hobby. I come from a commercial real estate background. It's a family business. My father bought up a lot of really good land where we live in Florida, and he kind of saw what the main drag was going to be into our town, bought a lot of that land, and now that land is all built out. And that's where my background really is. And it's always just kind of been a hobby. But like a lot of people, when Covid happened and we were all stuck at home and looking for things to do, I was already doing cards anyways. But then everything's kind of started getting crazy. And once everything opened back up, that's when I said, you know what? I've never really done a show. I want to start doing a show every once in a while. I, I think the first show I did was I, I was able to get into Dallas card show, into the Tarot hall, the main hall there. And I want to say that was late 21 or early 22, so it was still kind of like coming out of the pandemic. And ever since then I've been doing, been doing the shows. It's just been enjoyable to like really put more time and effort into something that was just a hobby, take it a little bit more serious and step away a little bit from the main job. It's just nice to be able to kind of have a change of pace at this point in my life. So you mentioned the show. Obviously, like there are cards that pop up on shows that don't pop up on ebay or online. You know, you're constantly trying to generate inventory for you and your business. Like, how do you think about that? How do you think about like the online and the offline world in terms of like making sure that you're secure? Cards that not only you love and you want to collect, but you know, that collectors like me might be interested in if you present Them or they become available. Yeah, both markets, online and offline are incredibly important. The amount of walk ups of stuff that I've never seen that, that happens at shows, it always blows my mind what might walk up to the table. And that that's not just wwe. That's back when I was doing more heavily into NBA and some of the major leagues. The amount of stuff that walks up is wild. You just, you just never know. You know, a lot of people will walk up and it's stuff that for me, I can't use. And then there's stuff that you didn't even know had ever been pulled and it might walk up. And that happens online too, but I feel like it happens more at shows. You have more of that. Wow, I was not expecting to see this show up at a show than it happens online. If it happens online, the Sharks, myself included, everybody spells blood in the water. If one person posts it, everybody knows about it. Yeah. So how do you think about buying versus selling? Like what's your mindset when it comes to those two worlds? So I try to work in. There's, there's two kind of mindsets and this is what I really love about wwe. Compared to NBA and a lot of the other major leagues, WWE is crazy accessible. You think back over the last 30 years, four years, 40 years of WWE, there's really only 30, 25, 30 people that really, really matter. There's not this, there's not two rounds of draft classes that people care about that are not going to pan out. You know, you go back to the 90s and the early 2000s and there's 15 guys that it really breaks down to or women that it breaks down to that people care about. And what's great about the WWE hobby is that every single one of those people, current and past, are super accessible. And they're very accessible at different levels of value. You can get Stone Cold and Undertaker and Roman Reigns and CM Punk and John Cena. You can get their autos fairly inexpensive. You can get their autos for 150, 200 bucks. If you want to be a super collector or have one really, really nice piece, there are five figure and six figure cards out there of some of those guys. But you can enter the space and collect the ends of the sport at a very inexpensive price. You can't go get a Jordan auto for 200. You can't go get a Tiger woods auto for $200. You can get a Hulk Hogan auto for. You can get a Hulk Hogan sticker auto for 150 bucks. And he's by many considered the greatest of all time when it comes to wwe. There's also six figure Hulk Hogan that are out there. And that's what I really like about the WWE market is that it, no matter what you are able to spend, there's going to be something for you. And so when I'm buying I, I personally focus more on the mid to high end and there's tons of guys that do the low to mid end and they do it really, really well. A lot of the streamers especially that do the whatnot, the fanatics law, they kill it. Yeah. So there's the people that sell the low to mid end and they do an amazing job. A lot of them are streamers and they do single shows and they kill it. I try to have, what I want is that when people walk up to my table at a show or find my Instagram or you know, look at it when they haven't looked at it in a couple of months, I want to have stuff that you don't see everywhere. So I kind of have like a minimum amount for the market value of what I'll buy. I want four to $500 and up cards and that's it. Up to any amount. But I, I want people to walk up to my booth and say oh, you don't see that card or that card or that