Check Out My Cards: Is It the Best Tool Collectors Can Use to Sell Cards Today?
For any kind of collector—no matter what sport, era, or product tier they focus on—getting a “holy grail” card is a goal they’ll never lose sight of.
Whether you’re into collecting baseball, basketball, or football cards, it’s likely that you’ve got a particular item on your mind that you want more than anything else. Now, you probably often dream about pulling it out of a pack one day and finally laying your long-winded dream to rest.
Of course, as card collectors, we’re all bound by one reality that we have to live with: you’re just as likely to win the lottery as randomly pulling THAT special card out of a box…
But, having that grail card in your collection won’t seem so impossible anymore if you sell your way to it.
Now, ever since we started the show, we believed that everything we did—from planning to production—had to answer one question as best as possible:
“What’s the best way you can sell cards you don’t want so you can buy the cards you DO want?”
Based on our experience, we’ve settled with the fact that there’s no single approach that’s going to work for everyone. We even went as far as to believe that the whole process of selling vintage cards still had a whole lot to do with luck…
Well, that was the case until we met Don Shaw.
For context, Don is a serial sports card collector who’s made a name for himself in the industry of card collecting—you might also know him as @geowiz34 on Twitter and Reddit, or nova_cards on eBay.
He started his card collecting journey with stacks of low-end listings—no rare finds, no triple digit moneymakers, nothing. To many, this would understandably seem like a less-than ideal situation to start a grail card collection with.
However, his use of Check Out My Cards and other selling methods helped him work his way to a high-ticket collection that includes rarities like:
- A 1948 Bowman Stan Musial;
- A 1909 White Border Christy Mathewson, and;
- A 1954 Topps Hank Aaron.
We sat down with Don to discuss his experience in the card collecting industry and how he used COMC to build his star-studded collection. Listening to his expertise and stories as someone who started collecting cards like everyone else and eventually became a figurehead in the space showed us that anyone can find the same success as long as make the right decisions:
“I know probably 100 names in the NFL. If you’re not in those 100 names, I’m not buying your card. I know the NBA and baseball. Baseball is my bread and butter. My thing with baseball is if you’re not a top 5% player, I’m not buying your card to send to COMC. I’m not going to purposely buy your card and send it.”
The excerpt above is one of the many “a-ha”-inducing moments we had during our insight-packed conversation with Dan. In the same sit-down talk, we also touched on other topics like top prospect cards to invest in, best practices for selling more with less legwork, and the framework of selling modern cards to buy vintage ones.
Here are some of our other favorite takeaways from this episode:
If you want to profit from even the newest of releases, you need to sell low—and sell FAST.
The biggest caveat of sports cards with today’s athletes is that they usually sell for low prices. (We’re looking at you, Tristan Thompson). Over time, this little reality of card collecting has led hobbyists to believe that they don’t fetch any value or potential profit at all—but Don says otherwise:
“What a lot of people do is they’ll send this off to COMC. You’re doing that and so are hundreds of other people, they’re also doing that. This is a massive release. You’ll see within three to four or five weeks of a new release, where there are 100 paper first Bowmans of Elly De La Cruz. What happens when a card gets listed and you’re the seller, you [need to] undercut people. You want to make yours the lowest so it sells the fastest, unless you’re confident of going in the middle.”
Although you won’t be getting Jackie Robinson Rookie or Michael Jordan values for modern cards, you can still get significant returns when you sell them often, quickly, and for a lower price!
With COMC, you can enjoy faster and more secure transactions.
As card collectors with enough experience in the game, we’ve seen our fair share of eBay bids and buys go bust because of sellers that either flake or are a pain to deal with. When you look at the most common reasons sports card transactions fail, in fact, you’ll quickly realize that it all boils down to buyers refusing to pay.
“With COMC, you hit buy, it’s funds transferred because you have money in the system. Both buyer and seller have money in the system. If you hit buy, it’s automatically taken out. When the seller hits accept, they hit accept, it’s automatically transferred. There’s no BS after that. That has been a pretty big sigh of relief for people that are dealing with eBay non-payers or elsewhere like that.”
With COMC, Don believes that card collectors looking to sell their way to vintage cards don’t need to worry about having flakey buyers anymore thanks to its automatic transfer system!
There’s no “magic pill”—the best way to sell your way to a vintage card is to keep on selling.
Most newbies (or even seasoned hobbyists) to the card collecting scene believe that two of the best—and even only—ways to get vintage cards are to pull a high-value card out of a deck or have deep pockets. But, Don notes that the best way to actually get the cards you want is by building a self-sustaining system that helps you keep on selling:
“My whole thinking, going into COMC, knowing that is this needs to be a self-sustaining system. When I first put money in, I put a few hundred dollars in. That’s the only money I’m putting in. If I’m going to take money out, my mindset is to use whatever I’m growing to buy cards and every few months, send myself 1933 Gowdy or some Oddball 1920s card, or something from the ’50s or a Soto card or something like that.”
Once you learn how to upscale your portfolio without shelling any more money, you’ll get to shorten the gap between your collection and the day that you have your grail card finally added to it!
Ever been told that “pack odds” are 100% spot-on? Stop believing it.
As a way to wrap their heads around the immense luck that goes into pulling good cards, collectors tend to base all their decisions on resources with pack odds that are “100 percent spot on”—ourselves included (sometimes). The truth, however, is that this will never be true because of factors like variations and manufacturer decisions.
“It can get really difficult with a product like Topps Chrome because there are so many formats. As more things are posted, it’s never 100%. If anyone tells you that pack odds are 100% percent spot-on, that’s wrong, because there’s variance. There’s things like Topps will hold cards back for replacements. Topps will not insert extended bass SPs into a product. It happened. It’s normal. It’s never spot-on but you can be pretty confident within a few percentage points.”
So, if you come across a Reddit thread, tweet, or article that says it has access to pack odds that are 100 percent spot on, let that skeptic in you come out and don’t believe it!
Looking for the next big whale in card collecting? Be on the lookout for Wander Franco.
Like us, you’ve probably spent quite a bit of time being on the lookout for cards of athletes that could become the “next big thing”—or next fortune-making card, honestly speaking. Among the different athletes with sports cards out there, Don believes that The Tampa Bay Rays’ El Patron is the next baseball card whale in the making:
“It’s because, we’ll go through all the reasons why. It’s Wander Franco’s first inclusion in the base set with Major League Baseball veterans. Mike Trout is on the same checklist. The checklist is 1 through 100, Wander Franco is card number 50, it’s the first time he’s ever been in a checklist with Major League Baseball veterans. It’s not an insert. Most people don’t realize Bowman Chrome cards are insert cards. BCP, BP, those are insert cards, those are not normal checklist cards.”
Our sit-down conversation with Don Shaw was one of the most insightful and engaging discussions we’ve ever had on the show. It was an absolute delight to have our perspectives on the card collecting game shaken up a bit—and we might even buy a few more Wander Franco cards soon!
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If you loved our talk with Brooks Hester, you can catch the latest episodes of GoodSellas wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest updates.
