[HN Gopher] Fanatics Is Building a Weird Monopoly over Sports Tr...
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Fanatics Is Building a Weird Monopoly over Sports Trading Cards
Author : cainxinth
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-08-14 14:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thebignewsletter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thebignewsletter.com)
| whynotkeithberg wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! I disagree with them saying most people have
| viewed fanatics taking over as a positive thing... On
| r/baseballcards Fanatics is not trusted or viewed well.
|
| We do like a few of the changes they're making such as selling
| more stuff online so the average person can buy on release day
| rather than having to pay double to scalpers. But overall,
| fanatics is not viewed positively by anyone I know. Especially
| those who have been unfortunate enough to buy their sports merch
| as it's not done well.
| disposition2 wrote:
| Great article, thanks for sharing.
|
| Fanatics sports merchandise (t-shirts, etc) is probably the worst
| quality merchandise I've purchased in my life. It's a good thing
| they have such a monopoly, because after a few purchases, people
| would seek out alternatives. I, despite being a pretty avid
| sports fan, have just stopped buying sports merchandise because
| it's almost always Fanatics.
| banannaise wrote:
| They even make the replica jerseys for the NHL, which has
| absolutely cratered the quality... and will be making the
| _authentic_ jerseys too starting next year.
|
| I'm sick of the trend of manufacturing companies being replaced
| by e-commerce companies who see manufacturing as an obstacle to
| distribution rather than a goal in itself. The quality is
| always worse because they don't care about the quality, only
| the logistics.
| kibwen wrote:
| Demonstrating that enshittification isn't a phenomenon
| exclusive to tech companies.
| [deleted]
| mfwit wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| Ebbets Field Flannels is basically the only sports merchandise
| I buy these days but since they were bought by Lids last year,
| Fanatics now has a partial stake in them too. Thankfully I
| haven't noticed any change in product quality, but its only a
| matter of time.
| barkerja wrote:
| My goto these days is:
|
| - homage.com
|
| - whereimfrom.com
|
| - neweracap.com
|
| - 47brand.com
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| 100% this! The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the
| last few years to the point that I won't ever order anything
| from there again. They have descriptions of some "performance
| t-shirt" material that turns out to the be low quality cotton
| that starts falling alert after a few washes. Advertisements of
| "Free Shipping" only for them to have $4 added to every order
| for "handling" (they're synonymous in the US).
|
| My tip to everyone is to order sports related clothing from
| Chinese sites like DHGate and AliExpress. The quality is better
| than Fanatics at 25% the price. "It's counterfeit" -- well
| sometimes a consumer has to fight back.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Reminds me of the old Vistaprint model of "Free business
| cards, just pay shipping."
|
| It was so cheap to print the cards (and relatively cheap to
| ship slowly) that Vistaprint still made money on the "free"
| cards.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Regardless of agreement, shipping and handling are not
| synonyms.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| "Shipping and handling" is a ubiquitous term in U.S. online
| stores and I'd challenge you to find any site that
| separates them out like Fanatics does.
| notyourwork wrote:
| They are literally different things and always have been.
| Whether it's common to bundle them isn't really the
| point.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| It's 100% the point. It's such a common and accepted
| thing here that most sites just have "S & H" during the
| check out process. To advertise free shipping in the US
| implies the S&H is free. To suddenly spring a "handling"
| fee at the last step is deceitful and no different than
| airlines or hotels advertising a price and then adding a
| "resort fee" on the last step. And if you think
| differently, then why do they hide the handling fee until
| the very last step?
| scott_w wrote:
| They're a doublet, like "cease and desist." Separating
| the two makes about as much sense as paying someone an
| extra fee to "handle" the goods from the warehouse to the
| supermarket shelf.
| saghm wrote:
| Hopefully if something is done about this, they'll make
| the policy Fanatics currently holds both null AND void
| Cpoll wrote:
| Regardless of semantics, a bait-and-switch is a bait-and-
| switch.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Sure, I think at some historical point, and by dictionary
| definition, they are not.
