Prizm football is finally here! One of the year’s most sought after releases has arrived where we’ll get what’s often considered the marquee rookie cards of some of the games biggest stars - Justin Herbert, Tua, and even Burrow as he looks to recover from an injury. There’s no doubt this product is going to be hot as the prices for hobby boxes soar north of $1,000.
Given the price increase, I wanted to share my thoughts on how I’m approaching Prizm Football before we break our first case this week. I am approaching this product four ways and because of that, there are many strategies for how I’m going to personally break the product that I thought would be interesting to share.
The Quick Flip
Any time a new product is released the prices for the cards are the highest in the first two weeks after release. That’s why we like to open on release day and ship to you quickly. Have a look at the three biggest chases with 2020 Mosaic Football - Burrow, Tua, Herbert. Once Mosaic Hobby released on 9/11 the Burrow sold for $135, Tua for $67, and Herbert for $35 - now at the midpoint of the season you can see prices have stabalized, though people anticipate them to dip further with this weeks Prizm release.
So what’s the strategy? Part of it is to sell what you don’t want as quickly as possible in the first two weeks of the release to recoup and reinvest in players you want to hold.
Grading then selling
In the same mindset, Prizm has the benefit of being the marquee rookie card. As such, these cards are highly gradeable. In fact, that’s why we launched PSA services before this release. There are all kinds of strategies here, but I will be grading a ton of the key players with an eye on selling before the season is over.
If you view the chart below, you can see the first graded Mosaic card sale occurred around October 10th, which makes sense because a typical 10 day submission is taking approximately 1 month. The early sellers were able to command a 2x-3x price premium to today’s stabilized pricing.
So the strategy here will be to grade as many of the key players 10 day and try to sell before the season ends!
Holding
I’m not just in this to sell in the short term, and I do believe that this year’s rookie class is one of the best we’ve ever seen. In fact, we still haven’t seen it all yet - Jordan Love and Jalen Hurts have yet to take the field. So as prices cool down, I’ll be picking up singles of some of the key players I’d like to hold for the long term, and yes - that includes Joe Burrow. Just remember if you’re using this strategy that over the course of time, its been that Quarterbacks hold the most value in this sport. I do believe we’re starting to see that change, but if you’re a long term holder on some of these players and looking to maximize value - quarterbacks is the way to go.
So what’s this strategy? Buy singles of key players one month after the season ends.
Collecting
Finally, I asked a question to the other Hit Seekers partners yesterday that I had been thinking a lot about - Do you ever have a card that you have no real tie to at all, yet you can’t really bring yourself to sell it because it’s so cool? Certainly many of you do - that’s what makes this hobby so amazing. I was talking about theb below Kenny Golladay Spectra Patch. I’m not a Lions Fan, I don’t really love Golladay as a long term hold, but the card is so fun to look at I can’t bring myself to sell it.
I’ll be collecting a few of the inserts, and this year I will be trying to complete the Prizm Rainbow of a couple of players. After all, this is an incredibly fun hobby to be in!
Happy Prizm Week Everyone!