card or that card. You don't see that everywhere. I, I enjoy the one of ones and the inscriptions and that's what I try to kind of focus on. Every once in a while I'll buy collections that have some of the lower end in it and stuff. But it's just more fun to go and uncover and have the, the grails all in 1.1 spot. So that's kind of where I'm at at least right now. I like having just, I like having that booth. I love it when somebody walks up and says wow, I've never seen this before. That's awesome. Yeah. And just by going to your page you can see a lot of those cards and I want to maybe talk about like how you're, how you think about getting access to those cards. But you said something when you were talking about why you like WWE and you mentioned like there's you know, only, you know, after this, all these years in that WWE's existed. There's, there's probably about you know, 30 or so performers that people like buy into who are all time greats. You look at what is happening on the front end of the market. And I, we are at like a fever pit, fever pitch of just the amount of money that is being put into prospecting young talent, which is fun. That's what we like to do in the hobby and you see it across every sport. But it really feels like it's getting warmed up here in the WWE side. And I just, it's fun especially because how the company is structured within XT and you get people exposed to these talent and then they're on the main roster. But obviously it doesn't always work out for each of those talent just based on creative decisions, their own missteps, all these things. But I don't know, like when you, when you see that happening, when you see individuals like, and I'm caught up in this because I think she's great, but like, you see what people are paying for Kendall Gray who's on nxt and she looks like the real deal. But we, we won't know until she joins the main roster. Like, how do you think about that just in terms of your position and what's happening in the market? Yeah, so I, I definitely in the last couple years have gotten more into the prospecting side of wwe. Kendall is amazing. She, she won the number one contender last night against Kalani Jordan Zaria also won the belt last night. That was exciting on nxt. Kendall looks phenomenal. She looks like she's got it all. She's tiny, which scares me because there's a lot of tinier women who have gone on to WWE and they just had not been used properly. More recently, Roxanne Perez, she's great in the Judgment Day, but I feel like Roxanne could do a lot more in WWE than she's been allowed to so far. Ivy Nile, phenomenal small wrestler, incredible. Her strength is unreal, but she's small. So when she goes up against somebody that's bigger, like a Charlotte Flair or faster and more athletic as far as movement goes, like Sol Ruka, it's tough to imagine Ivy Nile winning and I worry that they're going to fumble the Kendall Gray ball when she eventually does get called up as well. But she's so green. Only been there for less than a year if I'm not mistaken. She's got a long ways to go and, but she looks great so far. The, the prospects that have, that have come been coming out at NXT over the last year especially have just been phenomenal though. Obafemi Julia, Stephanie Vacair, Javon Evans, Sol Ruka. Recently there's been Shawn Michaels has been cooking in nxt, they've been, they've been really pumping out some, some great future superstars into the main roster. So how are you thinking about just like those sorts of buying opportunities? Because I would imagine, and I know you have some of his cards, but I would imagine like if you rewind the tape back to a year, maybe a little bit longer ago, you probably would have made the decision to buy every Obafemi rare and scarce card you possibly could. But like, like once you see that cycle and you see ob Femi at WrestleMania doing what he did to Brock Lesnar and probably being the, maybe we can call it outside of like maybe a Kevin Owens, one of the, the better NXT call ups to main roster debuts of all time. Like does that make you reset kind of your buying strategy or do you, are you still cautious just based on all of the missteps that have happened with the, this talent at NXT who then get brought up and you know, maybe don't hit that full potential? Definitely still somewhat cautious. You could tell with Oba and I will, I'll, I'll go on an aside in a minute, but you could tell with Oba that he had it, man. You know, I, I didn't get into NXT until a little bit too late. And what the aside is is my biggest regret so far since I've really gone kind of all in on WWE versus the other sports is last year at the national, the Obafami rookie Black Prism walked up to my T. Oh, oh. And I passed on. And I know Boz Sports, I know he picked it up in Dallas this past show which I skipped. I was that Dallas show. I'd like to think that if I was there I would have had a shot at it. But yeah, Boz Sports picked it up. That was the first time that it surfaced that I know of since national last year. But yeah, I passed on that. I want to say the ask was like $3,500, maybe 4,000 and I just wasn't, I didn't have that mindset yet, that prospecting mindset. I loved NXT as a product, but