The Reward of Mystery in Collecting Sports Cards

What's going on, everybody? Welcome back. Stacking Slabs, your hobby content alternative. Brett here, builder of the Stacking Slabs network. Hopefully you are enjoying your time in the hobby and you got a chance to listen to the flagship episode this week. Can collectors ever separate emotion from financial decisions? That was a fun topic to explore. There are a lot of conversations happening on this network each and every day servicing several different categories. Also speaking directly to not only the collector, but the business owner, operator, entrepreneur in this space. I'm having a lot of fun and and I can't stop. I'm spending time digging in, having conversations, researching and trying to bring topics that I think are interesting topics that I'm thinking about when I'm not recording. And I've got one today. And oftentimes during these chats, a topic comes up from a conversation and that is the catalyst for today's episode. Before we do that, make sure you hit the follow button. Tell a damn friend, Run on over to the Patreon Group. Do all the things scream from the mountaintops? Go to the card shows, say you're listening to Stacking Slabs. I do appreciate it. So I want to talk about mystery. Not mystery in the crime story sense. Not mystery in the sense of hidden damage or a bidder who nobody can identify. I want to talk about mystery that lives inside a truly special card when you own it and you don't have a neat comp sheet telling you exactly what it's worth. This topic came up during my conversation with Chris and Josh on Card Letter Confidential. If you haven't already, make sure you check out Card Ladder Confidential. New episode is on the feed. Chris made a point that if it's too easy to figure out what the things he collects are worth, they start losing their appeal. He said he likes some sort of mystery and that he's focused on things that are almost impossible to price. I heard that and immediately felt it because I'm wired in a similar way. I own cards where I know what I paid for them, but I honestly do not know what they are worth today. And I'm not saying that as negligence. I'm saying that as a collector. And I think for a lot of us that's where the tension starts because the broader hobby environment keeps trying to train us to think like liquidator daters. Check comps, watch the market, sell into the strength, rotate into the next card, capture the gain, move the capital, run the portfolio and listen. There's nothing inherently wrong with being a little market aware. I'm not anti price. I'm not anti selling. I'm definitely not anti opportunity. But I do think there's a fundamental collector experience that gets lost when liquidation value becomes the most dominant relationship we have with every object we own. So this episode is really about one question. When is the right time to truly understand value? We know what the Wimby Black one of one is valued as that flooded the feeds this week. His Prism Black one of one and the 5 million plus sale. Everyone loves to talk about that. But when is the right time to truly understand the value of cards in your collection? Not when it is possible. Not when it is fun. Not when it is tempting. When is it responsible? I think those are all different questions and I think the best way to answer this is to separate two kinds of value that always exist at the same time in the hobby. There is what I all reference as lived value and there is liquidation value. Lived value is when the card does what the card does while you own it. It's the satisfaction, the memory, the symbolism, the identity, the feeling that this thing belongs in your box because it says something true about what you care about. It has meaning. Liquidation value is what the market will pay when your relationship to the card becomes transactional. Most of the time collectors are supposed to live in the first mode. The second mode matters, but it should not be running in the background all day like some app draining all your battery. Research on collecting actually fits this pretty well. There is a lot of people that I have consumed or that I read that have argued that collecting is nearly purely consumption or purely investment and that collectors often operate out of distinct identity. And this gets reinforced by objects themselves and the behaviors around them. Collecting is not just buying it's self construction. And once we as collectors get that, Chris's point about mystery stops sounding soft and starts sounding like a sounding psychologically precise. Because mystery is not a bug in collecting, mystery is often part of the reward. Curiosity tells us that information gaps are really powerful. We lean towards things when there is not enough information to make us care and but not so much that the question is dead and the decision making under uncertainty has found Curiosity can override regret. That matters for cards because unique or rarely seen pieces often create exactly the that state. You know enough to know the card matters. You know enough to know it is hard to replace. You know enough to know it probably has serious value. But you do not know enough to flatten it into a tidy repeatable number. So the object stays alive. It keeps you asking questions. What is this really? How important is it? Who else would even want it what would it take for this to surface again? And rarity intensifies this. Dig into any document, article, podcast, episode, research project, whatever on scarcity and rarity and it will tell you