|
| In practical terms in north america, I've never seen them
| separate, and I buy online _A LOT_. So if they 're not
| synonyms (and I agree with that pedantry:), they are
| functionally equivalent for most people's most practical
| purposes. They're just a phrase that goes together.
|
| Ultimately, if a retailer advertises "FREE SHIPPING", and I
| find that I need to pay some additional fee beyond item's
| advertised price, to get the item to arrive to me, I will
| feel I've been deceived, whether they call that charge
| shipping, or handling, or gnorf.
| jffry wrote:
| Admittedly if they advertised "FREE GNORF" I'd at least
| be intrigued
| labster wrote:
| They offer free fnords all the time but people never take
| them up on the offer for some reason.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The quality at Fanatics has fallen off a cliff the last few
| years
|
| And yet our courts are still under the sway of the Chicago
| school of thought that says monopolies are _good_ for
| consumers, because it drives prices down and normalizes a
| market.
|
| Yet.. I've never seen that come to fruition, in any
| circumstance, ever.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I don't understand how Fanatics is still in business. I've
| heard good things about Fanatics products literally _never_. I
| still remember the Overwatch League merch where they shipped
| people black jerseys with black lettering. When people
| complained, since it was white lettering on black material in
| the photo, they were told they only printed black letters and
| it couldn 't be changed. Wild.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Rubin is good at schmoozing with big name athletes and power
| players in the sports world. If you can do that long enough
| to get some exclusivity agreements, then you're golden
| because no one else can make the "official" merchandise of
| NBA or whatever
| CalRobert wrote:
| "cards collected by children and hobbyists."
|
| Do children still collect these cards?
| tnecniv wrote:
| My friends did in the 2000s, mostly as impulse buys in the
| checkout line when mom was paying for groceries. I still get a
| pack now and then because it's fun just to see who you get.
|
| I'm sure they're not as popular as when they came with gum (and
| less popular as when they came with tobacco).
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| No! Not when adults fight over new boxes arriving at stores and
| not when a pack of 5 cards goes for $25. It's an industry that
| time and again builds up a massive bubble only to see it pop
| from over supply.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, why not make this an App, that can show cards but also
| short video fragments.
| treis wrote:
| That's Hearthstone
| swarnie wrote:
| Maybe without the tangible aspect even children would realise
| they are paying $$$ for infinitely reproducible pixels.
|
| IE the death of economics as i understand it.
| riversflow wrote:
| Highly doubt. Somehow video games are funding themselves
| selling skins. My understanding is that Gen Z eats them up.
| I'm a late millenial, and the Skyrim horse armor debacle
| was a formative experience, as such I have never paid for a
| skin, and neither have any of my (similarly aged) friends.
| Z
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Horse armor was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, I pirated it :)
| I did, however, pay for the Shivering Isles expansion.
| oefrha wrote:
| I recall playing with knockoff Pokemon trading cards when I
| was a kid. Same fun, $/$$ instead of $$$.
| bdav2418 wrote:
| While we are at it, we should also add some technology that
| makes them non-fungible, how about a blockchain?
| pxmpxm wrote:
| Pretty sure Pokemon cards is all the rage now, same business
| model. Marketing directly to children and near-infinite
| production margins.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Yup. Kids play it fairly regularly, and my 7 year old has
| some, despite not actually knowing how to pla.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Not really. The idea of collectable cards _that you can 't do
| anything with_ is antiquated. Ever since Magic: The Gathering
| came along, kids who are interested in collecting (Pokemon, Yu-
| Gi-Oh, whatever) want to do more with cards than look at them
| in a binder.
| munificent wrote:
| I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a sports-themed
| collectible card game that uses real players for the roster.
