The Cynicism Problem In The Hobby Is Earned

Plus a subscriber's cool baseball card TTM return!

Author

Mike Junk Wax Hero
November 25, 2024

Happy Monday, collectors! Here’s my latest for SI, about what might be the greatest Facebook Marketplace find ever.

The Hobby has a cynicism problem. The problem is, the cynics are often right. The Hobby has earned that cynicism.

Every video I post about “attic finds” results in comments that question the validity of the finds. In fact, there are often questions about the validity of a lot of different things anyone posts about.

On Friday I did my typical Attic Find Friday video, about the “holy grail” of unopened cards (you should absolutely read Will Stern’s Cllct article that my video was based on), and numerous people commented that the packs had almost certainly been CT-scanned.

My friend TJ Is Online (YouTube | Instagram) said it best:

What TJ is saying, I believe, is the sealed packs have been CT-scanned already, and the owners know there’s nothing good in them. Theoretically, the opened ones had good cards in them.

While we can’t know this for sure, the fact that dozens of people commented something similar speaks volumes. It was also discussed on Net54.

It’s a real bummer of a way to look at things! Reports of breakers doing this with modern boxes have led to this, though. And someone in that Net54 link says that Beckett wrote an article long ago about people CT-scanning tobacco packs in the 20th century.

Can this CT-scanning cynicism be fixed? Not retroactively, on packs and boxes in the past. But I have to think that Topps/Fanatics and Panini can put something in packs — or make the packs out of something — that prevents them from being scanned. And that would restore trust in future packs.

But for past items that are up for sale? The only thing I can think of is for auction houses to proactively scan them and provide the results of those scans.

Feel free to comment or reply with other ideas for how this can be mitigated.

I think I’ll cover cynicism in The Hobby in other topics in future newsletter, if people like it. For instance:

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The Pennysleever’s Amazing Card Products

Here are their products that I use:

I’m Going Streaking!

Check this newsletter streak I have going:

I took a week off in May with my family, but have published at least one newsletter per week since. I love this!

COMC 20% Off Sale!

I’m doing a 20% off sale on my COMC store all week. I have a pretty wide variety of cards on there, and at the time I priced them, almost all of them were priced at the lowest listed.

Everything is 20% off, and I’m happy to take offers. I’m not trying to make a profit; I’m just trying to get rid of cards for above what I paid to add them to COMC (usually $0.38).

“Thanks For Tuning Back In”

Someone asked me recently why I say, “Thanks for tuning back in” at the beginning of every video, and I don’t think I’ve ever explained that.

Back in 2021, when I started my channel, I worried that there wasn’t much of an indication that I was a regular YouTuber, and I wanted people to subscribe because they knew I’d be talking about cards in every video. I didn’t have shelves of cards behind me yet, and I didn’t have a cool(?) logo.

I decided to start saying, “Thanks for tuning back in” as a way to indicate that what they were getting in that video was some proximation of what they would get in every video.

Pretty simple, pretty stupid. And it’s stuck.

A Viewer’s Nice TTM Return

Subscriber Omaid, who has a newsletter of his own for career advice, received this return from Mickey Mahler. Pretty nice!

I bet Jack Morris won’t do this.

Worst Cut Auto Ever

After my Sunday video, when I said the Harmon Killebrew card was the worst cut auto ever, Dufex of Life, who has a killer Instagram, sent me this:

They cut the autograph off of a card to add to a card.

Woof.

Mystery Solved

In last week’s newsletter I asked why these two 1/1s were identical:

A commenter seems to have solved this mystery:

I couldn’t find a checklist that confirms this, but it seems to be the most likely answer.

🗣️ YouTube Comment Of The Week

🎬 Upcoming Videos

  • A response to John Mangini’s “If I were hobby president” prompt.

  • Another Attic Find Friday

  • #79-75 of my ACE 100 list

  • Covering some of your comments on a recent newsletter

📩 Upcoming Newsletters

Same as last week:

🎬 Channel Highlights From the Past Week

Whew, what a week.

This Attic Find Friday entrant is already one of my top 10 videos ever in terms of views, out of more than 600 videos. I was honestly not expecting that. Sometimes I spend a lot of time on a video and think it’s going to do great and it’s a bust. Other times, like this one, I spend what I feel is too little time on it, and it gets 16,000 views in the first 48 hours.

My mail day videos don’t usually do very well, but this one got more than 2,000 views:

Card show videos don’t do as well as they did a couple of years ago, either.

And, of course, my latest ACE100 video:

🎁 My Pickup Of The Week

Sneak preview:

👻 Brief Horror Movie Review of the Week

I’m not sure the original Beetlejuice counts as horror, but I watched that on family movie night and it’s still a blast.

3.5 out of 5 stars

I also watched the entire eight-episode horror-adjacent series called “Hysteria!” on Peacock. (A five-day weekend of relaxing was really nice.) Set in the late-1980s, it doesn’t suffer from nostalgia overload that a lot of things set in that era are guilty of.

I won’t spoil anything, but the actress who played Pam Beesly’s sister on The Office is great in this, as are the younger actors who play high schoolers.

4 out of 5 stars

YouTube:

I haven’t watched this yet, but this is the NEO video I alluded to on Sunday morning about the guy who claims Gamestop lost $375,000 in cards.

Here’s the original video I did on the $75 trunk FB Marketplace find.

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