Collecting Medal-Worthy Victory Laps

It’s not often I get to take a victory lap around here but I’ve (annoyingly, I’m sure) been talking about buying gold medal winner Alysa Liu’s autos for several months now - back when they were like $25 apiece. 

First, congrats to Ms. Liu for her incredible gold medal winning performance. 

Second, congrats to me. Finally. Her autos are selling now for around $200 on eBay and Topps Now is probably going to move 50,000+ cards of hers this week. Meaning, her market should stay pretty hot, especially when she ends up on Dancing With the Stars. 

OK, lap over. I need to go back and erase all evidence of me telling you to invest in Balloon Boy cards. 

Man, I talked about this a few weeks ago but the 2025 Panini Authentically Mahomes Trading Card Box set might go down as one of the worst buys in the history of trading cards. 

People bought (and are still buying) the boxes for anywhere from $17,000 to $20,000+ to get three autos and it’s seeming as in the “best case”, people are selling those autos for $1,500 to $3,000 on the secondary market. 

And the rookie buyback autos? Gross.

They might be the worst I’ve seen. Signing rookie cards with a blue marker and just writing “⅕” on the card doesn’t help the value. I bet those end up selling for less than the non-rookies. 

Anyway, much hate to Panini for this release and hopefully people didn’t get too slammed by buying them. At the very least, maybe this is the end of these types of garbage sets. 

I guess Lamine Yamal is old news at the ripe old age of 18, because soccer collectors have moved on to 16-year-old “phenom” Max Dowman. His rare rookie cards are going for over $10,000 on eBay. 

Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that we’re a silly bunch. 

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for some time then you know that I’m fresh into hockey collecting. Admittedly, I got in on the Connor Bedard craze and rode the Macklin Celibrini hot streak; so, I’m generally a novice. 

I say that because I was looking at trying to expand my hockey collection and, man, I was kind of caught off guard at how “cheap” Wayne Gretzky autos are. For being the greatest the sport has ever seen, there’s no other “GOAT” whose auto sells below $1k regularly. 

And I know hockey isn’t a top 3 sport or the international powerhouse that soccer is, but Wayne Gretzky is a household name. He transcends the sport. I guarantee that a lot of you are intrigued enough, even though you don’t collect hockey cards, to go and look at his market on eBay and consider buying an auto.

Good new, people who like to lose money! Monopoly is releasing a new soccer Prizm set ahead of the World Cup. As someone who sleeps on a bed of NBA Prizm Monopoly cards, I am very excited about all of the money I will lose on buying these cards. 

In case you were wondering, Topps has increased production of Series 1 baseball this year by 18% compared to last year. That means, that Jacob Misiorowski rookie card you just hit was also hit by everyone and no one wants to buy it because they already have it. 

Cool!

I love Anthony Richardson for this. 

Finally, I’m just going to say this out loud but please don’t take it as gospel but someone I know who collects TGC said that Dragon Ball Z cards are doing the One Piece thing at the moment.