I didn't think of it in terms of yeah, these guys are going to be maybe the next Roman reigns maybe in 25 years. Obafemi could be looked at back on as a John Cena level of, with, with a John Cena level of love depending on, you know, what he does in the sport. So yeah, but yeah, Oba, man, Oba's got it all. He really does. He's got the look he's incredible on the mic. He's got the walkout. He's can. He's huge. He looks the part. He's a great wrestler. We haven't really gotten to see him really wrestle. They've almost everything has kind of been a squash match or a quicker match. I'm hopeful that with King of the Ring happening, it'd be nice if we could see him and Javon Evans in the final and maybe get a a replay of that NXT match that I think a lot of people probably have never seen. But to be able to see that match again on a main card even if the results are the same, man, both him, Oba and Javon, that would really just kind of send them off into the stratosphere, even more so than they both already are. I totally agree. I want to get back to the kind of what you're buying in terms of one of ones and the access you have to em. Obviously like many of us like I'm sure when we get off this call we're going to get on ebay and check our, check our WWE 1 of 1 Save searches and see what's out there. But like you, you're get. You are, you are. You have stuff that no one has seen before. Like it. You just go to your page and you just see all these cards that I'm thinking specifically of like your spread of flawless stuff. Like it's this is stuff that I'm seeing for the first time through your page. So I'm sure you're buying cards off of ebay too. I know you're listing cards on ebay, but how, how do you think about how do you. How are you getting access to some of these incredible cards? Like what can you share without maybe giving up your trade secrets? I don't really have a trade secret. I've made great relationships with people in the when I was doing more of the NBA and high end basketball and those people have passed along some stuff because they don't know or really care too much about wwe. So it's great that for, you know, about four years I did predominantly high end five six figure NBA and a lot of those people have, you know, returned some favors and sent some stuff my way. I'm very appreciative of that. But the majority of what I'm able to find, what I purchase ebay, Instagram, every once in a while some great people will tag me if something is pulled and I get in there and try to see if I can make a fair offer on it. It's really just kind of always having your phone at your side because you never know what's going to be available. The other day, I missed out by just a few minutes. The. The Finn Balor WrestleMania patch. Auto Santiago Sports posted it and I responded to his post probably about 9, 10 minutes after he posted it, and it was already gone. So it's just about being quick. Right place, right time. Yes. You know, it's, it's great that over the years, I don't have a crazy amount of Instagram followers. I think I'm at like 55 or 5600. But I will say that all of those are purely organic. I've never paid for a follower in my life, so that is 5,600 people that know that I do wrestling and they can come to me with questions if they pull something. And so that's, that's definitely helped me. Just having the, having the, the relationships that I've built and then having the social media presence really is a big deal because you just never know what somebody's going to bring you on Instagram or somewhere else, even if they're not necessarily looking to sell, but then at least you know, kind of where something is at. And when they are ready to sell, you can let them know that you're, you know, you're interested down the line. It's, it's, it's good to make all those relationships and keep them going. I want to talk more about the relationships, but I'm curious just on your move from NBA to wrestling, which is very unique, you're the only guy I've ever met who has done that. Like, what is the reason? Like, what is your big why behind that? And how did you make that happen? Okay, so my, my big why is kind of twofold. One is that I was just getting burnt out on the whole NBA market. It's, you know, this, it's insane. Just what that market has done since 2020, 2019, what that market has done the crazy up with COVID Then it kind of came back down and now it's again gone. Pretty parabolic. There's some crazy swings. And I always tried to focus when I was doing NBA, I tried to focus the best I could on Legends. I tried not to do much of the prospecting. I didn't want to get caught up too much in that because you can make a ton of money and you can lose a lot of money if you're doing that. But even the Legends, you know, I see, I see a pretty entry level. Ish Jordan Auto Relic that I sold for, I want to say, $15,000 about a year and a half ago, two years ago, I saw it just move for 40. That's insane to me because I thought 15,000 was insane. So the swings were getting too wild with NBA for me to want to continue doing it. It's just kind of getting burnt out. And then the. To be honest, the real catalyst for me really making the move to wwe, I watched it as a kid. I