The Power of Nostalgia In Growing The Hobby For Generations To Come; Plus Disney Lorcana Popping Off!

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 another edition of Cards to the Moon. This is episode 375. My name is Clark from Five Card Guys.com and you can also find me at Five Card Guys on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and on TikTok. All right, it's another short Friday episode and this time I'm not going to rail on psa, but last night I recorded with Will and Roy for next week's Tuesday episode and we had an epic discussion on grading led by Will in our Just a Thought segment that you don't want to miss. Alright, so that's a little teaser, but for today I'm going to riff a little on the impact of nostalgia on the hobby and how there seems to be a pattern emerging on what IPs are going off right now and related to the hobby, what sets are increasing in value, and I'm going to mostly use non sports as examples. But as we know, I would argue the whole resurgence of the sports card hobby itself, especially during COVID was in part due to the nostalgia factor. So what do I mean exactly by that? Simply that many of us in our late 30s and 40s grew up collecting cards as kids, and a few decades later many of us now have disposable income to spend on things that we really enjoyed doing as kids, like collecting our favorite rookie cards of our favorite players. For me personally, that was The Ken Griffey Jr. 1989 Upper Deck rookie card. And most of the guests I've interviewed on this pod usually say something similar, where the nostalgia really got them back into the hobby. Now it's not surprising either to see the boom of Pokemon cards that that we're witnessing right now. And if you do the math, when the set first came out in the late 1990s and became really popular in the early 2000s, those 10 year olds at the time would now be in their mid-30s. And again we see this demographic coming into play. And for them it's the nostalgia of collecting Pokemon cards a couple of decades ago, and they're coming back in full force along with their disposable income to spend on cards that are some of them now worth five and six figures now. More recently I've been told by Raf, who's a friend and recent guest of the pod that the Disney Lorcana card market has also been popping off. More specifically, he mentioned the Buzz Lightyear card, who is of course a character from the popular movie franchise Toy Story. And if you have young kids, you probably know that Toy Story 5 is is coming out, which my kids are going to see this weekend. But yes, the Buzz Lightyear card from the Disney Lorcana wild unknown set, RAF noted that it sold for 2000 Canadian. On release, it dropped to 1500. And now as of this recording I just checked A second ago, one just sold RAW for under 8,000 Canadian, which is about 5,500 US. Now, I'm just going to paraphrase what RAF DM me on why he thinks there's this upswing in value for these Lorcana hits. And he says that Lorcana cards finally hit an IP whose demographic of collectors matches that of Pokemon, I.e. males in their 30s and 40s. And I like what he points out next, which is that while the Disney IP is huge, the demographic of Disney fans in general are mostly comprised of families, ladies and older gents, which I would agree with. But if you look at Toy Story, the largely male demo that grew up watching these movies, whose favorite character was Buzz Lightyear, they would be the ones who would be most interested in buying these cards out of nostalgia and willing to pay for some of these rare cards, which Raf, he estimates is about one in every 150 booster boxes. So pretty rare. And of course add on to that the investors and flippers coming into the space. Now, as we've seen in the Pokemon card market, that's the perfect recipe for hyper growth. Now of course, how sustainable is it? That's the million dollar question, right? But if it does follow the Pokemon pathway, I could see Lorcana Wild Unknown being one of those sets that holds up its value really well over time. And to tie this all together, the nostalgia factor is a key ingredient. Because without it, just see what happened with the Topps Chrome Labubu set. I had to research this, but the Labubu characters, they came out in 2015, so 11 years ago, which is not that long, relatively speaking. And also the hype of Labubu, I feel it wasn't from the true OG fans, however many there are, but rather celebs who thought they were cute and wore the dolls as accessories to show off. And I mean the whole blind box sensation these days certainly didn't hurt in having more collectors wanting to chase these rare dolls, but ultimately it just didn't prove to be that sustainable and even will. Roy and I, we fell for the hype and if you check out our YouTube video at Five Card Guys, we opened the Topps Chrome Labubu set and to date is still the worst ROI product we've ripped the cards. They look nice, but the value of the cards just absolutely tanked. I'll include the link to that video in the show notes below if you want to take a look for yourself. Anyway, now if you're forward thinker like I am, you might be thinking what can potentially be the next IP that goes off. And if you take into account the nostalgia factor that we've been talking about in this episode, a good place to start is to See what other IP was popular for 30 and 40 year olds today that maybe hasn't popped off just yet. So I of course like a lot of people do these days, went to AI. I asked Claude AI to give me a list of potential IPs and let's start with the 40 year old plus crowd because that's the one I'm in. There's the Star wars prequel, remember Darth Maul? There's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I know they have a collab with magic cards right now, and there's Power Rangers Jurassic park. And on the tail end of that era you got all the video game IPs like Zelda and Goldeneye, which I remember playing on the N64 and I absolutely suck at that game. But anyway, not all of them are going to make for great trading cards, I know, but I could definitely see potential in some of them. Okay, now if you look to the 30 plus crowd, things that could pop off might be Harry Potter. I actually think it's still pretty undervalued right now, although I know some of the cards are going for big bucks like the main characters. Then you start to get some of the anime IPs like Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, which I've never heard of until recently. And again, if you look at video games, you're talking Halo, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Riftbound. Now if you really want to play the long game and look at what the 20 year olds now were into just a decade ago, Minecraft comes into play and honestly, Claude AI spit out a bunch of anime stuff that I, an old geezer, have no clue about, like Fullmetal Alchemist, dbz, Bleach, Naruto again, and Death Note. Does any of this sound familiar to our younger podcast listeners out there? But I think you get the idea now right. We said this before in the pod. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and once you're in that age where you have disposable income, hey, what better way to spend your money on the things that made you happy as a kid and make you happy now? Thinking about how easy and relatively worry free life was back then and if these cards and collectibles start to gain value as more people your age get into it, I think that's just a nice bonus. Alright, let me know what you guys think. Love to hear from you and we'll have a brand new episode on Tuesday. I'll 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 @5Card Guys. Or you can follow Hyung at Integrity Sportscards or John @tradeyouecess. You can also check us out@fivecardguys.com thanks again and hope to connect soon.