|
| One of the real magic things about Madden as a videogame is
| that it has the same teams and players you know, with stats
| intended to reflect their real-world performance. The result
| is that you can take all of the sports knowledge you already
| have in your head from being into football and know that
| knowledge _materially makes you better at this videogame._
|
| Seems like you could do the same thing for a collectible card
| game and make a mint.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm surprised that someone hasn't created a sports-themed
| collectible card game that uses real players for the
| roster.
|
| IIRC, they did for all the major (in the US) professional
| sports at the height of the CCG craze; one example was MLB
| Showdown: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Showdown
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| It would be nice if anyone could just do that, but the
| leagues have exclusive agreements. That's why you don't see
| anything cool or interesting anymore in major sports video
| games, as the article mentions
| TylerE wrote:
| Baseball cards had a use when, ya know, the internet and even
| things like printed annual references, either didn't exist or
| would not have been affordable to the average kid.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| yeah and, strangely, part of the value in a legendary
| player's "rookie card" is that it's devoid of all that
| useful information, because nobody at the time knew yet how
| good (say) Homer Simpson would be in his career
| permo-w wrote:
| Pokemon cards, especially rare ones, are as big as ever,
| possibly bigger since a certain brand of influencers have
| taken an interest. As ever, you can buy them in pretty much
| any applicable shop in the UK. Match Attax and other football
| cards are still going very healthily
|
| I don't know or know of a child who is interested in Magic:
| The Gathering. Their target market is more like late teens
| and young adults.
|
| If you want a more accurate usurper to trading cards, you're
| best looking at things like Fifa Ultimate Team[1] - which,
| honestly, have missed a trick in not branching into physical
| cards - and Skylanders. Possibly also collecting skins on
| Fortnite and that kind of thing
|
| [1] a sort of virtual card-collecting football game made by
| EA where you open packs of cards containing football players
| and other items
| roxil wrote:
| I stupidly got into FIFA Ultimate Team (FUT) in one of the
| games from a cellphone couple years ago. I mistakenly
| assumed that your team from one annual release of FIFA
| would carry over to the next release, but I was shocked to
| find out that this isn't the case. EA basically deletes
| players FUT progress every year! Thankfully I didn't spend
| any money on it, so it was just time spent which was at
| least kind of fun, but I know some friends who have sunk a
| couple hundred bucks into it and they continue to buy and
| play the next game. I'm baffled that people put up with
| this. I will never touch FIFA again, until this changes. At
| least Fanatics can't delete your trading cards and you can
| resell them. Until there are similar guarantees for digital
| items, I don't think they will have nearly the same appeal.
| Valve has been the only company I know of that has done
| this decently with TF2, CSGO and Dota 2 skins.
| permo-w wrote:
| I think the issue you have is real, but perhaps not quite
| in the way you think? if you have the full game on a
| console/PC, you can continue to play with your team from
| the previous year _until_ maybe 3 or 4 years on when they
| turn off the servers, and all your work _is_ lost
| forever. that 's the thing I have an issue with. I'd love
| to go back and play with my teams from FIFA 13 or 15, but
| they're lost to the wind, or at least somewhere within
| EA's archives, at best
|
| Your issue is an issue with the way they implement the
| app, which has always been a bit of an afterthought to
| the main game in general. Still a valid issue and must
| have been extremely annoying, but I suspect your case
| might be quite unusual in that you came into it via the
| app, rather than the main title. however admittedly I'm
| not as au fait with the FIFA world as I used to be, so
| that may be more common than I assume
| hathchip wrote:
| I play M:TG with my 10 year old son and have done for a
| couple of years. I know of another family with boys roughly
| the same age who also play.
| uses wrote:
| Weirdly enough, every anecdote I've heard about Pokemon cards
| is that they are collected far more than played, and that
| most people who own them don't know how the game works.
| internet101010 wrote:
| [dead]
| lizknope wrote:
| I was a kid in the late 1980's to early 90's. That was the height
| of the "Junk Wax Era." Baseball cards were so overproduced that
| stuff from that era is almost worthless. You can still buy sealed
| unopened boxes of complete sets of cards from that time.
