As we turn the calendar from 2021 to 2022, it’s that time of year to again take a look at the past calendar year (I’m going to cheat a little bit and you’ll see why) in the hobby, the biggest themes, and what it was like collecting baseball cards in 2021. As usual, I will dig into the major themes, touch on some additional points of interest, and wrap it up with some of my favorites and 2022 goals.
2021 ROOKIE CLASS
As baseball collectors, we’ve been spoiled with the rookie classes the past three years. In 2018 we had future elite superstars Juan Soto, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Shohei Ohtani. Unfortunately, Gleyber Torres was the fourth member of that group but has seen his star fade significantly in the hobby. In 2019 we had two more superstars in Fernando Tatis Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. along with two more Tier 2 big boys in Eloy Jimenez and Pete Alonso. Keston Hiura, even more so than Gleyber, quickly faded from that group. In 2020, the headliners were Yordan Alvarez, Luis Robert, Bo Bichette, Aristides Aquino, Kyle Lewis, and Randy Arozarena. Kyle and Randy were in-season risers while Aquino turned out to be a flash in the pan and Kyle’s injuries have brought him back to earth. Yordan’s injury depressed his market for a bit, but he still has some Tier 2 momentum with Tier 1 upside today. Bichette and Luis Robert are still going strong, especially Bichette.
That leads us into the 2021 rookie class. There were plenty of choices to ascend to the heights of the previous rookie classes.
Alec Bohm couldn’t get the ball in the air and was demoted to the minors by the end of the season.
Cristian Pache couldn’t get the bat on the ball and was demoted to the minors in mid-May.
Jo Adell spent the first three months of the season in the minors and didn’t exactly set the world on fire with a sub .250 batting average and sub .300 OBP after he came up in August.
Dylan Carlson was good, but he fell short of 20 home runs and stole two bases - a far cry from the 20/20 stat-line I was expecting to see from the Tier 2 talent.
Bobby Dalbec made it to 23 home runs, but his profile needs to be hitting 30+ home runs for it to have a hobby impact when he’s sub .250 batting average and sub .300 OBP.
Ke’Bryan Hayes dealt with wrist issues all year and led to a less than stellar 96 game performance.
Alex Kirilloff had an underwhelming 59 games before having to go under the knife to repair a tendon in his wrist.
Jazz Chisholm has a Tier 1 personality but was only able to put up Tier 2-ish numbers with close to a 20/20 season with league average batting average and OBP.
Jake Cronenworth met my expectations as a Tier 2 player with 21 home runs and decent above average stats across the board, but nothing outstanding.
Jarred Kelenic struggled mightily and even a promising September couldn’t restart the irrational exuberance for his cards.
Andrew Vaughn got the Tony LaRussa treatment and was playing out of position leading to an underwhelming season.
Akil Baddoo was a success story from a Rule V draft pick perspective, but he was essentially a league average player.
Jonathan India was the National League Rookie of the Year and delivered Tier 2 numbers with 21 home runs, 12 stolen bases, and near-elite OBP at .376 in his rookie season. Great from a real baseball perspective and fantasy perspective, but not a Tier 1 elite hobby performance.
Ryan Mountcastle was a Tier 2 player for me entering the year and he somewhat exceeded my expectations. He put up a .232 ISO with 33 home runs at 24 years of age, which is quite impressive. The batting average and OBP were slightly above league average and that is what keeps him a Tier 2 player for me and the hobby at large as well. A potential great player, but not an elite one.
Out of almost 15 hitters that we hoped would have the ability to deliver hobby elite performances in 2021, not one truly lived up to what I consider a Tier 1 player. Mountcastle came closest from a stats perspective. India was an interesting case because his prospect stock had somewhat unfairly fallen, so he was starting from low expectations and was able to reach the heights of the NL Rookie of the Year. But as I said above, the stats don’t equal a Tier 1 player. Only one player really had that x-factor, that being Jazz’s personality, but his stats weren’t strong enough to pair with it to give us what the hobby looks for. There was also one guy who absolutely set the world on fire in the first month of the season hitting 5 home runs and batting .416 with the personality to match in Yermin Mercedes. It was mostly driven by him swinging at and hitting everything in sight while running hotter than the sun. He came back to Earth shortly thereafter and then Tony LaRussa made sure to kick him while he was down and the Yerminator phenomenon was no longer. At the end of the day, the 2021 rookie class, at least for the moment, were not able to hit the stratospheric heights that the previous three years had us expecting.
