Sports Card Nostalgia

This past September, I went back to my hometown for celebrations: of Birthdays, a new Job for my dad, and a wedding. What I didn’t expect to celebrate was rediscovering my love for trading cards, both for their intrinsic value to me as a fan and as their value to others as investment assets.

Trading Cards appear to be having a bit of a renaissance lately, with million dollar auctions for cards both of older players (see Honus Wagner & Mickey Mantle) and those still playing (see Tom Brady & Patrick Mahomes). I even found a collection of my old Pokémon and YuGiOh cards worth hundreds of dollars in my room. Obviously, they didn’t all stay in mint condition, but that’s not really a huge problem, as the value of these cards lie in their scarcity. Condition plays the largest role in how much money I might be able to get back, but the point is that I have these physical assets in my possession.

I’m not an expert in trading cards as assets, so I went to my local trading card store to see what I could learn. The first lesson: buying and opening unopened packs is more like gambling at the slots than investing in stocks. The value of most packs lie in the unknown-what could these packs hold-instead of any value in those cards themselves. People pay for the rush of “a hit” or a rare pull, but in truth, most packs won’t be a lucky winner.

The next lesson I learned was from online. A YouTube channel, Sports Card Investor, has a great breakdown of the 5 types of sports card investing: flipping, this year, career progression, key moment, and long-term. All of these have pros and cons, but the lesson learned was intentionality-having a very good reason to purchase a particular player at a particular time with a selling goal in mind.

I know I have plenty more to learn, and I will do my best to keep you updated on those tips and tricks. For now, you have to deal with my ignorance as I slowly reduce the shadow of ignorance and explore this exciting area of (hopefully) appreciating interest.