watched it into middle school. You know, the Rock, Stone cold, that era. And then I stopped. But when Netflix took over for Raw last year, my wife. It was a Monday night. We didn't have anything else to watch. And I was like, hey, you want to put this on? It's probably going to be like, cool. Maybe the Rock will come out. They're going to make a big deal out of it. It's the first. It's a big deal. It's the first Raw on Netflix. And we put that on. We really enjoyed it. That was a great three hours of television. And then Friday night rolled around, and we didn't have any plans that night either. And I was like, well, you want to check out Smackdown? Just to see what that's like, too. And she was like, yeah, yeah, she enjoyed Raw. And so then we watched Smackdown. And then I think a week later, we did it again. And there happened to be a ple that weekend, too. And I was like, well, you want to watch the ple. And it's been nice because I think it just kind of unlocks something that brought me back to my childhood a little bit. It's just a big, fun, goofy soap opera. And I love it, and my wife loves it, too, which is great. And we watch. We watch at a minimum now, six hours of wrestling every week between Raw and smackdown. But we try to tune into AEW every once in a while and NXT when there's a big match and we watch all the ples. We. We went to our first mania this past year. So really, it just kind of unlocked something in me. It kind of gave me that nostalgia feeling, being young, being a kid again, and just kind of enjoying these goofy storylines. And we both got hooked. And I realized. I started looking into the cards and realized just how inexpensive everything is compared to mba. And this, like I mentioned, this isn't my main job. My main job is commercial real estate. So if I can do something that I'm enjoying after being kind of burnt out on the NBA side of things, if I can. If I can move into a space that I'm really enjoying both in the card aspect of it and the actual WWE product. That's where I want to be. That's. That's kind of how I started with cards. Really was like I said, a Tomb Raider box. I love the movie. I had a teenage crush, you know, celebrity crush on Angelina Jolie. Bought the box, hit her auto, sold it, made money and I, I was a nerd and I knew all of the non sports stuff so I just kind of. That now I'm a WWE nerd. It's. It's just brought me back to my, to my childhood when I really enjoyed wwe. And it's been, it's been fun to kind of find a love for the hobby again because it was definitely waning there a little bit with, with NBA. I still watch NBA. I'm an Orlando Magic season ticket holder. I love it. To go off on a side, that game last night was unreal. Not a Knicks fan was definitely rooting for San Antonio. I know. I think my father and my wife's father both turned the game off before halftime and didn't realize what had happened. We watched it all the way through and I watched through, through my, through my fingers at the end because it was just brutal to watch as somebody who was rooting for San Antonio. But yeah, it's been, it's just been really fun to get back into the hobby doing something that I enjoy more than anything else. I love it. The. Yeah, the game last night, I knew in the second quarter when the spurs were flame throwing in the commentary was talking about biggest comebacks ever. I was like this is a bad home and, and I'm a Pacers fan. So I'm. I'm with you on, on that. But yeah, I couldn't believe it. And then also to the. You talk about the watching of the wrestling and it's like I think there was a, it was maybe like double or nothing weekend and there might have been a Saturday night main event and then you have the AW WWW television. I'm like doing inventory on how much wrestling I've watched for the week and it's like out of control. But I think that's fun and it's. We're all so passionate about watching the product. It just makes sense to be collecting and buying and selling and trading the cards. What. Back to relationships. Like what have you found just in terms of building and developing relationships with people in the space? Like how is it maybe different than your experience on the NBA side? It's definitely different. NBA, you just, you don't necessarily. There's. They're very few and far between the like really, really hardcore PC guys. And a lot of times with the NBA, when you do find a PC guy, it's much more of a role player. Somebody that super collects. Bill Lambert, Chris Mullen, you know, some guy from the 90s that they just loved it. You're not dealing with people that are super collecting so much. Steph Curry and Jordan in WWE. You have true super collectors that have 20, 30, 40, 50, 61 of ones inscriptions. They're Prism gold, they're Prism blacks, Chrome Reds, PSA 10, POP ones. And you have people that really have dedicated a lot of time into these, into these wrestlers. You just didn't see that very much in the NBA side of things. The NBA side of things is very, it's very money driven. Obviously the whole hobby is, there's no question about that. But you definitely have way more collectors in the space in WWE than I would say any other part of the hobby. They're very passionate and making