GRADING GONE WILD
Grading a card has always added value to trading cards, but the demand for graded cards exploded along with the Pandemic-fueled Hobby boom. This in turn spawned new grading companies, price increases, and eventually quasi shut-downs.
The main players in the grading space prior to 2021 were PSA, BGS, and SGC. There have been various fringe players that tend to come and go with GMA being one of the few that has stood the test of time as a bargain basement option. Come 2021 and the hobby gold rush attracted many more players with two new contenders drawing the most attention - HGA and CSG. Side note - make sure to have a three-letter acronym if you want to start a new grading company.
Hybrid Grading Approach caught the hobby’s imagination at the beginning of 2021. I’m not sure if anyone had done this before, but at the very least HGA made it mainstream and disrupted the market, at least for the first quarter of the year, with their custom labels, or flips as they are sometimes called in the grading world. I was, and still am, a huge fan of their custom labels and am somewhat surprised none of the big players have begun offering that as an option. On the other hand, they have stubbed their toe with their custom labels in using art that they did not have the rights to use.
The other innovation they brought to the grading business was the queue. Unlike the free-for-all nature of submissions to the existing grading companies, HGA implemented a set window of time where you could claim a submission spot of up to a specified number of cards and there was an overall cap on the number of submissions HGA would accept during that window. The idea behind this was that it allowed them to meet their stated turnaround times which had become a major pain point with PSA and BGS submissions. In the end, they still have struggled to meet their stated turnaround times, like everyone in the industry.
The final item worth mentioning is that when they burst on the scene, the “Hybrid” part of their name was implying that they used AI technology to grade cards. I’m not sure what claims were or weren’t made about their AI technology either on their site or via social media channels, but there is no current mention of AI on their site. Currently they refer to ultra high resolution scanning technology that is better than using traditional magnification devices as the basis for their “Hybrid” grading approach. That is a far cry from the AI we were all under the impression they were using when they started up and quotes still floating around from their facebook posts in the start up days painted a much more grandiose picture.
Unfortunately for HGA, they became the whipping boy of the majority of the hobby. They made quite a few mistakes, including the previously mentioned use of artwork on a label without permission, mis-spellings and incorrect labeling, questionable grades, damaging cards while slabbing, no longer meeting turnaround times, authenticating fake autos and altered cards, putting out a “hype” video about the company that looks like it was produced by a high school film crew from the 90’s, not yet publishing a promised video on their “AI”, and on and on. All of the grading companies have issues and some of those are similar to the ones of HGA above, but when you are in the spotlight, trying to make a name for yourself while disrupting an industry, you often don’t get that leeway and you can’t compound your problems with high profile mistakes and broken promises like HGA has.
Certified Sports Guaranty, or CSG, was the other major entrant into the grading space in 2021. CSG is part of the Certified Collectibles Group (CCG) which runs grading and authentication companies across a number of industries and is well respected in the coin, comic book, and Pokemon grading spaces. The launch of CSG was actually announced back in October of 2020, but they didn’t open for business until shortly after HGA did in February of 2021. As opposed to HGA and the “disruptor” approach, CSG went with a more traditional approach. Another option in the space that you can trust from a well-known company led by two experienced graders in the space (Andy Broome and Westin Reeves who were senior graders at Beckett). No fancy labels (we’ll get to that in a minute), no fancy queue, you get charged based on turnaround time and card value (HGA did away with the card value determiner), etc. Just another “solid” tried and true option in the grading space.
So what’s the catch? As time has gone on, CSG has anecdotally been considered a very hard grader. While the hobby as a whole wants every card to get the grade the card deserves, each participant in the hobby wants their cards to get the best grades no matter how irrational that is. Unfortunately, CSG does not yet have a Pop report to tell us truly what percentage of Pristine, Gem Mint, etc. grades they are giving out versus the overall amount of cards they grade.
Being known as a tough grader is essentially a double-edged sword as I somewhat described above, but what really is the most controversial aspect to CSG is their label/flip. On rare occasions I will hear people complain about the lime green color scheme. The real complaint centers around the size of the label. It is literally the size of Peyton Manning’s forehead. When you don’t pony up the extra dough to include sub-grades on the flip, the blank space exacerbates the size of the label. As silly as it can be, there is a heavy bias towards a slabs aesthetic and this label has not won many people over. At the end of the day, if CSG slabs were outselling every other slab it wouldn’t matter, but since it’s not, it is one of the main challenges CSG faces in being adopted by a majority of the hobby.