|
| https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/ranking-junk-wax-er...
|
| I mention this because I don't really trust anyone's opinion
| about how rare something is or price guides created by groups
| trying to get you to buy more cards.
| autokad wrote:
| Becket (through Becket Price guide) told us what the market
| price was back then, only that it wasn't. We had no idea how
| many cards were being produced (it was A LOT) and we didn't
| even know that print run was an issue.
|
| Today, card prices is all market driven (there are some bidding
| shenanigan's that happen though).
|
| Today, people mostly buy graded cards, which have pop reports
| through the grading agency. There are also many good ways to
| know how many cards in a Print Run. Scotty B's cards on youtube
| goes over these in detail. Since there are serial numbered
| cards that have pack odds, you can reverse engineer the print
| run.
|
| That being said, its not a wise idea to buy base cards anymore.
| What you really want is licensed serial numbered cards,
| preferably rookies with on card autos of the base card. Of
| course this is sport specific, such as in hockey the young guns
| cards are most important.
|
| I have made about 40,000$ this year in revenue selling cards
| (revenue, not earnings - doesn't include cost).
| jandrese wrote:
| Well consider it this way. If Fanatics produces only garbage
| that falls apart immediately then there may be a collectors
| market for it in the future since most of the existing products
| will have been lost to landfills. The poor quality may
| ironically increase future resale value, just so long as you
| tie steps to preserve it.
| tnecniv wrote:
| I've gotten packs from that era as free box stuffing gifts when
| buying merch from smaller companies
| angry_moose wrote:
| It's more so you've missed the window.
|
| The hotness is whichever athletes were popular when current
| 24-26 years olds were children. The group that is just getting
| their first taste of disposable income and starts chasing the
| things they missed as kids.
|
| I'm about the same age and watched cards like Michael Jordan
| and Derek Jeter spike about a decade ago and come crashing back
| down. These days its Lebron James and Ichiro Suzuki.
| lizknope wrote:
| I probably spent about $100 total on sports cards as a kid. I
| never bought an individual card, just a random pack of cards
| every once in a while.
|
| I had a friend with thousands of cards. His dad was a doctor
| and he would buy multiple boxes of Topps, Fleer, Upper Deck,
| and more. He would open one and categorize everything in 3
| ring binders. Then he would have unopened complete sets.
|
| He also had a hundred or more individual cards in plastic
| cases. I know he had a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. That one
| is probably still worth a lot.
|
| It was cool to look at and that kid is a successful lawyer
| now but I haven't seen him in 15 years. I wonder if he still
| has all those card. They took up multiple book shelves in the
| guest room they had.
| marktangotango wrote:
| My kids are into collecting pokemon cards big time. We have
| this conversation pretty frequently; why didn't I buy pokemon
| cards in the 90's? We'd be rich! I try to tell them about the
| over production and glut in collectible cards in the 90's but
| it really doesn't sink in. At the time we had just come off the
| beanie baby and pog fads. I personally had no interest in
| buying any thing. I still have no clue why these cards are
| "worth" as much as they say they are. On the other hand those
| black lotus mtg cards I used to see for $10, that is real
| scarcity I understand.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yea, what the other people are missing is there were 100+
| other collectable pieces of shit that ended up in the dump
| worth nothing. The people that managed to buy the right crap,
| then keep it for decades are the ones that effectively won a
| lottery. But really it was pure chance they happened to win.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And the ur-example is baseball cards. My dad's childhood
| collection was worth something like $40K in the 90s. He
| literally bought about 800 of them over 3-4 years in the
| mid-late 50s, then not only lost interest in them but in
| baseball completely, and the cards sat in the same clean,
| dry, temperature-controlled basement for 40 years until
| they became lottery tickets.