relationships with those collectors is important. There's people that have brought me Soul Ruka cards knowing that I PC, PC her. I've brought a Drew McIntyre card that walked up to my table. I brought it to a friend in Florida at my cost. I have sent Ria Ripley cards to Sam wwe. I've sent Gelman and Banister cards, Orton and Becky's, you know, when they pop up, if I see him somewhere. So it's nice. It feels like a good amount of people kind of have each other's back and that's, that's nice. There's of course some, some bad actors in the space, but there's bad actors in every space. But yeah, it's very important to kind of. It's such a small community right now compared to any other sport that it's kind of, it's important to know where those super collectors are and get to know them and kind of know their collecting habits and let them know you're collecting habits as well. So that hopefully it can be kind of a give and take relationship where you can help each other out. Yeah, I think it is certainly a definitely small where it feels like I know if I see a card who I can shoot it to because I know they collect that wrestler, which is good. And then there's, it's also expanding at the same time. There's, you know, through the, through the license change and the promotion of the product, there's new people entering, entering in gray, selling cards on ebay all the time. I guess maybe like and I'm just in my DMs talking to people who are stepping into wrestling cards for the first time. And I'm just answering questions and trying to be helpful maybe based on it being small and growing. But also maybe some things to look out for to make sure individuals don't get stuck buying something or selling something too low. Like what, what are some of your observations and maybe what advice would you give to anyone out there who is listening who, who might be interested in stepping into the WWE or wrestling card market. So number one, and this goes for any hobby, whether it be cards or anything else, only spend what you can afford to spend. It's a hobby. This. Look at it, look at it. Like the good thing with WWE is that like if you go buy a stone cold Steve Austin auto, more than likely nothing's going to happen. That value is going to hold. But cards are cards. The markets are going to move up and down. It's a stock market, it's a much more steady stock market wwes than anything else. But treat it like you're going into a casino. If you're gonna spend 200 bucks on a card, kiss that 200 to buy, enjoy the 200 card that you have and hopefully down the line it accrues some value. And when you do want to move it, hopefully it's worth more than you paid for it. But know that you're going to have to take losses occasionally. I've taken huge losses in the MBA space but that's, that's what I. And that, like I said, that goes for any hobby. It goes for when you walk into a casino. Only bring what you can afford to lose. You know if doesn't matter what your hobby is, just don't get carried away. And like, like I mentioned earlier, the good thing about WWE is that there's all those different levels. You can, you can buy a 250Hulk Hogan auto and if you want to go higher, you can buy a thousand dollars on card Immaculate auto. And if you want to go higher than that, you can buy a high graded rookie of them that sells for six figures. There's all those entry points that don't exist in a lot of the other sports. And that, that's what is nice about wwe. As far as selling. My biggest thing, and I've this on my story numerous times is shop the card. And that includes to me, okay, I've seen people get taken advantage of and sell stuff way too cheap because they didn't put it up where people could See it. I've seen people lose five figures by not putting the card up on their Instagram for people to see as the whole and be able to make offers on because it was pulled late at night and maybe only one or two people that could buy that card were alerted to it. And yeah, then people get taken advantage of, unfortunately. And that, that happens in every sport. But it sucks to see in wrestling. It sucks to see, especially when it's like newer people that are coming into the hobby, they sell something for X amount and multiple people then say, man, it's. It's worth at least this amount. And then they kind of, you know, that's a bummer to them right out the gate to be kind of taken advantage of. So when you're coming in, if you're coming in with the intention of breaking and opening and trying to get hit that scratch off and get lucky and pull a big card. Well, when you pull that big card, take the time, take your time. You don't need to take the first offer. And if somebody, if somebody tries to pull that, oh, you know, this offer expires, you know, I don't want you showing it to people. There's a reason for that. And that takes, that's across all hobbies, all sports, all cards. There's a reason somebody's trying to pressure you into a sale. There's a reason for it. So shop your cards. Let people see them. Let the big collectors or the big buyers come and make offers. Before you commit to something, there's something I want to toss your way that I have. Don't know if I've ever asked anyone just regarding