Fickle Finds, So You Don’t Have To

Hope everyone is enjoying the early throes of summer. Hard to believe that we’re already in June, eh?

Small Talk Tuesdays is brought to you by Fickle Finds®. 

Fickle Finds®: A few bullets in an email newsletter that you are literally reading right now. “Fickle Finds®, so you don’t have to.” 

• I grabbed a few of the WNBA Funko Pop collectibles that are still in pre-order. Really awesome of them to include Doppler, the Seattle Storm mascot, but a huge miss to not have Liberty mascot Ellie the Elephant collectible. I will go out on a limb and make a bold statement: an Ellie the Elephant Funko would outsell Caitlin Clark (Ed’s Note: Insane take). 

• I bought a bunch of unopened packs of Spitting Image to chase the Mike Tyson and Prince cards at $9 a pack. There’s a strange historical significance to these cards, which are hard to find unopened - so I’m thinking I might leave the packs sealed because they are increasingly scarce. But also I may be the only person in the world looking for them, so, there’s that. 

• I’m not massively into prospecting in baseball because of how fleeting those ebbs and flows are, but I did feel like I was missing out on having enough Pete Crow-Armstrong cards in my collection. I’m sitting on a few too many Julio Rodriguez cards to feel confident in my purchases, but PCA has been a fun player to watch and to add to my PC, eh?

• I’m of the age where I shake my fist in the air when I find that you can, in theory, buy 4 Muhammed Ali autographs or one Dylan Crews auto for $1,000. This isn’t meant to be a knock on Mr. Crews, but he’s not in the Mount Rushmore of Sports conversation. That said, I grabbed an Ali auto for under $200 this past week which, again, feels a bit crazy to think about. 

• I was not the buyer of the $70 million Grand tête mince bust, and apparently neither were you because this sucker only got bid up to $64.25 million. Instead I’d rather buy this Kobe Bryant bust for $250, since he most certainly wasn’t a bust. 

That joke was way too easy. 

Time for some quick hits:

It’s hard to believe that people find this hard to believe, but Walmart is getting into sports card breaking. Where there’s money to be had, there’s people with money wanting to have more money. 

It would be great of Walmart to turn this all into other consumer goods. Imagine We The Hobby opening up a box of Cheerios and finding that there’s Lucky Charms inside the box: “We take those! We take those!”

“Chat! Chat! The throw pillows are at $12!! What are we doing? Look alive, chat!!”

I had this whole thing planned around making fun of the Sydney Sweeney bathwater situation - which is absolutely insane - but then LeMeme James came with the Rubin Rinse heat. 

Nicely and grossly done, sir. 

If you’re a lover of baseball and collecting calories, make sure you’re following Ben’s Biz on Instagram. He travels to each Minor League park eating the wildest and whackiest foods he can find. 

Speaking of food:

SI.com had a fun piece on fast food collectibles and as you know I write about fast food collectibles ad nauseam and legitimately told my editor that I was going to “give it a break” … but, suck it, Evan! 

This week in “what will they put inside a card next,” Topps gives us a game-used-goal-scored soccer net. As one guy in the comments puts it, “they be making anything into a card man.” They certainly be doing that, man.

Poor Kentavious Caldwell-Pope.

Finally, congrats to the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder who will face off in the NBA Finals this week. I have a random question and I’d love to open up the conversation on Mantel, but curious of this thought:

• In the last 25 years, are the Indiana Pacers the “least collector-friendly” NBA team to have made the Finals?

I know that Tyrese Haliburton is blowing up, but if you combined the two teams there’s a reasonable argument that he would be 4th on the list of “players who will hold future value” behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren. And you can get a Pascal Siakam RPA for $40. 

Head over to Mantel and sound off on what you think the current and future market looks like for Tyrese Haliburton and the rest of the Pacers!

Note: I swear I’m not a bitter Knicks fan.