|
| What everyone needs to do is to take that hobby when you
| bought a lot of rare, fragile stuff, and publish a high-
| priced coffee table book about it. Some rich bore will use
| that book and his money to simulate a personality, and
| other jealous idiots will try to imitate him, bidding up
| the prices.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why does anyone say this type of thing? Someone with
| different interests from you isn't simulating anything.
| They are just being a person with interests. Honestly I
| disdain those who speak about such interests
| condescendingly much more than I would anyone who chooses
| to spend their money on a hobby.
| TylerE wrote:
| Pretty much anything sold as collectible, by definition,
| isn't.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| Limited editions of video games seem to do decent. Many
| runs sell out and then buying them on amazon costs 2 to 3x
| the price of the limited edition originally. It is
| extremely rare for such an item to go much above that these
| days, compared to some games from the past where a new copy
| is 10x the price or more, but it is still enough to count
| as collectible.
| TylerE wrote:
| But is some limited edition swag gonna be worth 20x in a
| few decades? I think not.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| You are confusing terms. "Collectible" doesn't imply that
| something will gain or hold value.
| ipqk wrote:
| Not always. M:TG has always been sold as a collectible card
| game, and many of its early cards are extremely valuable.
| SaberTail wrote:
| M:TG wasn't immune to the collectibles glut in the 90s.
| The Fallen Empires set, which came out in 1994, was so
| overproduced that you can still get factory sealed
| booster packs for the same price as current expansions.
| omgmajk wrote:
| In fairness, only Hymn to Tourach was really any good
| long term from Fallen Empires.
| TylerE wrote:
| Aren't the ones that are valuable mostly misprints and
| low volume variants?
| tmedina wrote:
| Not necessarily variants or misprints, but many old
| powerful cards are extremely expensive. By this point the
| volume is much lower just due to time, but many cards
| from the first ~4 sets are worth hundreds to hundreds of
| thousands of dollars depending on the card and condition.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| No, but they are from the first couple sets when
| production runs were smaller. WotC has made a promise to
| the community that they will never reprint (tournament
| legal versions of) some of those early cards which helps
| keeps them rare and expensive.
|
| You wouldn't really want those cards reprinted anyways.
| They're very overpowered and seem like amateur design if
| you look at them through a lens of the rest of MTG design
| history.
|
| You may be thinking of the different border on cards from
| the alpha and beta sets as variants. But that's the way
| every card was printed back then.
| phantom784 wrote:
| I still have my 90s Pokemon cards. Haven't found any that are
| really worth anything.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Matt glosses over the caselaw and rules.. This case is nowhere
| near as likely to succeed as he thinks.
|
| I'll just quote the FTC itself here: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-
| guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
|
| First, Panini is not a small newcomer trying to break in, in
| fact, they had exclusive rights prior to Fanatics (and still do).
|
| This case would be much more likely to succeed if it was a
| newcomer trying to break in.
|
| As a result, Panini is going to have a hell of a time arguing
| that because somebody else won the contracts, it's now bad.
|
| Second, Matt literally doesn't mention it, but all Fanatics would
| have to do anyway is show some set of procompetitive effects of
| the agreements, which is fairly easy to do.
|
| See, e.g., https://www.justice.gov/archives/atr/competition-and-
| monopol...
|
| (just to quote the DOJ)
|
| Third: He throws in some stuff about MSRP, but cites no caselaw
| because MSRP's are legal, and even kicking out dealers who refuse
| to honor them is legal.
|
| Again, see the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-
| guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
|
| I actually personally think MSRP and friends should have stayed
| per-se illegal, etc.
|
| But it's not.
|
| Another significant issue with this case overall is: The remedies
| won't fix anything - Panini will have a hell of a time showing
| that divestment or injunction would fix the market.
|
| Instead, to create competition of any sort, you'd have to enjoin
| MLB/NFL/etc from exclusive dealing with a single trading card
| manufacturer.
|
| Otherwise, whether it's panini or fanatics, you will still have a
| single licensed trading card manufacturer.
