A New Card Valuation Framework

Demand Side Economics!

Hype!

Why do people fundamentally collect? What forms does that commonly take?

What archetypes should you target?

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Transcript

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In the last episode of Slapnomics, we hit the history books. Today we discuss building a crystal ball for your card investment process. Let's dive in. Welcome to Slapnomics, the intersection of collecting investment and market theory for sports cards. Episode three MLD card valuation. In ancient Greek mythology, fate wasn't random. It was managed by three cosmic sisters, the Moirai. Clotho, the spinner, wove the thread of life. Lakeesis, the measurer, determined its length, and Atruppus, the cutter, decided when it ended. They didn't negotiate, they didn't apologize. They worked harmoniously together, keeping the cycle of life and death in order. But imagine for a second if one of them acted alone. If Clotho fabricated the thread haphazardly, without care to quality, using whatever struck up in the moment and was easily attainable. If Atropus, the cutter, started severing life threads willy nilly, as directed by clamoring voices in her ear, cutting early before they had a chance to stretch. Or if Lakeisus the measurer let threads run forever, ignoring healthy boundaries, warning signals, and reason. The whole system chaos. Order collapses. Fate once predictable unravels. Now think about sports cards. They have three forces too, and they're just as sacred. Market like Clotho, it spins the narrative. The hype cycles, the buzz, the liquidity. Legacy, like Lakeesis, it measures the significance of the player and card through time. Design, like a tropis, it cuts through the noise, it gives a card permanence, identity. When these three forces are in sync, the result is stability, appreciation, and collectability. But when one overpowers the rest, the market goes rogue. When hype outpaces legacy and design, prices fly, then collapse under sky high expectations. When design becomes gimmicky, say sixty three parallels, sticker autos, recycled templates, the magic inside us dies. When legacy is tarnished, childlike wonder also dies. Cards lose their connection, and connection is the thread that binds collectors and cards in the hobby. So if you want to understand card value, don't just ask what's it worth. Ask who's spinning the thread, who's measuring the impact, and what can cut it short. There are only three pillars of any market supply, demand, and price discovery. This market triangle, this manche, provides the current assertion of value with its confluence. Change any part of the supply, the demand, or the price discovery process, and you change the current price tag. Last episode, we broke down supply with a walk through the history of junk wax, junk color, junk slabs, junk everything. This episode, it's all about demand. Who wants the card, why they want it, and what they're willing to pay for it. Demand boils down to how many people want the player's card versus how many cards there are. Pretty simple, right? But buried in that sentence are three distinct valuation engines. The people, the market, the why, the legacy, the card itself, which is the design. Let's dig into each. Demand is desire, but desire's not one dimensional. It's a Venn diagram with overlap, contradictions, and shifting weight. Otherwise this would be a pretty easy game to play. So easy we wouldn't even play it anymore. Like checkers. Instead, demand side is the true 3D chess of the market, played upside down on a ceiling while you have chronic diarrhea. I didn't just throw that in there to make the picture more vivid. The analogy holds up because you're constantly distracted and constantly thinking about the next exit point. See, I tied it together, you thought I wouldn't, didn't you? Okay, so the people in the 3D chess game shitting their pants have a thousand different reasons for trading in their hard earned liquid currency, such as US dollars, euros, Argentinian pesos, for a piece of cardboard with a chick or dude's picture on it. And if that oversimplification irked you, that's totally natural, because it's much more than a piece of cardboard with a chick or dude's picture on it. But that's only because of the meaning that we attach to it. And the meaning that I give is based on how I identify myself. Think about that for a second. What do I take pride in? So if you're with me on this concept, you'll see that there are many avenues of expressing identity with the collecting activity. Here are a few of the ways that comes out in the sports card market. Number one, team builders. I am a Packer fan. Fans who want every card from their squad. This is a very tribal activity. Number two, set builders. I am a historian or artist or storyteller or willful completionist. Fans who seek challenge, make narrative their own, and create order from chaos. three, city or regional fans. I am Texan. Fans who usually own more guns than sports guards. Number four, positional collectors. I collect offensive linemen. This subset says a lot about what they identify with and what they value, and normally is a collector signaling that the market undervalues a certain subset unjustly. I respect this group a lot because they're one of the most pure collectors in that they collect most closely for the sake of collecting itself in defiance of outside forces. five Style Crusaders. This is a highly varied subset, but a powerful one. Something like I knew about a player first, I bought his rookie card ages ago, or I collect underdogs, or goat collector. I have no special knowledge of this, only intuition, but I would surmise that these kind of collectors on average spend more on these manifestations of their identity the stronger that core identity is. Some may even spend because they have anxiety over having no strong core identity. But that's a deeper podcast than this one. And just when each collector thinks he's got everything figured out and everything's going well, a trade happens. A scandal breaks, a player gets blood clots, Ronaldo gets definitively passed up by Messi. Suddenly demand pivots. The why changes. The who multiplies or divides, and the value runs along with the shit down your pants as you run to sell, sell, sell. So if the landscape is ever shifting, how do we keep grounded? We create financial models around risk reward. We can practice doing this in our heads every time we look at a card or consider investing in a player. Here's a little show me the math for you. Say it's April 2025 and I see someone asking in the Facebook groups if anyone has any Deserie Duate to sell. Hmm, I may think to myself, not very familiar with that player. I'll probably move on and find the next 2014 Prism card on my list to track down. But