As I have already gone long on the new players to the space, I won't go too long on the established veterans - SGC, BGS, and PSA. The biggest story for all of the grading industry, but especially these companies, is that they were getting overwhelmed with submissions. The market and demand for any and every card created a huge spiral of graded cards being the most desirable and thus drawing the most ROI and thus leading to every collector and flipper and Tom, Dick, and Harry submitting every card under the sun for grading to these companies. Seriously, stop submitting base cards for grading. Each of these companies started with increasing price levels to try and stem the tide, hoping that would make people think twice before submitting a card for grading. They were wrong.
PSA said they were receiving more cards in five days than they would normally receive in three months. PSA’s backlog got up into the millions of cards waiting to be graded and they said that they didn’t even have the manpower to open all of the packages that were arriving on a daily basis. The backlog was so much that PSA suspended almost every single service level except for the two most expensive levels at the end of March (Super Express and Walk-Through) and did not start gradually re-opening levels beginning in July. As of the end of the year, they have opened up everything from Regular service ($100 a card) and on up. The two lowest levels, Value and Economy, remain closed and I don’t anticipate that changing any time soon, perhaps not opening at all in 2022.
Beckett Grading (BGS) followed suit at the beginning of June closing all submission levels except for their most expensive level with Premium. They have still yet to re-open any submission level below Premium. BGS typically does not release much information on what’s going on ever, so don’t expect to see a long runway on announced changes for them. I would guess at least the next level down, Express, opens back up in 2022, but trying to figure out what BGS will do is harder than reading tea leaves.
SGC did not shut down submission levels as they stuck to Page 1 of the playbook. In mid-March they raised the base submission price for the lowest value cards with standard turnaround times from $15 to $25. Then PSA shut down the majority of their submission levels and literally a day later, SGC submissions increased by 500%. The following day, on April 2, they tripled that $25 price point up to $75 to try and stem the tide and were already in full scale up mode to try and avoid shutting down submission levels, which they were successfully able to do. So successful that just over a month later, they dropped the base submission price back down to close to what it was after the first increase at $30 which is where it is still at today.
From the Grading companies bursting at the seams to a multitude of new companies jumping into the fray (there were many more than what I highlighted, but no more at the moment worth mentioning), the grading world got flipped turned upside down in 2021.
FANATICS
Fanatics’ entry into the hobby is by far the biggest story of 2021 and it’s potentially competing for the biggest story in the history of the hobby. At the very least, it was an absolute shock to the hobby system. Back in mid-August, Fanatics closed the deal on acquiring the exclusive trading card licenses for MLB/MLBPA, NFL/NFLPA, and NBA/NBAPA. If you want to see what my initial reactions on that earth-shaking news were, see my article on if I thought the Hobby Sky Was Falling. That set off a wave of speculation without much meat to chew on through the end of the year. And that is why off the top I said I was going to cheat “a little bit” on the year in review. Fanatics announced they acquired Topps Trading Cards and Collectibles on Jan.3, 2022. I felt it was important to include that in this hobby year in review because it was part two of this major story that hit in the late summer. To read my immediate reaction to it, see my article on Fanatics acquiring Topps.
Moving forward, it should be status quo in the short term as they focus on the existing Topps licenses (MLB/F1/UEFA/Bundesliga/Star Wars). The major changes are more likely to come when Fanatics/Topps takes over the NBA and NFL licenses as they will have learned plenty from their initial pass through the hobby. The biggest questions to answer are the distribution (direct to consumer/local card shops/retailers/secondary markets) and pricing models. We’ll see how the Fanatics Trading Card division handles those very important market-making or breaking decisions. Followed closely will be how they move forward with the thoroughly discussed vertical integration. They want to be the one-stop shop where you buy the cards, re-sell the cards, grade the cards, and insure the cards. Interestingly, Michael Rubin, the owner of Fanatics, was one of the investors in the Blackstone Group’s recent acquisition of Certified Collectibles Group, which owns CSG, one of the new players mentioned above in the trading card grading space. This may mean nothing, or CSG could be integrated into the Fanatics all-in-one experience for discounted grading activities.
