This week offered a nice mixture of new releases of sports cards at the shop.
With the NBA playoffs right around the corner, we received a good amount of 2020-21 Crown Royale Basketball. This particular product offers one autograph and one memorabilia hit per box, on average. It’s been selling well for us in store and online this past week.
We also got the incredibly popular 2020-21 Prizm Fast Break version of the white hot basketball line. This product is, just as it states, a fast break from the opening of the first pack of the box to the last. You will find one autograph and 12 Prizms and various Fast Break exclusives among the 90 cards in the box.
2020 Select Football is a relatively new release with some rather odd timing. It arrived about the same time as the new 2021 NFL stuff is hitting stores. One of the highlights is that it offers the XRCs of the new prospects. I would say the nameless, faceless XRC redemptions are an acquired taste.
We hadn’t really seen any opened in store until late this week. One of our good customers decided to open a Mega Box and I must say it was pretty impressive. The box yielded a plethora of colorful parallels including ones of stars such as Aaron Rodgers and Christian McCaffrey and rookies like Jordan Love, J.K. Dobbins and some great base RCs of Tua Tagovailoa, Jalen Hurts and more.
2021 Score Football started making its way into stores, too. Score offers the very first officially licensed trading cards of this year’s rookie class including prized number one overall pick Trevor Lawrence and new Chicago Bears quarterback Justin Fields, among others.
We saw one box opened the day we got it in stock. One customer opened a pack or two without getting any autographs and then he hit one autograph dud and made the decision to continue to open and pack by pack until he secured all the autographs in the box. It took until the last pack to get the final one. None of them were much to write home about.
We saw our very first of the new TriStar Hidden Treasures mini helmets opened in store this week. The customer pulled one from Hall of Fame linebacker Mike Singletary. I must say, being a Bears fan, I was excited for him. I don’t think he shared in my excitement.
The problem our customers are running into (or anyone for that matter) is the fact that at the price point at which we must sell these helmets you could easily go online and just buy most any of them at a drastically cheaper price.
In an interesting side note from the week, the word on the street is that the Zion Williamson 1/1 RPA Logoman out of 2019-20 National Treasures that had an initial $500,000 bounty from Blowout Cards was pulled and from a case we had in the shop not long ago. It’s believed that the person who purchased it from us sold it to another collector and from what we’re hearing, that person cracked it and indeed pulled the Zion RPA.
I’m trying to confirm this and if so, I will get the entire story and probably make it next week’s Shop Talk piece.