that limited availability can increase preference, perceived uniqueness and perceived cost. While looking at a lot of different collectibles markets, watches, art, other adjacent collectibles markets. They'll tell you that rarity and distinctiveness can increase not only monetary value, but emotional and social value and in some cases make an item less likely to be resold. That should sound familiar to anyone who has ever owned a truly weird, singular or under the radar card. Some objects are loved precisely because they are not easy to triangulate. You are not just buying scarcity, you are buying a more personal relationship to meaning. Then ownership changes everything even further. I recorded an episode this week with Max on Hoops Collectors. Great podcast. Go check it out. We were talking a lot about meaning and identity. I mean I put together a digital book on meaning collecting for keeps Finding meaning in a hobby build on hype, you know, and in that there is this premise that our possessions are major contributors to and reflections of our own personal identity. You dig into psychological ownership theory, which will tell you that we develop a sense of mine through control, intimate knowledge and self investment. So think about what that means to the hobby. You don't just buy a card, you chase it, you research it, you justify it, and maybe you miss it, circle back, negotiate, finally land it, tell a story about it, maybe show a friend, maybe build a special place in your collection for it, maybe buy other cards that relate to that card and it's off to the races. All of that is self investment, and all of that is a route to ownership in the deepest sense. And even newer research on this topic shows that concrete thinking about specific object increases psychological ownership and valuation, while more abstract framing can make trading and sharing easier. And I think that's important because it means that the exact same card can feel completely different depending on whether you experience as a specific beloved object or as just one card in your collection. This is also why buyers and sellers so often feel like they live on different planet. There's a brilliant body of work showing that buyers and sellers are not just placing different prices on the same item, they're actually focusing on different parts of the exchange. Buyers tend to think about what they are giving up, which is usually money, and sellers tend to think about what they are surrendering, which is the object, and the benefits of continuing to possess it. That is one of the clearest ways to explain why you can stare at a card in your collection and think, I honestly don't know what I would sell this for. While a buyer can look at the same card and start from comps, recent sales or budget, you aren't disagreeing because one of you is dishonest. You're disagreeing because ownership changes attention. So if that's true, then it's all. It also explains why true value is not always available to us in a clean way. While we're owning something we love, we're too close to it. We've built ourselves into it. We're not just valuing the cardboard, we're valuing the time, the story, memory, effort, identity, and maybe even the version of ourselves that felt most alive when we acquired it. I know I am in the process right now of going through some discovery with my own collection every year. I try to take a good look at everything and I love everything in my collection. But there is a lot of factors that go into it. Is something in my collection not connect back to something that I am building? Is the card once? Was the card once a part of something and now no longer is? This examination will test the way you think about meaning in your own collection. And that is exactly why I don't think the goal should be to know every card's real market value at all times. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't romanticize ignorance either, because eventually selling thoughts show up. Think. If you listen to my conversation a week ago with Kevin Captain, 37, he made it a point which was really good and sobering. Says basically all these. All these cards are eventually, you know, can be sold for cash. And when they show up, they usually arrive through a lot of different doors. And our love of cards and our passion for cards is something that makes us look at the cards in a different light from everybody else. And so while the there are these different doors that exist, I think it's important to talk about them. I think the first door is the identity drift. And I talk about it all the time. And I talk about the My collection is constantly evolving. I went stagnant for the first like five or four months of this year. I just bought a lot. I just kept buying and I didn't evaluate what. What remained. And so this is where the evolution of your collection comes into play. We start having conversations and questions about cards, whether they should stay or they go. Think that the phrase about your collection evolving sounds nice, but underneath it, something is more demanding. It means I am evolving as a collector. And that's really, really important to to call out. Possession disposal suggests that when people feel out of touch with their authentic selves, they also become alienated from their possessions and are more willing to exchange, replace or dispose of those items. Other work on possession portfolio argues that people are always balancing the right number and type of possessions against the psychological and practical costs of keeping too