In the comic book world, I can find weekly and monthly Top 10 hot comics lists, hot book alerts, and other market watching type of threads and videos that help collectors with heads up on what stuff to be on the look out for when at shows and shops. I don't really see that for non-sports cards.

Occasionally I'll see something or someone brought up on a Beckett News article, but not so much in terms collector to collector alerts. Is it because print runs on comics are so much larger that helping other comic collectors isn't making too much competition for ourselves in finding items? The smaller comic book print runs are still around 20,000 copies versus the trading card world of higher print runs of around 2,000 for numbered base cards and 200 for autographed and other material/insert/parallel cards.

So with less trading cards out there and less of the remaining card stores and comic shops carrying non-sport cards packs/boxes let alone singles, it might be next to impossible to find a hot card in the wild. But you never know, there might be a dealer or weekend warrior carrying non-sport cards at a card show or a comic convention that might have something in their common boxes. Maybe we can try to help each other out with sharing our observations. It could be from what we've seen selling online, stores or shows to what we've noticed people asking for and what dealers/stores are buying.

For example, I noticed over the holidays that people were buying WWE trading cards packs and blaster boxes and specifically Becky Lynch items like shirts and figures at retail stores. I was even surprised to find a comic book store selling individual WWE packs from a hobby box. I forgot to ask the worker if people were looking for specific wrestlers or cards though.

At another shop, I saw customers looking various Captain Marvel base cards in the display case. They probably displayed Miles Morales/Spider-Man cards instead as I saw Spider-verse books selling.

Here's also a write up that I noticed Matt Bible did recently in Beckett News on Hailee Stienfield's autographed and material cards from 2014 Ender's Game. Hopefully someone here will find one at a good price!

https://www.beckett.com/news/r...ett-pricing-insider/

As adult aimed collectibles, the market principles for comic books and non-sport cards have certain general similarities. Rules of supply and demand for instance, as well as cross overs between titles and characters that were originally comic based. Then they veer off into their own hobby worlds, a lot of it having to do with the differences in collectors, fan bases, print runs, pricing and product availability. So when you say this is what they do for comics, why isn't done with non-sport cards, well I could go into a lot of things, but it would be a very long post that would bore everybody.

So the short answer on Hot Cards would be, everybody knows what the Hot Cards will be from the moment the checklists are finalized. Dealers don't make mistakes and underprice them. They don't wind up in common boxes at any hobby events. If you are very lucky, you might find them at an estate sale or flea market, where the current seller is not the original buyer and has no knowledge of the value. Even then, they would have to be very lazy to not look it up on the internet before putting it out. And they are more likely to be good older cards, not current Hot Cards.

I don't believe it has anything to do with comic book collectors being more generous in sharing information with each other than card collectors. Perhaps they just meet each other in person more. Comics get more coverage because its a larger market with more collectors and hobby outlets. They are also extremely cheap to buy compared to what we have to spend on cards to call it a collection.

I could run on, but I said I wouldn't, so I'll just leave it at that and maybe others will continue. It's a good subject to postulate on for a cold Winter's day.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:
So the short answer on Hot Cards would be, everybody knows what the Hot Cards will be from the moment the checklists are finalized. Dealers don't make mistakes and underprice them. They don't wind up in common boxes at any hobby events. If you are very lucky, you might find them at an estate sale or flea market, where the current seller is not the original buyer and has no knowledge of the value. Even then, they would have to be very lazy to not look it up on the internet before putting it out. And they are more likely to be good older cards, not current Hot Cards.

There are some autograph cards that end up in the common boxes or are price rather low when the products are first opened because individuals get popular sometime later and dealers forget about them. Here are few that I can recall off the top of my head ...

Bradley Cooper - 2002 Alias Season One
Chris Hemsworth - 2009 Star Trek Movie
Tessa Thompson - 2010 Heroes Archives
Meghan Markle - 2012 Fringe Seasons One and Two

Meghan Markle's autograph card is probably most extreme case of going from a $15 common to triple digits. There was even a thread about it.
http://nonsportupdate.infopop....4605353/m/7577087486

I could be wrong, but I thought comic hot lists and things of that nature were put together based on feedback from Comic Shops/Dealers.

Due to there being so few dealers/shops and as you pointed out such small print runs for most hits I think it would be hard to get a consistent 'hot list' from dealers. . .

There are a lot of cards that get hot. . .

The Hailee Steinfeld autograph is being discussed in another thread, that was a $15 card for a long time.

Donald Trump has several autographs that at one point were selling for $25ish, and now sell for hundreds.