At the end of the day, Fanatics appear to have the best intentions. We’ll see how they execute - acquiring Topps was a good jump-start on being able to execute their plans for the hobby. And given how quiet they’ve been able to keep the two big shoes that have already dropped, I firmly expect we will be surprised by Fanatics somehow some way in 2022.
Additional THEMES
PSA
“Joe, didn’t you already cover the PSA topic above in the Grading section?” “Why yes, voice in my head, I did”. But wait, there’s more. Not specific to the grading topic, but more specific to PSA itself we have plenty of news to discuss.
While this story began towards the end of 2020 with Collectors Universe, the parent company of PSA, agreed to be purchased and taken private with the deal closing in February of 2021. The two biggest names involved in this deal are Steve Cohen, the current owner of the New York Mets, and Nat Turner, an entrepreneur and card lover most recently of Flatiron Health before that company was acquired. Turner has stepped into an active role/face of PSA since the acquisition while Cohen is wearing out his welcome in New York (at least that’s what my Mets friends tell me). PSA then went on to acquire multiple companies to expand their capabilities and reach. In April, they acquired Genamint, a grading technology company that was targeted to help PSA with their intake and pre-grading activities. Kevin Lenane, the president of Genamint, has now ascended to the top position of PSA after Joe Orlando left in July after 20 years running the company. Just prior to the Joe Orlando exit, Goldin Auctions, one of the leaders in the secondary auctions for the high-end trading card space, was acquired by PSA. And wrapping up the year, PSA finished up their 2021 spending spree by picking up Card Ladder, a leader in the trading card market price and trend tracking.
I doubt this was the end of the acquisition activities and fully expect PSA to continue adding companies and technology moving forward as they look to expand their dominance in the grading industry.
The Market
Juan Soto PSA 10 Update Series base rookie US300 9/1/2020 - 12/31/2020
While it could be considered a primary theme, the card market goes up and down every year and I feel like it is an underlying theme across every single one of the primary themes but still deserves a mention in the Additional Themes given the large ebbs and flows. The market was so strong in 2020 that the standard baseball off-season market swoon that usually starts to hit around September, ramps up in the winter, and doesn’t trend back upwards until early spring, was completely short-circuited. It lasted roughly six weeks between the beginning of October through mid-November, led by Juan Soto after his elite 2020 season. Typically the baseball card off-season lasts from September/October through February/March.
2021 High End Card Ladder Index (all sports)
2021 Low End Card Ladder Index (all sports)
The market peak was this past Spring, depending on the card, player, and sport. But for the most part, the height of the frenzy was sometime around February to March. Bottom line is that there is still a lot of money in the hobby, but that money is interested in high-end, quality, and rarity and is much more focused than what we saw in the run up at the beginning of the pandemic. Middle and low end cards have taken the hit and haven’t shown much in the way of a recovery - they’ve mostly just flattened out or drifted lower since they’ve hit their current bottom.
Juan Soto PSA 10 Update Series base rookie US300 2021 full year trend
Going back to Juan Soto as an example, base cards like the Juan Soto rookie card from 2018 Update Series (US300) suddenly became “investment-worthy” which made a base card affordable to the hobby masses that could, and did, double or more in value. As the supply met the demand and people traded up to more grail cards vs. base cards, the rotation out of base became a spiral that sent the low-end base cards back to where they were at or before the off-season dip. It remains to be seen how the continued backlog catch up of the grading companies continues to put downward pressure on the middle and low tier market as that drove a huge portion of the backlog to begin with, but it’s easy to connect the dots and say that it won't help.
Project 70
Following up on the success (I think?) of Project 2020, Project 70 launched in mid-February with 51 artists slated to do 20 cards each. The “70” is from Topps’ 70th anniversary in 2021, which they used extensively across a majority of their products. One of the major differences was that the artists weren’t restricted to a rookie card of 20 specific players. It was in theory an open universe of players and the card design could be pulled from any Topps flagship cards past and present. However the list of players according to some artists in the project was about 200-ish long and the artists had to essentially petition to include players outside of the list. MLB and the MLBPA would then have to sign off on the player. For example, Barry Bonds has not been willing to give the MLBPA license to use his likeness and as a result does not have a Project 70 card (nor appear in the MLB The Show video games). What came to be even more of a challenge was that Topps, MLB and the MLBPA all had to sign off on every single card leading to rejections, delays, and possibly leaving a bad taste in the mouth of some of these artists.
