I’ve been watching some of the auctions for P’ups cards for the artists that interest me, and I have to say the selling prices on a lot of these have been really sad. In fact this has been a bit of a trend in some other recent sets as well — Voltron comes to mind. So what’s the issue?

While there are certainly many contributing factors, the fact that great cards done by great artists with pin-ups on them aren’t even able to fetch $20 minimum bids in many cases probably has some people scratching their heads (perhaps the manufacturer) — others grumbling in frustration (dealers) — and others either shrugging it off or very happy for the bargains they are getting (collectors). . .

The biggest contributing factor, in my opinion is that these aren’t reaching a large enough collector base to sustain any interest. Alright, that certainly isn’t a revelation — the question is why, and I think that’s easy enough to answer.

WAYYYY back in March P’ups sold out in 10 hours. That’s right, if you happened to sleep in the night these were announced available for sale you were shut out of pre-orders. So, right out the gate many people who might be interested in a pack here or there were turned away instantly, unless they wanted to pay a premium for packs or singles. But really, it isn’t how fast P’ups sold out that’s the issue, it’s who bought the packs. A decent percentage likely went to people who were interested in collecting the cards, but a TON went to dealers who wanted to ‘rip and flip’ the packs.

Who knows how many, but at one point shortly after release there were 650 P’ups sketches for sale on eBay. Even today weeks after release there are nearly 400 of these cards on eBay. Let’s put that into perspective — 1500 packs were made. Of course some packs had an additional sketch, and also of course some of the 400 on eBay now have been auctioned before. . . but at one point well over a third of the entire production run was on eBay at the same time.

And really, that’s not an issue in and of itself, the real problem at that point was the INSANE Buy-It-Now prices many dealers had on most of their cards. Collectors realize dealers need to make a profit, but they aren’t stupid. Lots of decent, but ‘common’ sketches from P’ups were being listed at 4 times the pack price or better — a 300% profit — the rare, and many nice cards were being listed at 6-10x the pack price!

So what happened? The few collectors that were able to get pre-orders in stuck around and collected a few additional sketches — and NO new collectors bought into the set. The end result is what we have today, lots of cards not being able to find buyers, and the ones that do sell are bringing typically less than double the pack price. If more dealers would have started all their P’ups auctions at $21 (a mere 50% profit per card) we’d likely have many more collectors, and organically higher prices for the better cards.

The situation now is tenuous, many dealers are frustrated, many collectors who couldn’t buy P’ups at pre-order price or a reasonable price afterwords are frustrated and have walked away and the few collectors left are picking over the carcass.

The lesson, in my mind, is that more attention needs to be paid to the people who are actually sinking their money into this product at the end of the day. Not the rip and flipper whose only interest in the set is the amount of profit they can make, but the people who are going to spend their hard earned money to add these cards to their collections. Now, don’t get me wrong . . . not every person who bought and sold P’ups sketches falls into this category, but if you look at the history of how these cards were listed the story is pretty clear.

What to do now?

Extend the pre-order period. Get more cards into the hands of the people who actually want to keep them. I’m not sure how to do that, perhaps limit the number of cards per order even more (selling out in 10 hours is good for the short term, but it doesn’t do anything to build buzz or interest in a set, in fact it frustrates a lot of people), perhaps drop the 25 card incentives so there is less incentive to buy more cards than people personally want, I’m not sure how to do it, but there has to be a way.

Dealers also need to be willing to sell the cards they are ripping and flipping at organic levels, not artificially inflated prices — not every card pulled from a $14 pack should sell for $40, or even $30. What’s wrong with a $5-6 profit on a $14 pack — that’s not to say the great cards won’t sell for $75, but many dealers seemed to think that starting an auction at $19.95 for something they paid $14-15 is highway robbery. Now that the collectors have avoided this set many dealers are hoping to get that $20 sale.

It’s good for me, I’ve picked up some AMAZING cards cheap (thanks Rachel, Craig, Nick and a few others), but it’s bad for the hobby and the industry.

Jon