DIGITAL DABBLINGS #32 – Top 25 Singles Sold & News and Notes

The App is Dying? News to me!

Remember what I said last month about the app being in the doldrums and losing players? Well, turns out that was the nadir of the movement. The app currently has just under 13,000 active accounts, which is a huge increase over last month when the active account base was just under 10,000 active accounts. What made the difference? Not sure, could be Football season is over and a lot of Huddle players decided to switch focus. It could also be the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania season effect as well. In fact Huddle, Skate and Bunt have all lost players recently, while Slam is gaining.

Another metric I use to gauge the health of the app is diamond bundle sales. We don’t know how many diamonds are normally purchased on a daily basis, but we can extrapolate sales data for the diamond bundles that come with cards and I specifically track each card based bundle set’s sales. Since the beginning of 2019 event based bundle sales are on an upward trend as you can see below:

So the app is definitely not dying as many think it is. It’s doing just fine.

New Sets and Notes:

Wrestlemania is right around the corner, just a few weeks away, and as usual Topps will be dumping a veritable ton of product into the game between now and then. Just this week we got yet another iteration of the popular Excellence now in its third year. This set seems to be a hit with other collectors, me, not so much. I think it’s pretty lazy that they don’t even bother to change the background each year.

Believe it or not, all three of these cards were issued in different years!

Brave the Elements is a new limited premium weekly set with an interesting concept that each of the featured elements will be changing every few weeks. First up was Ice and next was Lightning and lastly will be Rain. In any case the 250cc hard limit makes these sell out in minutes and secondary market prices are more than double digits for female performers. There’s still 9 more weeks to go for the overall award of Roman Reigns. Yawn.

This card has sold for $20! Can you believe it? (It’s also sold for as cheap as $5).

Spirit came back from 2017 with a new daily set with two variations. The easy one was 1:5 in coin packs, while the premium version was only in 1000 diamond guaranteed packs. Nothing too exciting here, though at least they’re using in-ring photos for the most part.

Because you needed yet another AJ Styles Award.

The NXT brand gets yet another weekly set for 2019 with a whopping 21 inserts. Fortunately they’re fairly inexpensive as 25K coins gets you a guaranteed card. Once again these aren’t anything super-exciting, it’s the same old renders on a weird background. I’m collecting it, but only because it’s cheap and I have all the other NXT weekly sets from the beginning.

It’s nice to see Vanessa Borne get some love. She only has a handful of individual cards thus far.

For National Pancake Day Topps issued a cute die-cut New Day Pancake Set, which was fun and easy to collect being a 3 card release and guaranteed at 20K coins per card. The award was a nifty pancake themed card of all three members of New day.

Get your pancakes here!

St. Patrick’s Day got some love again this year with a four card, two variation set of the Irish Arse Kickers, including the Man Becky Lynch, Fit Finlay, Sheamus and Kilian Dain. Last year they omitted Dain and Finally for a 3 card set. Finn Balor is the award for collecting all four. Thankfully a 1200 diamond pack got you all 8 cards you need for the bonus gold Finn award.

Here’s hoping this gold Finn Award is really low CC. Man, look at those abs…yikes!

I really kind of dig the retro feel of the WWE Legends weekly set of 21 cards that started last month. These are super-easy to collect with a guaranteed pack at 25 diamonds or 1:15 in a 10K coin pack. They haven’t announced the awards yet even though they have released the entire 21 card checklist. There will be four awards, one for each of the 7 waves and an overall award. I suppose it’s possible that Hulk Hogan could be an award here, but who knows.

All of the WWE Legends available to date.

Since our last column we had a full set of Foundry cards come and go, same renders with new orange or purple backgrounds with a theme of sparks I guess? Not sure. Carmella was the award, which only 129 of the paywall tiered Purple cards were redeemed. Almost 350 sets of the orange low tier were put together. There’s nothing unique at all about these.

Foundry…blech.

Headlines returns from 2017, only this time instead of each card actually getting a unique headline, the background is just faux text with nothing special going on. At least they’re fairly inexpensive, 200 diamonds guaranteed or 1:20 in 10K coin packs. These are also a weekly set, with 21 cards in 3 waves. The overall award is Becky Lynch, so that’s why there’s a lot of these being sold.

Ronda’s Headlines. But wait, there’s no “headline” here. C’mon, Topps.

Another returning set was Splash, which made its’ third appearance (2016 and 2018 were the previous go-arounds), and the same three variation scheme was in effect, only the highest tier (color) were limited to 200cc, making them about $5-10 cards each. The award was Finn Balor, so quite a few were redeemed, though there’s only 60 of the Color Finn Award, making it a very nice acquisition for those who could get him. Alas I did not.

Yet ANOTHER returning set was Infinite. Same old same old here, I don’t think they changed the background much either. This set was massive at 15 cards in pink and green variations, the pinks are still showing up on the prize wheel.