On the positive side, Alex Pardee became an instant star of the project. He has the top three print runs in Project 70 and five of the top ten. The effort he puts into his cards and promotion of them is absolutely fantastic. I had more people on the fringes of the hobby ask me about Pardee, and especially about his first card after it came out (Ronald Acuña Jr.), than any other artist in Project 70. The Pardee Acuña is still one of the only Project 70 cards to have its base cards sell for at least double what you could have paid directly from Topps during the primary sale window. Plenty of other artists were exposed to new audiences and on the flip side some of those artists were exposed to the hobby for the first time. Chuck Styles, Brittney Palmer, Lauren Taylor, and DJ Skee are some of those new names to the hobby that made strong impacts, among others.
On the negative side, the list is quite long. Artists not meeting their obligation to the full 20 card set is one of the bigger ones, disappointing collectors of those artists. The reasons are likely different for each artist, but none have come out and said why they did not finish the set as of yet.
As we got closer to the end of the year, we saw days and even a week here or there without the expected Project 70 cards, or just partial releases. No public explanation was ever given, but the rumor and speculation is that it was due to a combination of artists not delivering and MLB/MLBPA not approving artist submissions. And the final negative I will mention is artists making some egregious mistakes. King Saladeen previewed a Mickey Mantle card that lifted the majority of the artwork from an artist Daniel Jacob Horine that goes by PopFlyPopShop. This card was never released and King Saladeen released a completely different looking Mantle Project 70 card. In the end they seemed to be on good terms as they collaborated on a King Saladeen Project 70 release of Deion Sanders.
Similar to the King Saladeen debacle, but worse because it actually made it through the approvals and was sold by Topps was the Solefly Shohei Ohtani card. It was an “homage” to the Ace of the Diamond Manga series by Yuji Terajima but looked almost identical to it and got taken down from Topps social media via copyright claim as there was no permission granted by the rights-holder. Fortunately, it was never delivered to purchasers and everyone was refunded and in theory, the card was never printed.
There is so much more to be said about Project 70, but I will leave it there with some of the highlights and low lights. With its large roster of artists and more expansive list of players to use as subjects, there were plenty of choices for everyone which was a great addition to the hobby in 2021.
Topps Through the Years
I try not to be too harsh when mistakes are made, but the Topps Through the Years cards from 2021 Topps Series 1 deserve ALL of the vitriol. These cards are intended to highlight some of the best and most sought-after cards that Topps has produced in the past like a 2009 Bowman Chrome Mike Trout Autographed card.
The cards had a purple Topps border surrounding a photo of the original card, but it was not obvious, especially to the uninitiated, that these weren’t the actual card itself. That they had not had the “hit” of their life by pulling a Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto auto out of a low tier flagship product. One of the problems was that these cards had blue ink signatures, and we have been trained over the years to see blue ink as “real” autographs where black ink signatures on card are typically facsimiles like we’ve seen on Heritage releases of products like 1971 Topps throwbacks that had the printed signature back then.
Regardless of why these cards have fooled so many collectors, new and old, the fact that it regularly happened as they were pulled out of packs is terrible for the hobby. One of the best parts of opening packs/boxes of cards is that exhilaration when you pull the huge hit. And then completely invalidating that high either immediately when you realize it yourself or later on when someone has to burst that bubble leaves nothing but a bad taste in the mouth. Follow that up with people taking advantage of this situation in selling these cards to unknowing buyers and it compounds the situation.
The further we get from this release, the more I expect this part of it, the unexpecting buyer of these cards in the secondary market, to pop up and lead to a continuous cycle of souring by collectors that should never, ever need to happen. Just a terrible error in judgment when this insert was conceived and I hope that all of the manufacturers have learned their lesson from this experience and we never ever see something like this again.
NFT’s
It’s almost impossible to discuss 2021 without mentioning the rise, and in some places, the fall, of NFT’s or Non-Fungible Tokens. Essentially they are digital representations stored on a blockchain of artwork or in the case of the baseball card hobby, a baseball card.
What actually had its moment in the sun for the NFT sports world was NBA TopShot, which were digital “Moments”. These Moments were like video highlights and in early 2021, somewhat in lockstep with the hobby market, went to ridiculous heights. And they crashed pretty spectacularly. Topps tried going the standard static digital image of their flagship cards and it got a moment of hype with its introduction in April based on Series 1 on the Wax Blockchain. That hype quickly came and went. In September they moved off of the Wax Blockchain to the Avalanche Blockchain with their Inception release in September and their Series 2 release in October.