|
| But MLB/et al are not party to the suit. So they can't be
| enjoined.
|
| Their desire for "Fanatics is not allowed to sign exclusive
| contracts" would require that the MLB/et al not _want_ exclusive
| contracts, which they do!
|
| Panini knows this, and in practice they just want _Fanatics_ to
| not be allowed to sign exclusive contracts. They themselves want
| to turn around and resign exclusive contracts forever :)
|
| This is totally obvious to any judge, etc, and as a result, the
| suit will simply seem like sour grapes - they are not pissed that
| the market is being monopolized, they are pissed they are not the
| ones doing it. They will get really hard to answer questions
| about how the remedies will create competition in the market,
| rather than _them_ monopolizing the two-party market instead.
|
| In practice, if they want competition, they should be suing
| MLB/et al.
|
| I don't give this case a super high chance of success. It may
| succeed, for sure, but it's a much tougher road than Matt paints.
| dghughes wrote:
| I'm not into sports but I recently saw a story on Football
| (soccer) Stickers aka Panini stickers. It's a massive industry
| over $1 billion in sales maybe $1.5 by now. edit: I see it
| mentions Panini hard to believe Fanatics sells more!
| amelius wrote:
| They are leeching from children. Can we have an open-source
| trading card movement who will just make them go bankrupt?
| somat wrote:
| No: open source works because the economy of manufacturing
| software is so wierd. you can breakdown total costs into
| development, manufacturing, distribution. Software
| manufacturing and distribution cost are about as close to zero
| as you can get. So all it takes is one altruistic soul willing
| to shoulder the research cost. and there is no reoccurring
| manufacturing or distribution cost to burden this person.
| physical trading cards would have a recurring manufacturing and
| distribution costs. This is, strictly speaking, orthogonal to
| opensource, an open source trading card by definition would
| come with the design file used to make the card. I guess you
| could print your own cards.
|
| No: the trading card appeal is scarcity of resource. there is
| no thrill of acquisition when you can get anything at will.
|
| Yes: go to wikipedia and look up information of your favorite
| sports figures. feel free to put it in a nice template. there
| is your open source trading card.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I can't wait for the school yard of the future where kids
| just trade laminated Wikipedia printouts with each other.
| "Hey look, I got a rare Honus Wagner from 2007 where somebody
| vandalized it to say Honus Wanglord!"
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Couldn't really make it collectible in the traditional sense,
| but an open source deck building game could be interesting.
|
| I guess you could introduce collectibility by allowing artists
| to make limited runs of cards with alternative art.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| One search found many promising results, including ArcMage
| [0].
|
| [0]: https://arcmage.org/
| masklinn wrote:
| You can't really compete on licensed league IP, since you'd
| need to acquire the license, and leagues want money.
|
| "open source" doesn't really make sense for _trading_ cards
| either, since the entire point is collectibility. It 's not
| even clear what "open source" would entail at all.
|
| Hell, even for a trading card _game_ what "open source" means
| isn't really clear: you can already create your own format if
| you want, you're never going to be able to play bespoke cards
| at sanctioned events (way too easy to abuse), would it just
| give you the right to "fork" the TCG and reuse as many of the
| existing cards & rules as you want ignoring the rest?
|
| That hardly seems useful as you can more or less already do
| that, everybody understands that an MTG ETB and a Hearthstone
| Battlecry are the same thing, you just can't use the exact same
| names (let alone reuse art because _that_ is under separate
| licensing).
| tnecniv wrote:
| Don't forget the players get their money too. I'm not sure
| how it works for the trading cards but, for the MLB at least,
| players get paid for their likeness used in video games.
|
| As an interesting aside, Barry Bonds is the only player since
| the 70s to opt out of the collective player licensing
| agreement. He figured he'd make more if he / his agent
| negotiated his own deals. This led to him not appearing in a
| lot of the licensed games from that era. Normally he got
| replaced by a fictitious white guy who batted right handed to
| avoid any possible litigation since developers didn't want to
| work out a separate deal with him.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Yes, but you won't like the answer. It's NFT-s. You need
| artificial scarcity in the digital domain for an economy to
| function so that trading and collecting makes sense.