Amanda Seyfried was sub $10 for a very long time.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Heroes For Hire:
There are some autograph cards that end up in the common boxes or are price rather low when the products are first opened because individuals get popular sometime later and dealers forget about them.

Meghan Markle's autograph card is probably most extreme case of going from a $15 common to triple digits. /QUOTE]

Yes, there are exceptions, usually when circumstances radically change, but the vast majority of common autograph cards will always be commons. If it is a temporary bounce due to death or good/bad publicity, the majority will return to common status in a couple of years.

If it is a true sleeper, like a Markle or Hemsworth or Trump (not counting the Apprentice since his was the biggest card in it at the time), where the autograph cards were commons in the list and then took off, they get pulled from bargain boxes by dealers at any hint that the signers might be in demand. Card dealers know the business or they won't be in business for very long. Everything is immediate in the internet age. Hot cards are identified as soon as they get lukewarm. To get a bargain as a collector you have to pick up autographs before the signers do something to get noticed. By the time they make a published Hot List or get mentioned on a forum it's already too late.

And comic hot lists are easy to compile through store sales because the comic is the whole product. With cards the units of boxes is the product and tracking the sale of individual cards in the product requires a lot more work. Many hobby stores don't even sell new product as individual cards because the days of stores busting boxes for themselves are long past. Dealers and flippers busting are likely to be on eBay or such, where everyone compares pricing and any changes occur across the board quickly. Just trying to extract the right sales data illustrates another one of the differences between these two hobbies.

quote:

Originally posted by webjon:
I could be wrong, but I thought comic hot lists and things of that nature were put together based on feedback from Comic Shops/Dealers.

Due to there being so few dealers/shops and as you pointed out such small print runs for most hits I think it would be hard to get a consistent 'hot list' from dealers. . .

You are probably correct about using dealer feedback was/is how hot lists were/are put together.

But since there are less dealers/stores then maybe that paradigm should be changed to include more collector feedback. The folks at NSU take a look at Card Talk from time to time. Maybe those that help put together the Non-Sport Hot Lists for Sports Card Monthly and NSU magazines can use the information that Card Talk members point out to see if those cards/individuals have the criteria to make an upcoming Hot List. Never know, there might be a card here and there that even the professionals might have overlooked.

Yeah, pretty much anybody selling cards knows to check on something like an autograph. Either that or they are lazy and are just going to assume it's valuable and overprice it. You are more likely to get lucky with someone not checking prices on promos especially on older ones (ie. before 2010) and especially with the last Promo card Encyclopedia being over ten years old now. Longtime collectors have approximate going-rates in their heads even if there aren't any recent documented sales and can spot a bargain when it presents itself.

quote:

Originally posted by Raven:

So the short answer on Hot Cards would be, everybody knows what the Hot Cards will be from the moment the checklists are finalized. Dealers don't make mistakes and underprice them. They don't wind up in common boxes at any hobby events. If you are very lucky, you might find them at an estate sale or flea market, where the current seller is not the original buyer and has no knowledge of the value. Even then, they would have to be very lazy to not look it up on the internet before putting it out. And they are more likely to be good older cards, not current Hot Cards.

quote:

Originally posted by Heroes For Hire:
But since there are less dealers/stores then maybe that paradigm should be changed to include more collector feedback. The folks at NSU take a look at Card Talk from time to time. Maybe those that help put together the Non-Sport Hot Lists for Sports Card Monthly and NSU magazines can use the information that Card Talk members point out to see if those cards/individuals have the criteria to make an upcoming Hot List. Never know, there might be a card here and there that even the professionals might have overlooked.

Good idea, I've learned a ton from collectors -- especially, for example, when an actor who had a bit part in one show gets signed on to a large role in a show or movie I'm not paying attention to. . .

I.E. Robert Pattinson.

I've seen a few Bradley Cooper ALIAS autos on the auction sites recently, in the $ 75 range, and there were no buyers

Not a very good looking card, IMHO. Others may disagree.

I think the Cooper autographs sold a bit faster before his Americana autographs came out, but still Cooper's Alias auto was available for like $5 for quite a while. JJ Abrams from Alias was cheap for a long time too.

I definitely remember seeing multiples of this 4400 card in the common boxes a few years back. Nice job Matt Bible highlighting these auto cards by Mahershala Ali

https://www.beckett.com/news/c...ett-pricing-insider/

Seems like Miles Morales cards have been selling more recently. His 2016 Marvel Masterpieces Orange parallel that's numbered to 99 looks to be pretty popular. Not too surprising since the Spider-verse movie released last month.