So wait.. We're NOT in a new junk wax era..?

mindcycle · 07-11-2020, 02:03 PM

The reasoning people throw around to claim that we're not currently in junk wax era 2.0 is pretty comical to me. Stuff like "Well.. if it's not in every gas station and drugstore then it's not like the 90's." Or.. "It's not all base cards anymore, so it can't be considered junk wax". Panini is selling a ton of product online so they really don't need to put product in every store anymore like the 90's manufacturers did. I'm sure if they thought it would be profitable they would, but not really necessary in the modern age. And just because a card has a serial number doesn't mean it can automatically be excluded from the "junk wax" designation (look at totals below). So instead of trying to defend a more or less educated guess on my part every time this topic comes up, I decided to gather some data.

The point of this post is not to say that collecting isn't fun, or that you should stop collecting modern cards. I still enjoy putting Nuggets team sets together for various products each year and i'm still doing that. It's simply meant to provide some factual data for some healthy conversation (or not, whatever floats your boat..

) on the topic. Maybe also help some of the new collectors, or returning collectors, visually see what is happening right now so they can come to their own conclusions.

I've used Beckett's website to sort data for some of the hottest rookies from past and present. The first search for each player is the total number of "products". This really equates to total cards featuring that player from their rookie year. This includes parallels, so that must be taken into account as well. I then filter by RC designation, which essentially gives us what Beckett deems a true RC and not an insert. I'm not sure if the RC filter is entirely meaningful in later years when we have things like memorabilia cards (think RPA's) possibly being excluded. But I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

I also filtered these results by NBA cards only. For example, I didn't include Scoreboard or Classic cards for Shaq since those were college licensed. Or for Zion i've filtering out South Bay and only included Panini manufactured cards. It honestly doesn't make a huge difference to the total number, but I felt stuff like that needed to be excluded so the data is more accurate. Also keep in mind we're still not fully through Zion's rookie year so not all "products" are listed yet. There also isn't a RC filter for Zion yet so I don't have a way to provide that data at this time. I will edit this post if I find a way to do that.

So here we go..

1992 Shaq cards
51 Total Cards
7 RC's

1997 Tim Duncan cards
137 total cards
18 RC's

2003 LeBron cards
633 total cards
62 RC's

2018 Luka Doncic cards
1270 total cards
27 RC's

2019 Zion cards
1519 total cards
RC's unknown at this time

So there you go. I think it's worth noting again that as we've moved more into the modern age, parallel and serial number cards have become more common place, and thus cause a pretty large uptick in the total "products", or total card count. But to me, this just makes it even harder to determine what a truly desirable card is going to be in the future since we now have 1,500+ different cards to choose from..

07-11-2020, 02:03 PM	#1
mindcycle Member Join Date: Apr 2015 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 5,043	So wait.. We're NOT in a new junk wax era..? The reasoning people throw around to claim that we're not currently in junk wax era 2.0 is pretty comical to me. Stuff like "Well.. if it's not in every gas station and drugstore then it's not like the 90's." Or.. "It's not all base cards anymore, so it can't be considered junk wax". Panini is selling a ton of product online so they really don't need to put product in every store anymore like the 90's manufacturers did. I'm sure if they thought it would be profitable they would, but not really necessary in the modern age. And just because a card has a serial number doesn't mean it can automatically be excluded from the "junk wax" designation (look at totals below). So instead of trying to defend a more or less educated guess on my part every time this topic comes up, I decided to gather some data. The point of this post is not to say that collecting isn't fun, or that you should stop collecting modern cards. I still enjoy putting Nuggets team sets together for various products each year and i'm still doing that. It's simply meant to provide some factual data for some healthy conversation (or not, whatever floats your boat.. ) on the topic. Maybe also help some of the new collectors, or returning collectors, visually see what is happening right now so they can come to their own conclusions. I've used Beckett's website to sort data for some of the hottest rookies from past and present. The first search for each player is the total number of "products". This really equates to total cards featuring that player from their rookie year. This includes parallels, so that must be taken into account as well. I then filter by RC designation, which essentially gives us what Beckett deems a true RC and not an insert. I'm not sure if the RC filter is entirely meaningful in later years when we have things like memorabilia cards (think RPA's) possibly being excluded. But I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I also filtered these results by NBA cards only. For example, I didn't include Scoreboard or Classic cards for Shaq since those were college licensed. Or for Zion i've filtering out South Bay and only included Panini manufactured cards. It honestly doesn't make a huge difference to the total number, but I felt stuff like that needed to be excluded so the data is more accurate. Also keep in mind we're still not fully through Zion's rookie year so not all "products" are listed yet. There also isn't a RC filter for Zion yet so I don't have a way to provide that data at this time. I will edit this post if I find a way to do that. So here we go.. 1992 Shaq cards 51 Total Cards 7 RC's 1997 Tim Duncan cards 137 total cards 18 RC's 2003 LeBron cards 633 total cards 62 RC's 2018 Luka Doncic cards 1270 total cards 27 RC's 2019 Zion cards 1519 total cards RC's unknown at this time So there you go. I think it's worth noting again that as we've moved more into the modern age, parallel and serial number cards have become more common place, and thus cause a pretty large uptick in the total "products", or total card count. But to me, this just makes it even harder to determine what a truly desirable card is going to be in the future since we now have 1,500+ different cards to choose from..