Topps loves to celebrate holidays, and for Valentine’s Day this year they issued two themed sets, one a V-day Cards offering and the other featuring “Power Couples”. The V-Day cards were super easy to collect, 1 guaranteed at 10K coins, 3 in 25K coins and there were only 10 cards with a HBK award. The Power Couples though were kind of tough to put together at 1:25 in 10K coin packs, or 1 guaranteed in 300 diamonds, 3 in 600 diamonds. NONE of the 5 card set hit 1000cc, and the Randy Savage/Miss Elizabeth award capped out at 535cc. Even still because none of the set were major stars, singles aren’t going for much more than $1.00 apiece with the award selling for less than $5. Just goes to show CC isn’t everything.

Who doesn’t miss the Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth? I mean who?

Of course it wouldn’t be February without a new Pink variant Base Set, which was released to time with Valentine’s Day as well. This time they were hard capped at 750cc and were available for 2 weeks or until they sold out. Well, they didn’t sell out. They did a timed award issuing which is something they’ve been dabbling with in more than a few sets. Players who completed the massive 89 card set within one week got an Asuka Signature award (95cc), in two weeks they got a Bray Wyatt signature (99). The pink is currently on ebay (as of this writing) for $12.

On a more personal note – While I have said in public on more than one occasion that completionism; or the need to own every single card of a specific performer, or set or whatever; is a disease, I’m pleased to report that as of this moment I own every single Bret “the Hitman” Hart card in the game. I was able to make trades for my last two needs (the 25cc Cyber Monday 2018 base variant and the 10cc 2016 Lime Green variant) this week and for the moment, I don’t need any other Bret cards. Now this will obviously change once Topps decides to issue more Bret Hart cards, but until they do, my master set is complete.

This is what appears when I look at “all cards” with the “cards I need” filter on, and searching for Bret Hart.

Fortunately for me there aren’t too many low CC Bret cards, and there’s been no signatures issued yet. My next collection would probably be Chris Jericho since I already have a few of his low CC cards, but there are at least 3x 5cc limiteds that I’ll never get a chance to own. At least there won’t be any more Jericho cards issued for the near future now that he’s no longer signed to WWE in any capacity (he doesn’t even have a legends contract since he’s still active with AEW).

Top 25 Cards – 1st Quarter 2019

Last but certainly not least, let’s look at the top 25 singles sold in the game via ebay for the first quarter of 2019. The #1 card last time is now at #2 having been sold yet again, this time though it only garnered $321. Remember this is the same card that had previously been sold for $850 and $450. There’s only one of them has to be this one.

Taking a deeper dive into the list it looks like the cool off on Alexa Bliss is still happening. While she is still a huge draw and super-popular, she only appears here three times, granted one of those is the top spot. Still there’s more Ronda Rousey low CC cards that appear on the list than Alexa, with three of those four being 5cc cards. The only other performer to garner 3 or more cards on the list is The Rock, go figure. He hasn’t wrestled a match that lasted longer than 30 seconds since 2013, but his high-profile keeps his cards selling.

It’s no surprise that the early January release of 2018 High Caliber dominated the listings this time around. Those 5cc gold signature cards, if you pull one, are basically a license to print money. Almost 1/4th of the overall 100 card print run ended up being sold on ebay, the MINIMUM price being $50 or so. Considering the gold signatures were a 1:15 chance in a 1900 diamond pack (the mean cost of $150 in diamonds PER card), these are good investments for the future, even if moving them might take some time to find the right buyer.

The other major release that’s featured this time around is the recent Excellence box set, which is represented by 6 cards, all 5cc. Excellence will never be worth quite as much as High Caliber though, due to the much lower point of entry, the 5cc Excellence cards will cost just about half as much as the High Caliber 5cc cards cost to pull on average.

Ricochet made a strong showing this time around with two cards in the top 25. His star appears to be rising amongst collectors who are taking a shine to him. Curiously one of the very rare Serial numbered cards made an appearance on the list with the #5 out of 5 of the Rock’s Gold Autograph selling for $250. These were a strange one-off release during the first year of the game and only available in a $15 cash pack, with super-long odds and you really don’t see them come up for trade or sale very often.

This one card sold for $250 recently. No, you don’t have it. Unless you’re one of the 5 who do have the 1/1. No, I know that doesn’t make sense to me either.

Several cards make repeat appearances on the list, chiefly the 2016 TLC Alexa Bliss vs. Becky Lynch Gold Dual Autograph Award of which there’s only 30 in the game. That card has appeared on four of the last five top 25 lists, gaining in high end value each time, going from $120 over a year ago to a high of $165 this time around. The Rock’s 2nd Anniversary Gold Signature 10cc card has appeared three times out of the last five, and has improved from a $100 top value to $120. Sadly at the same time his Unrivaled 23cc Award has appeared twice dropping from a top value of $100 to $85 now. Charlotte Flair’s 7cc Museum Award has also appeared twice but has gone up in high end value from $65 to $92 now.

Survey taken 3-12-19 to 3-19-19

My Collecting Blog –The Budget Collector

The Daily WiLL – http://willaday.blogspot.com/

NOW CHECK OUT LAST WEEK’S ARTICLE: DIGITAL DABBLINGS #31 – The Fourth Base Set Has Arrived