It was another fun week and one in which I had the opportunity to focus pretty heavily on the sports card side of our business. That always makes me happy and fulfilled within those four walls of our shop.
We had a lone box of 2022 National Treasures NASCAR sitting on the shelf for seemingly 500 laps, so as the price continued to drop close to our cost or below, we decided to crack it.
Full disclosure, I am not a big racing fan and we only have a few customers who are. We opened the upscale briefcase/box and found our pack, and within it held a number of cards that made it more than worth our while to open it, including a redemption for a Hailie Deegan limited edition autograph (you can find that for sale in our eBay store).
We also snagged a nice on card Legendary Signatures Jimmie Johnson autograph, an on card autograph of legend Daryl Waltrip and a few hits from some of the younger drivers in the sport.
We saw a few new versions of 2022-23 Prizm basketball arrive, including some retail. We got completely skunked on a blaster we opened. The packs offer four cards per and I openly wondered if we could possibly have any fewer cards in a pack of cards at this point. Will companies go to three or an absurdly low number of two cards even in lower end products? I guess we will have to wait and see. 
The sales were relatively brisk for said Prizm blasters online. One of our good basketball customers, Dan, decided to crack one and actually hit an auto and a few solid rookies. I guess we’re doing well overall in the store in the few boxes we’ve seen opened.
Over the past few weeks, we have had multiple customers calling in, asking if we had received the new 2023 Topps Big League baseball in yet. I understand it’s a very reasonably priced product at $50-$60 for hobby box, but it wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge baseball fan, and I’m a big fan of a budget friendly products, but I still wasn’t quite sure. That was until we opened a box for ourselves.
The box itself was a mid tier foil and each pack contained very unique subsets and inserts. The base set offers a clean design and sharp photography with a number of great images featured.
As an unexpected added bonus, there are true limited parallels which was a really nice surprise. The icing on the cake was the fact that the very first pack we opened had a beautiful Adrian Beltre green autograph.
I say that to say this, autographs weren’t even listed boldly anywhere on the box. They’re randomly inserted so we definitely got lucky. As we were opening the box, I actually thought if my daughter Izzy was a few years older, this was a set we could have a lot of fun building together. I couldn’t tell you the last time I thought that about a product we opened. I give Topps Big League Baseball a big A+.
Another pleasant surprise of the week was the new 2023 Sage Mega Football boxes. At a price of $39.99 with six autographs per box, I had to open one of these for myself. I pulled six in the first seven packs I opened with a bunch to go. 
I actually hit nine autographs in my box, including a really nice one of top running back prospect Bijan Robinson, one of Maryland quarterbackTaulia Tagovailoa and a few other guys I’d call semi-stars. Our customer Donnie was in the store and couldn’t help himself and opened two boxes, and both of his boxes also contained more than six autographs. Jason opened one for the store, and that also went above and beyond Sage’s promise. While these don’t carry any kind all out licensing, if there are a few stars that emerge from the ’23 NFL Draft class and you’re paying about 5 or 6 bucks an auto, that’s not bad at all. It certainly makes for a fun ripping experience. I would suggest anyone looking for some reasonably priced rookie and prospect autographs grab a box or ten of the new 2023 Sage Mega Football.
In recent Shop Talk columns, I’ve mentioned our new official dealer account with PSA. We have been taking full advantage of this opportunity as we’re sending cards almost every other day and receiving them back and about the same clip. We are so happy we decided to make this jump and are still kicking ourselves, wondering why we hadn’t done it much sooner.
It rained basically for the last two weeks here in lovely Central Pennsylvania but the weather finally broke late this week and it showed with our level of in store business. We had a number of our local card customers and walk in traffic in the shop late this week, which made for a lot of buying, selling in a little bit of trading, which makes my week complete.
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