I have no idea if the Wax Blockchain is better or worse than the Avalanche Blockchain, but it’s not great that they abandoned their initial choice so early in the game. It does not speak to stability or well-thought-out planning. Regardless, there is very little interest in these from the traditional hobby community, and without that, baseball hobby-based NFT’s are dead in the water.
PERSONAL TAKES
Favorite Product of the Year
2020 choice - Topps Stadium Club. Stadium Club is always in my personal Top 10, but unlike last year, there wasn’t a photo of a player that I personally collect that made me seek it out (although there was still one that I loved as you’ll soon see), so while it was again a great product, it didn’t elevate above the rest for me personally. As is usual, I gravitate to the prospect and flagship products. With the poor rookie performances this year, the flagship products were going to be a tough sell, and they didn’t quite get the design right with the hard-to-read team and player names.
Bowman Baseball had an underwhelming checklist and in comparison to 2020 (and 2019), it left a fair amount to be desired. Bowman Draft suffered a similar fate with some of the better names held out, guys that you would hope have autographs but don’t (Brady House), way too many pitchers, and not holding up in light of previous years editions.
On the other hand, 2021 Bowman Chrome was a big win. A stronger checklist than what we usually see in Bowman Chrome is the foundation. Carlos Colmenarez, Cristian Hernandez, Cristian Santana, Pedro Leon, Reginald Preciado, Liover Peguero, Pedro Pineda, Victor Acosta, Jeferson Quero, Luis Rodriguez, Wilman Diaz, and many others provided a deep bench to collect. And almost as important as the strong checklist was the return of the base 1st Bowman cards. For whatever reason (I still don’t know why or can come up with a good reason), Topps excluded 1st Bowman base cards from the 2020 Bowman Chrome release. It absolutely made it one of the worst products of 2020 because of it. 2021 Bowman Chrome - easily my favorite product of 2021.
Favorite Card of the Year
2020 choice - Topps Stadium Club Mike Yastrzemski. A player I collected from my favorite product of the year who was shown with a great of the game and his grandfather, Carl Yastrzemski. I am going back to the same well for my 2021 favorite card of the year - Topps Stadium Club. The card is a Jim Palmer autographed card of him shirtless lifting a barbell and while I am a straight man, I can admit I swooned a bit when I saw this card. I can picture this as a poster hanging up on the wall of many teenagers in the greater Baltimore area back in the late 70’s. I am stoked it was hanging out in the Getty archives for Topps to turn into a Stadium Club card. It is not a PC player, but the moment I saw the card, I had to own it. There was no other card in 2021 that gave me that feeling. Unfortunately there are no base cards for Palmer using this photo, but that’s just a small negative that barely detracts from the overall attraction of my Favorite Card of 2021.
Collecting Goals for 2022
Looking back on my 2021 goals, I think I did pretty well. Grow and learn, expand my horizons, and make new friends in the hobby. Continue prospecting. Collect from products where I wasn’t in the hobby - vintage and post-junk wax. Collect non-MLB cards, specifically KBO and NPB cards. I did all of those, even if the NPB cards I focused on in 2021 were mostly just Shohei Ohtani pre-2018 until they became cost-prohibitive in the summer. Continued my slow accumulation of 1960 Topps All-Stars in PSA slabs along with a select few other older cards. Started to pick up 1999 Upper Deck Century Legends Epic Signatures cards for my post-junk wax set (which I likely wont ever be able to afford to finish, but you never know).
2022 Goals - More of the same from 2021. More vintage and post-junk wax cards. Fill in gaps in my personal collection. More Buster Posey cards from his active years now that he’s retired. One thing I really dove into in 2021 that was not on my 2021 list was art/custom cards. Some of that was the Project 2020 cards priming that pump, and some of it was seeing other hobby friends start picking them up. I really got into them and want to continue to expand and find more artists with more cool custom cards. They may not be worth a ton of money in the future, but it gets to one of the main themes behind why I collect - because I really like the look of the cards.
FINAL THOUGHTS
There’s a lot to be optimistic about and still some things to be pessimistic about in the hobby, but whatever happens, I am looking forward to another unpredictable hobby year in 2022. Thanks to all of my hobby friends for reading my work, listening to the Local Card Pod with my good buddy Ryan Rygiel (RySox5), and supporting everything I do.