this topic. And I think sometimes there's this like, anchoring on price and intimidation from buyers. But I am always an advocate. Like if you land a big car that you don't want to keep, like listing it on ebay for a high price and having best offers turned on just to see what you get and you'll. You like. I just landed a card recently that was listed very high and I offered half of the list price and I acquired the card and I couldn't believe that that. But sometimes I'll get scared and be like, oh, this card's out of my league. But I think just it's protection from a seller perspective that at least you can understand. Like, get some feedback. Get some feedback outside of one person giving you that feedback or making you one offer. Like, what is your mindset on that? Like listing cards on ebay for a. And it doesn't need to be Crazy price, but a high price with offers on. Just to get some perspective on where the card is at ebay right now, in my opinion is the best market for high end WWE there. There are a handful of cards that do need to go to an auction house, a golden or fanatics, you know, the Cena Mania patch, when it gets hit, I don't think any of the bounties should, should matter. Let all those people that have the bounties fight it out when it's publicly, you know, at auction. But ebay, without a doubt right now, and I've told this to numerous people, put it on ebay. If you can afford to just sit on the card and you don't like need the money, put it on ebay, let it sit and just forget about it. I just had a story like that. Kind of the. As a seller, you were the buyer. But as a seller, I had a card just a month ago that I had on ebay for. I think I had it there for 9,000 or $10,000. And obviously that was a high number. And I got a $6,500 offer and I had to go look at my sheets and see what I paid for it. And I pulled it out. And the last time I had it at a show, which I haven't done a show in a while, it's been a few months. Last time I had it at a show, I had a $4,500 sticker on it. I got a $6,500 eBay offer. Of course I took it. I didn't even counter the guy. You know, they made an incredibly strong offer. They caught that at a show. By four months earlier they could have gotten a discount on it. But I hadn't redone any of my stickers and I haven't redone any of them since I did that last show. But yeah, ebay is like. Somebody just posted the, the Tiffany Stratton Wrestlemania patch on ebay, I think for 60,000 and just got discount. Just got discounted to 50. I got. We're all watching it. I got the email. I saw the 10,000 discount email this morning. I don't think that that ask honestly is crazy. No, I think it's closer. I personally think it's closer to 50 than it is to 25. I think it's. I think it's the third. Some people have said otherwise. I think it's the third or fourth best, probably the. I'm sorry, like the fourth or fifth best mania patch in the whole set. It was a great match. It's a memorable match. It had a lot of good storyline buildup to it with her and Charlotte and you know, a lot of people have seen her kind of maybe take a step down now that she's doing the whole US Championship mid card kind of run. But I think she'll be back in the main event titled picture soon. But yeah, I personally think that ebay is the way to go. Like there's a Jay USO patch right now on fanatics. Hopefully people see this and they go to fanatics because I don't know if a lot of people know that it's there. I don't know. I don't think I know the seller. Maybe I do and I'm just blanking on it. But I don't think that was the right place for the Jey USO patch. I think just parking that thing on ebay, if you don't need the money, you park that thing. Selling Jey USO right now, his storyline is the worst it's been in a few years. If they are truly doing the whole bloodline story again, Jey USO is going to turn on Roman and he'll be relevant again for a little while. That's when you would want to sell that thing. That's what you would want. It just parked on ebay and you get somebody that's excited with a storyline happening and seeing maybe big maybe, obviously, but seeing him, you know, in the main event picture again, that's. That's when you want that card to sell. That's when you want eyes on it. Not when he's, you know, Roman's lackey like he is right now. Especially not in an auction house where it's not really getting the publicity that it needs. So I hope it does well. I think it, I think Jay should be like a 15 to $20,000 card and I hope it gets that just because that kind of helps everybody put a value on those kind of like mid tier mania patch autos. But to go back, Ebay right now in my opinion is the best place to buy and sell and I try to put the majority of my inventory on ebay because you're going to get more eyes there than anywhere else. Like no matter how many Instagram followers I get, I will have more eyes on that card on ebay than anywhere else. No doubt. I love that. I. I'm curious maybe just as we're rounding the corner on this conversation, just someone in your position doing what you're doing. The hobbies evolving so rapidly. Like we just spent Basically the whole episode. Talking about the changes in the wrestling card space. Like