| npm i football-trading-cards
|
| doesn't really cut it.
|
| It's been a while since I was a kid, but I remember collecting
| car cards from gums. I was the happiest when I had something
| rare others didn't. Same thing with a local Magic the Gathering
| clone, we went nuts with it and when someone printed a card it
| was really frowned upon.
| ISL wrote:
| A sports Wiki with Creative Commons PDFs of cards could offer
| a free alternative to the traditional cards industry.
|
| I'm sure that there are printing firms out there who might be
| interested in printing small runs of CC cards to see if they
| can make a consistent margin above their costs.
| runamuck wrote:
| Fanatics just bought PWCC - I assume for their sleek (IMHO)
| online auction and vault. This provides another pillar to their
| sports card domination.
| raydiatian wrote:
| Wait, who cares about trading cards?
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| When the emerging sport World Chase Tag released a set of
| trading cards, the fans were surprisingly enthusiastic about
| it.
| detourdog wrote:
| I once found an incomplete set of orchestra playing cards at
| Lincoln CENTER.
| [deleted]
| tnecniv wrote:
| People like collecting whatever. I buy a pack now and then at
| 711. It's fun to see if you get players you like or if you pull
| a card that's out of date (player is on a different team
| because the card was printed before the season started, or the
| text on the back predicts a good year when they end up having a
| laughably bad one, etc.)
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A friend of mine made tens of thousands, buying and selling
| trading cards. And that's what he sold, what he didn't sell is
| worth even more. As an investment, it beats most of the more
| "serious" options.
|
| It is crazy, people pay hundreds for a pack of new cards, just
| so that they can sell them for thousands later, and it works!
| And it has been working for decades, though it has been taking
| ridiculous proportions for the last few years. Now, you are
| probably better off printing trading cards than bank notes.
| zoover2020 wrote:
| This is a billion+ dollar industry, it's not about "who cares
| about ..." but rather exposing evil corporations before it's
| too late.
| dagw wrote:
| _exposing evil corporations before it 's too late_
|
| To play devils advocate, too late for what? Let's assume this
| company succeeds in their evil scheme and completely takes
| over the sports card market for next 50+ years, using their
| monopoly power to mercilessly crushing anybody who tries to
| compete. Unless they can use that power to muscle into a
| market that actually matters, what difference does it make to
| society.
| CPLX wrote:
| I'm not sure how to break this to you gracefully but you,
| your parents, your children, and every person you have ever
| met or even contemplated will die, and along with them
| their hopes, dreams, and preferences.
|
| The degree to which one type of diversion "actually
| matters" or not should be taken in that context.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A monopoly is a profit fountain. You can use that monopoly
| to leverage yourself into new monopolies (because you have
| capital to waste/dump e.g. Microsoft), and use that
| collection of monopolies to leverage yourself into
| political influence. Monopolies are like cancer.
|
| edit: to expand; a monopoly is by nature a political thing.
| Once you control the market, you control the suppliers and
| retailers, and you don't actually have to manufacture or
| handle the products that you control. You set your
| suppliers prices, you set your wholesale prices, and you
| set your retail prices. Your real job then consists of
| fending off politicians/regulators that become interested
| in what you have, and creating politicians/regulators that
| will help you get more of what you want.
| [deleted]
| gadders wrote:
| It's not my bag, but honestly if you can think of it, someone,
| somewhere collects it.
|
| I'm so glad I don't have the collecting bug.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Panini cards are huge (generally thought to be the more premium
| brand), there are millions doing it. They have trading
| communities, etc. A popular YouTube thing is for someone to buy
| a bunch of boxes and to record them opening them. I haven't
| bought cards in 20 years, but I remember growing up they were
| big. Now my nephew is into it. So GenX/Millennials and their
| kids are bringing it back pretty strongly.
