DIGITAL DABBLINGS #40 – Royal Rumble Preview

Welcome Back!

Topps WWE SLAM (available from your Android or IOS app store) has been back for a little more than 10 days at this point, and collectors have come back to the app in droves!  Besides a massive amount of new cards entering the game, older cards from 2016 to 2021 (or the first era) are still extremely popular and with players being able to trade and sell again the market is wide open.

Before we take a look at the newest sets available, let’s look and see how cards are selling on the aftermarket.  Glancing at the latest listings I see some folks asking for big money for older cards, like a 2020 8 performer booklet that is 15cc with an asking price of $600.

Would you pay $600 for this digital card?  Me neither.  Nice card though.

Pie in the sky territory.  Sure it’s a great card, but not for $600.  I would venture it’ll sell for about a 3rd of that.  But that’s just a guess.

There are plenty of places to get your sets filled in for cheap, and everything new is readily available.  It’s a great place to go if you missed a daily card, or you just can’t get that last one on the checklist to get an award.

Before we drop into the new set update, I want to look at the older stuff and how it’s selling.

So far the top 20 single sales of Slam cards has a lot of the usual faces, but also some newer performers like Liv Morgan and Rhea Ripley.  Interestingly, it’s very clear that the high end economy has not yet bounced back completely.  The last time I ran a top 20 list, the total sales for those 20 cards was almost $4,500.  Today it’s barely $2,400.  Last time every card sold for more than $100.  Today only the top 8.  So there is a way to go before the economy is again robust.

The top selling card currently.

Top 20 Single Topps WWE SLAM Card Sales January 2025

(Indexed 2-1-2025 from Ebay.com sold items)

 

You will notice there are no 2025 cards on the list.  One or two would make it, but I decided not to include them because the pricing is too volatile.  For example, the card that would have made it (a Legendary dual sig of Cody Rhodes and the Rock) sold for $64 at 22 CC.  That same card is listed right now for a Buy it now (BIN) of $15 and the CC is well above 200.  Many of the lower CC 2025 cards have sold, but because the CCs are super-inflated currently, it’s hard to determine what their value will be over time.  Probably not very high.

The State of the App

Currently the major gripe I hear from other collectors is that the CCs are way too damn high.  They’re not wrong.  The previous iteration of the app had limits on many of the high-end Legendary and Iconic cards.  So far, nothing in 2025 has had a CC limit.  Thus Legendary cards from the still available Royal Rumble set are now in the 200CC and higher range.  For a Legendary.  There are Iconic cards numbering over 1000CC.  To say that the current batch of cards will never be worth as much as older cards is a vast understatement.

I suspect that as Topps introduces more sets we’ll start to see limitations.  So far we’ve only had just a few sets in 2025, so let’s take a quick look.

Event Sets

• Full Throttle – One Variation. 4 Cards 1 Award.
• All Stars – One Variation – 10 Cards 1 Award.
• Attitude Era – One Variation – 28 Cards, 2 Awards.
• Forge – 64 Variations – 30 Cards, 1 Award.

Daily Sets

• Main Event Famous Factions Wyatt Sicks – Two Variations (Uncommon/Rare) 5 Daily cards, 1 Award

Motion Uncle Howdy (Rare)

Weekly Sets

• Free Pack Friday – Two Variations (Uncommon/Rare) – 2 Cards, 1 Award

Rhea Ripley FPF (Uncommon)

Normal Insert Sets

• Championship Relics – 4 Variations (Unc. to Iconic) – 12 Cards, 1 Award (Note split into two drops, 2nd drop is not out yet)
• Fury – 4 Variations (Unc. to Iconic) – 17 Cards, 1 Award

LA Knight (Iconic)

PLE Based Sets

• Royal Rumble
  • Base – 4 variations (common to super rare) 61 Cards. 1 Award
  • Signature – 3 Variations (SR to Legendary) 29 Cards.  1 Award
  • Dual Signature – 3 Variations (SR to Legendary) 11 Cards.  1 Award
  • Final Four Motion – 2 Variations (Iconic & Legendary) 5 Cards.  1 Award
• Royal Rumble Legends
  • Base – 2 Variations (Uncommon & SR) 15 Cards. 1 Award
  • Signature – 2 Variations (Rare 8 Iconic) 15 Cards.  1 Award

Becky Lynch RR Legends Base (Uncommon)

The Forge Set has just been released as of this writing, and it’s something we haven’t really seen in Slam before.  It’s also very confusing.  Basically you have to buy lots of packs of Forge cards, which yield some basic building blocks.  You then decide which cards to “burn” for tokens.  Once you have tokens you can then upgrade the other cards you have.  Each card has three levels of upgrades and with each upgrade you get one of 4 random “traits”.  Once you have them all leveled up completely (which takes multiple tokens) you can then trade the results.

Thea Hall Award 

The awards you get are for getting specific cards upgraded.  Currently those are Bianca Belair, DDP, Dusty Rhodes, Victoria and Jey Uso.  If you can get the specific cards from them, then you get a special Thea Hall award.  If you can get all 4 Thea Hall rewards you get a bonus shiny award.

It’s a lot of work and a coin suckage.  That said, you can forge some really low CC cards.  I currently have several under 10cc and not gaining new copies very quickly.   Opinions on the set are all over the spectrum so we’ll see how it goes.  Player collectors sure are in a bind though.  There are at least 64 variations of each of the 30 cards.

The associated event can be replayed multiple times too, which is good because the first tier gives you 500 tokens to upgrade your cards.  I’ve already replayed it 5 times.

The Royal Rumble is later today.  Topps is doing some sort of watch party like they have in years past.  Haven’t heard about their traditional In-App Rumble, which isn’t a bad thing.  Seems like they’re specifically muted about their offerings this time, I can’t imagine they didn’t have enough time to put something together, more I would think they’re taking a smaller approach this time around to gauge fan interest.

Which is still pretty darn high.

BTW – my pick is Cena to win the Rumble, but I see that Punk is creeping up the betting odds, so not surprised if he wins.

See ya in a few weeks, will be back to recap all the Royal Rumble releases and results and then preview Elimination Chamber for March!

Remember, I’m GRENDELSEN in the app if you wanna trade!

---

My Collecting Blog – The Budget Collector

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