what, what's like, I think about communication a lot, but like, what skills do you think are really important for people who are dealing sports cards in this space right now to have and to possess? Patience. Good luck. Yeah. Which myself included, that's one of my, not one of my best traits, but patience. I mean, both in waiting for things that you want to pop up to pop up at a price that you want to pay or can afford to pay. Patience in dealing with certain sellers or, or buyers. Patience in, like you said, the WWE hobby is very much changing right now. A lot of people thought that maybe this would happen. When Prism came out, prism boxes 2022 prism WWE were insane. And people thought, oh my God, like we're going to get the run up on WWE that we got on soccer. No, it didn't happen. Towards the end of the Panini era, the, you know, 2024 products, it did start to happen with flawless and three count. You know, the downtown's hitting kabooms came out the year before. You were starting to get a lot of those crossover inserts and products that a lot of the other sport people would kind of gravitate towards. But now that Topps has taken back over, it's being marketed to a level that Panini could never, I mean, even just Topps getting the athletes to show up at the rip nights is huge. That's huge. I mean, an hour away from me in Orlando, Jacob Fatu was there, Joe Hendry was there, Alexa Bliss was there. I think Tiffany Stratton may have been there. There was like five or six big names that were there and that was just in Orlando. They were all over the country, their tops getting these athletes to come out to card stores and athletes themselves getting involved in the hobby for better or for worse. I think it's for better. You know, Karl Anthony Towns is buying WWE right now. That's crazy. The man, the man's playing in the finals up 3:1. And I saw him buying into breaks on his night off. I, I, I, I went and looked and saw that he had spots that and he didn't pre buy them. He bought them live. Like when the spots went up, I was there as the spots were going up. And maybe it wasn't him. Maybe he, you know, I'm sure he has somebody that he says, hey, I want this person, this person, this person. But the fact that a guy that is potentially about to win a ring in the NBA finals is even thinking about WWE cards during his finals run is crazy. It's insane. The hobby is definitely evolving. I think we're, I think we're seeing it get to a, a place where a lot of people thought 20, 20, 202022 prism would kind of get the hobby, get the, the WWE market to. I think it has a lot of ways to go. I think Topps is doing a good job with, with some things. There's some things I, you know, I don't like how they're doing. Um, but I think they're doing overall a good job. And to swing it back, that's, you know, that's where the patience comes in. You, you have to, you have to, you have to wait until that entry point gets there for you. It could drop. The entry point could be too expensive right now to get in. Even on some of these, you know, lower guys. I think that Topps is doing a great job of, for lack of a better word, flooding the market with the entry level availability. Not so much the sealed product, but the singles. Zarya just became the champion. You can go pick up a Zarya chrome on card auto for 15, 20 bucks. She could be the next Sol Ruka. She could be the next Stephanie Vacaire. She could be the next big call up. You don't know where her story is going to take her in NXT and then maybe into the main roster. But some of these younger up and comers you can get in incredibly inexpensive. And I think Topps is doing a good job at making that entry level point a little bit lower and lower every set because Stone Cold is signing in every set. Even the Rock. The Rock is now signing in every set. Triple H has on card autos in every set. Those were guys. The Rock had nothing whatsoever other than I think it's 1998 raw set that he had the on card autos. He had no WWE autos until Topps took over. Triple H had zero on card autos. With Panini, he was still. Now we have him in every set. He's. He's got unnumbered base autos in Cosmic. So they're doing a great job at continuing to bring down that entry level for collectors to get in with their favorite wrestler, be it a prospect or a legend, while also having chases like the Mania patches that are there for the high end collector. I think they're doing a good job kind of balancing that and I commend them for that. It's been fun to watch it change and it was really fun to get your perspective as someone who has moved kind of from NBA to wrestling, card buying, selling, trading. Brian. This was a really fun conversation. A lot of insight and information shared. Looking forward to another one down the road. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was. It's always fun to talk cards and wrestling with anyone. Really fun chat. I've wanted to have one of those with Brian for some time. Glad we could do it here on Passionate Profession. Really appreciate everyone out there supporting this show. Shout out ebay for sponsoring this series and making it all possible. We'll have more Passionate Profession next week. You all take care. Talk to you soon.