With the recent moves in grading integrating to go directly to online markets or vaults, I wonder where this will lead. 

Topps Bunt has been doing digital Collectibles for years, and everyone laughs. It holds no value, they aren’t real. What is so different about a card in an online auction, or market, that gets put in a vault, that you can then flip without ever physically touching the card?

Right now people don’t but boxes, they buy breaks. What if Topps sold packs? What if they had a mechanism like Topps Now, where you buy a “pack” and it’s all digital cards from a pack that go to Topps Now to print? Breakers and retail no more, and it’s people at the digital slot machine gambling scratch-offs they never hold. If they offered faster turnaround to grading that would be the catalyst.

Then there is the phenomenon of owning a card you never hold. You can sell these items all day never physically seeing them in person. This is now some sort of commodity day trading-esque scenario. 

In an era of ever growing digitalization of every aspect of our lives, I see a path where packs and boxes are primarily digital, and printed tangible products are added at a hefty cost. I hate it. 

Digital Twins – Fanatics Repacks

So I wrote this article the other night, and today I saw on Neo Cards and Comics that Fanatics is now making repacks. This falls directly in line with the thoughts above. The article is originally from CLLCT, and this line in particular I found interesting, “Instant Rips will feature breakers on the live-streaming platform opening digital twins of cards stored in the Fanatics Collect vault. Ownership of the cards will instantly be transferred to the customer, who can then decide to keep the card or list it for sale on the Fanatics Collect marketplace.“

While this solves a logistical problem for Fanatics and their breakers, I see it as one more step in the direction toward physical cards being replaced by digital counterparts, especially with the “digital twins” description. I believe that Fanatics is making a market of all digital cards, which you can eventually print if you need to.

Fanatics App vs Topps

Topps/Fanatics released a new product but you can only get it through…….the Fanatics App. The Murakami x MLB World Tour Tokyo Series Collection is “exclusively in the Fanatics app”.

What is the future of the Topps brand if everything is running through Fanatics app? I certainly don’t want Fanatics branded cards, but this to me is not a good sign. Fanatics to me feels like corporate baseball cards.