if a day or two later I see a different person saying the same thing, now I've got a market trend. So now I go from hmm to let's look into this guy. Let's think about it for a sec. He's on PSG, so a big club with a top-tier reputation. Green flag. He's young but has great involvement metrics, which is even more impressive given how big the club is and tough the competition is. Big green flag. So he's got the underlying market demand with PSG and the French national team, the budding legacy based on age-based performance, the likability aspect that boosts that legacy. He's checking all the demand boxes for an excellent potential investment. See, I told you it was a good investment. Bonus, the overall supply is low. He was looked upon as very promising, but that was fresh from a smaller club with a 50 million euro transfer in 2024, and starter time at an upgraded club wasn't guaranteed. Now here's where the hidden lever comes in. Expectation. Players with sky high expectations, Wembanyama, Fati, Kyle Pitts, already have the legacy piece over inflated. It's like a hype accelerator or NAS for the market. So market discovery is already baked in, and supply is bloated by manufacturing cashing in on that hype. If you're into basketball, you know exactly what that means when talking about Wemby. He carried the rookie market on his back for two years. There was no 2024 rookie class. So when the market is oversupplied and prices are still high at the outset of a career, you have a dangerous liquidity trap. The manufacturers make their money off the initial energy and hype. They don't care if the resale market evaporates after a year. The market punishes excellence when it was promised greatness. The polar opposite happens when low expectations, because they have two OP things working for them low supply and untapped hype accelerator. This results in a short squeeze, similar to what infamously happened with GameStop. Everyone was trying to get through a tiny door all at once. Demand climbs aboard the hype accelerator rocket ship and quickly overwhelms supply, and prices can't come down until demand slackens or Panini can come up with some half baked set to spin cheap cardboard into gold. The best ROI plays often come from low expectation risers, such as the grinders who emerge late, post-hype sleepers, once hyped rookies who cooled down while developing, or injury returnees, volatile but asymmetric upside. These are your value inefficiencies to leverage. This is the core of the legacy function of value. Legacy can be hurt by a lot of things scandals, injury, poor performance, bad mindset. Legacy is built quickest by overcoming obstacles and outperformance. And for a player who wasn't expected to be great, just being an excellent player accomplishes both. Two birds with one stone. The lower the expectations, the higher the upside. The higher the expectations, the lower the floor. Card value is determined by how many people want the cm. Let's emphasize that last word the card. The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. That's what a great card does. Because no matter how legendary the player is, the physical slab is the manifestation of that desire. So have you ever stopped to think about why rookie cards are the most important cards of that player? They're the first installation. The most fundamental picture of that player, before the future fame and weight of the years took its toll, before the scandals, the trials, the wild successes, the drama, the emotions, the victory. It's the blank canvas of the concept of that player. And that's the same concept for a first set of cards that becomes an iconic name. The manufacturer had to lay it all on the line to introduce a new set, just like that rookie player. It wasn't a question of how much can we print to make the most money. It's how do we make the best product we possibly can to express via this design structure. The best art, the most unbridled play go hand in hand in both rookie players and rookie sets. The best sets freeze time. 2014 Prism World Cup Soccer, 1952 Topps Baseball, 2012 Prism Basketball, 1989 score football. They become portals. The sets are the key to those portals. A card transports you to when you were a kid and went to your first game with your dad and saw that player hit a record breaking home run. Or that game when your favorite team was down and counted out and came back in the ultimate underdog story, twenty-eight to three at halftime to beat the Patriots. So next time you see your set builder friend, give him a hug. He's doing a beautiful thing. Set builders aren't just collecting cardboard, they're archiving eras and transcending time. Woo! We went through a lot of concepts and ideas. Got a little crazy there when I was talking about chess for a second. Sorry about that. Let's summarize and put it all together for you quick. Hype, design, and legacy must stay in balance to foster growth. What you take pride in dictates what you invest your stored energy, money, into. The more pride, the more the investment. Reason through high level supply, demand, and expectations as leverage, either up or down. What changes to these factors has the market not taken into account? Post type sleepers reignite the hype nos quicker. We're primed for it. As for the simple math that is absolutely not set in stone, MLD card valuation might look something like player market plus player legacy plus set design times narrative timing. Just remember, cards aren't spreadsheets, they're storytellers, and stories are the most human thing about us. You want to know who's undervalued? Find a great story, the market is drowning in other narratives. In the next episode of Slabnomics, we will dive more practically into sets. If you can't tell, I'm a set builder, so take all that talk before about different buyers with a grain of salt for my obvious bias. Now that we put in the work to explore some basics, we're going to start putting in practical applications with numbers and explore the concepts through concrete scientific method. If you disagree with me on anything I've talked about here, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, under slabnomics, and start a conversation. Pop onto my content anytime to give me an earful and or tell me how this is the Cowboys year. Oh, and one thing to think about before you go. Not a sponsor, but the PSA platform is an incredible resource not just for pop counts and high-res images, but did you know you can see card facts about sets and see total auction values for sets? You can use those as a barometer for how valuable the set is in relation to others. How cool will it be to see comparisons of that later on that social media account for Slabnomics you're about to follow? This has been Slabnomics episode three, MLD card valuation. Thanks for listening. Talk to you later.