much. So when you sit with your cards and feel that one card which once fit your vision doesn't fit your current version of the vision anymore, that's not fickleness. It may be evidence that your collection is alive enough to reflect your own movement. But here's where I want to push back on our own instincts a bit. I do not think any doubt means selling is a good standard that's too loose, too emotional, too vulnerable to big sales, boredom, recency, bias, and other people's enthusiasm. A better standard is persistence. Misfit beats monetary doubt. If the card keeps failing the fit test over time, then that matters. If the doubt only appears when the market gets loud, I'm skeptical. That's not the inner truth, that's just the atmosphere. The next door is opportunity. This one is real. And I think it's underrated because people sometimes frame it as a lack of loyalty to a card. But opportunity is not betrayal. When a stronger card, a more aligned card, or a more defining opportunity appears, the current card can stop being a destination and start becoming a bridge. That doesn't mean you love it less, it just means its purpose in the collection has changed. The next door, an important door. The market heat. And this is a dangerous one because it's often disguised. It disguises itself as prudence. The voice sounds rational. Be smart, take profits. The market is hot. Sell, sell, sell. Don't be emotional. The market's at an all time high. But if you dig into anything on the behavioral finance front, it becomes very clear that many people derive utility from realizing gains and that historical highs and rising markets can increase the propensity to sell. This deposition says people are systematically more likely to sell gain positions than lost positions and that this tendency is robust enough to show up across many different settings, including sports cards. Even more interesting, you dig into this and you realize that people have found that simply reducing the salience of a purchase price information cut the disposition by nearly 25%. So digging in and maybe translating that back to hobby talk. If you are constantly checking what you paid, what you're up, what the last comp was, what the trend line looks like, and whether this is an all time high, you are just you are not just observing the market, you may be training yourself to want to sell. That's the part I think is easy to miss. A lot of collectors imagine comps are neutral information. But if salience changes behavior in financial markets, then by inference it probably changes behavior in the collectibles market. Like sports cards too, the more you for you foreground unrealized gains, the more likely you are to feel the pull to convert them into realized gains. That doesn't mean never check comps. It means do not confuse constant visibility with wisdom. And then we have the public sale environment, which adds another layer entirely. Because once a card goes to auction, especially a big public auction, value discovery stops being private and starts becoming theatrical. On Card Ladder Confidential, I mentioned the Randy Orton sale and the response that followed. People posting their ordnance cards, everyone watching, everyone reacting, everyone participating in the moment. And that pattern makes sense through the lens of auction and competitive research. Auction fever shows that rivalry, time pressure, social facilitation, the uniqueness of a card being first to market, fuel overbidding and might impair decision making. A public comp does not just reveal the price, it creates a social vent around the price. And I think that is important because this hobby is moving more and more to being a moments based industry. You have moments on cards, Allen MVP patch. You've got the debut patches, you've got big moments where rookie photo shoots where cards are showing up and we're continuing to trend that way. I think this is why Chris's point from the episode really stuck with me. A big sale can give permission, but it doesn't guarantee the action that might be. This the most enlightening point I have heard regarding this topic of category repricing. Because what these monster sales often do is shift permission structures. They tell owners, your lane is real. People love it, keep buying. They tell speculators, someone will step up here. They tell the market this category is now allowed to matter, but that still does not mean the number is broadly repeatable. It does not mean the buyer pool is deep. It does not mean the next copy will see the same energy. And it definitely does not mean your own emotional response to the comp is pure. This is where I think the hobby gets into trouble. We take a public result and treat it as if it were moral instruction. A card sold high, therefore I should sell mine. A player popped, therefore I should reassess everything. A category got a headline. Therefore every owner is now sitting on a time sensitive decision. Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes a result is real repricing, sometimes it is a permission slip. Sometimes it is an outlier. Sometimes it is a temporary collision of right card, right bidders, right mood, right night. The point is not to deny the number. The point is to resist letting the number think for you. And this brings me to private sales. And it is an important week for private sales with the Wimby Prism Black one of one rookie being a private sale because I think they matter more here than people might admit. Emotional attachment often raises the minimum price sellers want, but it can also lower the minimum acceptable price if the buyer's intended use feels right. In other words, when we really care about an object, we sometimes care not just about getting paid, but about where the object is going and what kind of life it will have next. That is an incredible lens for cards because sometimes the responsible move is not to maximize auction fever. Sometimes it is to make a private handoff to a collector you know and trust at a price that feels fair because the destination itself is part of the transaction's value. So let's answer the big question as clearly as we possibly can. When is the most responsible time to truly understand value? My answer is when responsibility arrives, not when curiosity whispers. Responsibility arrives when the card no longer fits in a persistent way. It arrives when a real opportunity depends on the capital. Responsibility arrives when you are choosing an exit. Responsibility arrives when the people around you would be affected by the decision. Responsibility arrives when you know you are no longer just enjoying owners ownership. You are evaluating whether ownership should continue. That is the moment to shift from lived value mode into liquidation mode. Not before. This is a deeply personal topic for me. As I consider my collection, I consider my collection, I consider this brand and this business and I consider my family. I am constantly wrestling with these questions and wrestling with the thought of well, if I sold these 10 cards and got $10,000, is it more responsible to take that money and put that money back into my business? Or is it more responsible for me to hang on to these cards because I love them? These are questions I'm battling. I'm sure you all have your own version of this at some level. If you live in liquidation mode full time, you will flatten the collection. If you refuse liquidation mode forever, you will romanticize inertia. The mature collector has to be able to move between those states deliberately. And a practical tool I'd use is running tests. I am a marketer by trade. I run experiments and tests my entire career and this is how I think about it. The first is the card in hand test, sit with the object, look at the details, remember why you bought it. Revisit the story. Make the experience concrete. The second the portfolio test. Pull back. View the card abstractly. Ask what role it is playing in your broader collection. Ask what it is crowding out. Ask whether the collection becomes clear with or without it. Abstraction tends to make trading and sharing easier, which is exactly why the second test matter. Now, there is a key here. If the card in hand test says keep and the portfolio test says sell, you do not have your answer yet. You have tension. If both tests say keep, then keep it. Both tests say sell. Sell. If only the portfolio test says sell, you may be under the influence of optimization more than conviction. It if only the card in hand test says sell, which is rare, but possible. You may be seeing something more emotional, more intu intuitive, and more final. I like that framework because it respects both the head and the heart in the architecture of collecting. And if you want to go one step further, you can ask questions. You can ask yourselves questions like, if this card went flat tomorrow, would I still want it? I think that is a very good questions. And there's many more questions you could ask. And these questions might make you uncomfortable. But discomfort is not always a warning sign. Sometimes it's just proof that the thing mattered. And that's maybe the final point I'll make here in this episode. Selling is not always the opposite of collecting. Sometimes selling is one of the ways collecting keeps its integrity. A card can serve a season of collection your collection. It can teach you something. It can connect you to a moment, player or set or some version of yourself. And then, after all that, the most honest thing you can do is move it. Not because you never loved it, but because you did. And because you understand its role clearly enough to let you be, to let it become the fuel for the next chapter. That, to me, is mature collecting. Not permanent holding, not constant flipping, not fake detachment, not total ignorance of value. Mature collecting is knowing the difference between the value that helps you live with a card and the value that helps you leave the card. So, yes, I think I'm with Chris here. Mystery can make a card more interesting. If I can comp everything too easily, some of the magic is gone. And yes, I'm with my own instincts, too. I wish more great cards disappeared for a while. I wish more of them sat in collections long enough to build a biography instead of immediately becoming content inventory in the next comp. But I also think responsibility matters. And when a card starts to feel less like a home and more like a question, that is the moment to stop romanticizing about ownership and start learning value with intention. You do not need to know what every card is worth every day. You need to know whether it still belongs and when it no longer does. That is when price discovery becomes wisdom instead of noise. I hope you are enjoying the conversations we're putting out here on the Stacking Slabs Network. I really appreciate your attention. I appreciate you being here, showing up and showing out each and every week telling a damn friend, make sure you hit the follow button. Appreciate all of you out there. We got a whole lot more coming up. Stay tuned. Take care. Talk to you soon.