| owisd wrote:
| The whole appeal of trading cards comes from some company
| creating artificial scarcity on the supply of the cards, if you
| could just go online and order for a flat per card fee any brand
| new trading cards a la carte from the entire back catalog it
| would take away all the "fun".
| matt_s wrote:
| Really the appeal of trading cards and foundation of scarcity
| goes back to the 1960s when kids would play with the cards, put
| them in bicycle spokes to make brrr sounds, etc. and then their
| parents threw their cards out or the kids did themselves when
| they outgrew them.
|
| Fast forward 20-30 years and scarcity happened for cards like
| Mickey Mantle and other hall of fame players and prices shot up
| to thousands for a single card in mint condition. Kids like me
| hear that and buy tons of baseball cards. The lore of people
| with rare cards was talked about at card shops. It was cool to
| buy a pack and see what you got and trade with friends. Being a
| baseball fan at the time, it was fun to collect every player on
| your favorite team, maybe get cards signed by them at a game.
|
| The fun is in the collecting, sharing, memories, etc. I'm sure
| there are similar stories for things like comic books and other
| collectibles (first edition books) where earlier releases of
| things are now rare. If everything were just a flat fee per
| card nobody would bother.
| 1337biz wrote:
| Same situation with Ferraris. If only they would hire more
| people, cut some corners and get a bigger factory, I could
| afford one!
| kjs3 wrote:
| To be fair, unlike a monopoly controlled product, Ferraris
| are fungible in that I can equally not be able to afford a
| Lamborghini, Bugatti, Koenigsegg and numerous others. We have
| many options for cars we can't afford. The Honda will have to
| do. :-)
| kibwen wrote:
| This is quite a silly comparison, because these cards are
| cheap to produce and trivial to manufacture relative to
| something like a car. The value is from the perceived
| scarcity, not from the perceived quality or luxury or
| usefulness, and the scarcity is at the whim of the
| manufacturer who artificially decides which cards will be
| scarce and which will be common.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
| thombat wrote:
| Not a useful comparison, since the limitation isn't of the
| supply of cards overall but of particular cards that (other
| than the material printed) are identical to the common ones.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| You can buy individual cards on COMC or eBay and can find
| pretty much anything you want that way.
|
| Buying singles is generally regarded as the best way to build a
| collection, but it's not as fun as buying a pack or box of
| cards and seeing what you get. Collecting vs. gambling.
| Loughla wrote:
| Our youngest is huge into baseball. His grandfather collected
| cards when he was a kid (50's and 60's).
|
| Now they open boxes as a way of talking about baseball and
| bonding. Valuable cards are just a positive side effect.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think for thing like card game direct to order model might
| make sense.
|
| But that would not allow you to sell all the bulk(multiple
| copies of same minimally useful cards) to pad profit margin. Or
| make the whole thing to lottery (see 1/1 One Ring). Thus
| driving gamblers to acquire as much product they can.
| kbf wrote:
| I started collecting the newer Pokemon cards because of how
| good they look. I'd be overjoyed if they were abundant, but the
| knockoffs don't come close
| llsf wrote:
| Creating fake scarcity + random draw, looks like a lottery/casino
| where the slot machine is not locked/regulated. Fanatics is
| trying to own the whole sports card lottery. They are going to
| print money in 2026. It would be nice to have alternative venues
| for the sports cards addicts.
| hoseja wrote:
| That sounds like a deeply perverse and useless market in the
| first place. Hard to care somebody is cannibalizing it.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm not sure if exclusivity is a bad thing... So what is the
| complete opposite of this type of monopoly? Anyone getting a
| license for very cheap and then just producing insane amount of
| cards.
|
| In the end those cards end up being worth nothing, or below the
| initial sale price. Then again maybe that moment of enjoyment is
| enough if it is cheap.
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