Our New Unexpected Collecting Obsession
· Yahoo Sports
Friday night, Dakota Ditcheva defeated Denise Kielholtz at PFL New York in a three-round decision. Ditcheva, a 28-year-old flyweight, is now 16-0 in her professional career and 11-0 with the PFL.
That part alone should work for a “buy low” opportunity – and her non-autographed cards are extremely affordable; but her autos seem to be far ahead of the market, listed for $100+. It’s mostly Panini and Goodwin Champions, too. Very cool, artistic cards in a few sets.
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An autographed Goodwin Champions base card sits at around $76 on eBay right now. Her 2024 Panini Instant (technically her first card) is over $100. But her 2025 Young Guns “rookie” is just $5.99. Her 2026 Goudey starts at just over a dollar. A Goodwin Champions lenticular can be had for under $10. It’s kind of all over the place – and it’s weirdly all over COMC, for some reason. With most of their listings having “READ” in the title… and then no warning or caveat inside the listing.
That’s probably another investigation for another day.
Anyway here’s why we are in “cards love” with Ditcheva: she’s awesome and we think she’s about to blow up.
A day before the New York fight, the PFL announced it was merging with Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions. That should be instant rocket fuel for her career if Paul starts putting her on undercards for bigger fights and sharing videos and posts about her. Ditcheva – who has 393,000 followers on Instagram – is one of the most social-savvy athletes, bar none, you will find. You know JR Fickle doesn’t do hyperbole; go check out the account and see if I’m wrong.
Ditcheva also seems down for any and all stunts the PFL social group (highlighted by 4.4 million IG followers) wants to pull. Here she is doing the Crossbar Challenge during the World Cup. Charles Barkley interviewed her. And if I can just editorialize for a moment here – having a British accent and a crap-ton of charisma doesn’t hurt the cause. It worked for Davey Boy Smith!
Add this all up and where do we land? This COMC thing is really annoying because our usual eBay trick – heart the listing and wait a few hours for a “15% off” offer to come in – won’t work here. But this has a very easy solution – just go to COMC and make offers. Our shopping list:
The $4 lenticular, obviously, because I am a child who wants modern day Sportsflics (no offer made)
The “memorabilia” for $10 just to have a “patch,” which is a popular search (offering $8)
The Young Guns “clear cut” looks cool and goes for about $18 (offering $15).
And a bunch of /199 “yellow circles” for about $3 each because that’s way too low (not even messing with make an offer here to keep karma on our side).
A $40 investment on a rising star works for now! If things start to bubble up, we’ll revisit the $70 autos.
We talk a good amount about the Marge Simpson Playboy here – mostly to provide bi-weekly Easter Eggs for our loyal readers. And also to make Evan Parker (who edits but promises he doesn’t write these emails) sweat about what we’ll be referencing after the mention. FEAR NOT, sir! This is just a segue to the Beyonce Sports Illustrated “rookie” card, which has brought up an interesting conundrum.
One of our favorite follows on social media is Who Knew Collectors – if you enjoy this newsletter, you will love his account. Last week in one of his reels, he featured a Beyonce SI Swimsuit Issue card. It’s about $10 on eBay, depending on if you wanted it graded, which card you’re trying to buy, etc.
But in our initial search, we ended up stumbling upon listings for the actual magazine. And those were, in many instances, cheaper than the cards. And while magazines are kind of, sort of nudging their way more into the spotlight, it does bring up an interesting question: which one of these holds more value – the card or the actual magazine it is based on?
Obviously the magazine has a bunch of variables beyond its condition – if it has a mailing label, how many were printed, etc. And it kind of, sort of goes back to the argument we made last year to buy the Livvy Dunne issue – nobody knows where to buy the magazine these days. And even if you pass one in the airport, would it be a little awkward buying a swimsuit issue with prying eyes all over you? “It’s for my daughter!” won’t work like it does buying four Happy Meals when you only have three kids!
Granted, the latest sale was in May, but that Livvy Dunne cover is worth at least $30 now! Beyonce may have the opposite problem – in 2007, SI circulation was over 3 million per week, so there are a ton of those out there.
I’m casting my lot with the card – the “rookie” card! But this also brought us to the 2005 issue, which had trading cards inserted in an SI for Kids-style promo. Should I? Could I? Would I?? As of send time, I’m still hovering. It just needs a few people to say “hey remember these cards? They’re impossible to find in anything over a PSA 5”... and we’re off to the races!
Have a great week, everyone!! See you again soon!