Episode 26 How Top Sellers Win in Sports Cards ft. Trike Cards

Released: October 14, 2025 | Duration: 40:22

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About This Episode

There is a version of selling sports cards that looks like luck and a version that looks like infrastructure. Troy from Trike Cards has spent years building the second kind – starting with a raw-to-graded edge during the pandemic, through a bear market where most people were cutting losses, and into the current run where the tools and instincts he developed are finally paying off at scale.

This episode gets tactical. Where do different cards belong: COMC, eBay Buy It Now, auction, card show, or private deal? How do you negotiate without torching relationships or leaving money on the table? When does grading math actually work, and when does it quietly kill your margin? Troy addresses all of it, including the single most common negotiation mistake he sees (and why “what’s your best?” kills deals before they start).

The throughline is a framework that works across market conditions: understand the downside, understand the upside, know your buyer profile, and have a plan before you buy – not after. If you can not articulate where and how you are going to sell something, that is not an investment thesis. That is wishful thinking.

Topics Covered

  • COMC pros and cons: no-work appeal vs. reduced liquidity and hard pricing on eBay cross-listings
  • How to segment cards across channels: COMC, eBay BIN, auction, card show, private deal
  • Raw-to-graded strategy: where the leverage is and why PSA inconsistency is a manageable variable, not a dealbreaker
  • The patient buyer approach: why bear markets reward collectors willing to wait for the right person
  • Negotiation fundamentals: why leading with a specific offer beats “what’s your best” every time
  • Comp-checking etiquette: how to challenge a price without burning the relationship
  • Set premium as downside protection: why 2014 Prizm and Flawless command floors that no-name sets can’t
  • Upside and downside thinking as a card evaluation framework
  • Always having a plan before buying: knowing the exit before entering the position
  • Cutting losses without ego: how to recognize when you’re wrong and redeploy capital

Full Transcript Summary

COMC, eBay, and the Case for Segmenting Your Sales

One of the most practical moves any serious seller can make is figuring out which cards belong in which channel. Troy from Trike Cards has been doing this long enough to have a feel for it…and COMC is a good place to start because it illustrates the trade-off clearly.

The pitch for COMC is simple: you penny sleeve the card, box it up, and let the platform handle everything. No listings, no shipping, no back-and-forth. For lower-dollar cards that would otherwise eat your time for a two-dollar margin, that freedom is genuinely valuable. Troy uses it for cards like 2017 Topps Chrome refractors of non-featured players – cards that might fetch five dollars on eBay but will find a home in a bulk lot on COMC.

The limitation is liquidity. COMC cross-lists to eBay, but at a hard price. Buyers who want to make an offer (and the offer function is one of the most conversion-friendly features in the hobby) cannot use it on COMC inventory. That friction costs sales. For cards that move better through negotiation, COMC is the wrong venue. For cards you just need off your shelf without spending time on them, it does exactly what it promises.

Raw to Graded: Where the Leverage Actually Lives

Troy’s selling journey started the same place most serious sellers eventually land: grading. During the pandemic, he was submitting Iniesta Mundicromos for around fifty dollars in grading fees, coming back with PSA 9s, and selling them for fifteen hundred. That math is hard to argue with – and it taught him early that the leverage in this hobby is not in buying the cheapest card on the market. It is in buying cards that other people have not priced correctly relative to what they can become.

The raw-to-graded edge has compressed since then. Grading fees are higher. Slabs sell for less than they did at peak. Turnaround times have stretched. Troy grades fewer cards now and is more selective about what he submits. The question he asks before any submission is not “could this be a 10?” It is “at what grade does this card stop making sense financially?” Setting that floor before you send anything in keeps you from grading yourself into a loss.

PSA inconsistency is real. Troy acknowledges it. But the answer is not to find an alternative grader and evangelize it – the market has already voted, and PSA wins on trust and comps. Inconsistency is a cost of doing business, not a reason to leave the table.

The Bear Market Advantage: Patience as a Business Model

Troy went full-time on cards in 2023, which was not a hot market. That choice was deliberate. He had already noticed that his style – patient, collector-focused, willing to hold for the right buyer – outperformed in low-velocity environments. When the market was running hot, fast flippers and high-end dealers were winning. When it cooled, the people with inventory no one wanted were stuck. Troy was the person willing to take the soccer cards no one else wanted at a card show, hold them for eight months, and find the right collector.

This is the alpha-and-beta framing he uses to think about cards. Some inventory is highly correlated to market sentiment – it runs up fast and falls hard. Other inventory is more defensive: rare enough that the right buyer is always out there somewhere, but not so hype-driven that it craters when attention shifts. Flawless autos, certain 2014 Prizm parallels, low-pop cards with no obvious comps – these are the cards that reward patience and punish panic-selling.

Negotiation That Converts

The most common negotiation mistake in the hobby is asking “what’s your best price?” or “what’s your lowest?” Troy gets this constantly on eBay, Instagram, and at card shows. His take is direct: it’s lazy, it removes the human connection that makes deals happen, and it almost never works. When someone opens with that line, they have not done the work of figuring out what the card is worth to them. That is their problem, not the seller’s.

The alternative is to come to the table with a number and a reason. If you think a card is worth five hundred and it is listed at a thousand, say so – and explain why. Reference a relevant comp. Acknowledge what the seller has. Keep it respectful and specific. That approach does two things: it shows you have done homework, and it gives the seller something to respond to rather than just reject. Troy closed a card show deal by simply asking whether the seller would take eighty-five percent on a bulk purchase of soccer cards – and framing it as a genuine question with a reason attached, not a demand. He got the deal done. The person who would have walked up and said “I need to pay fifty, that’s just the market, bro” would not have.

Set Premium as Downside Protection

One of the cleaner frameworks in this episode is how Troy thinks about set premium as a floor. Not every card has the same downside risk, and the biggest factor in that calculation is the set it lives in.

A 2014 Prizm gold of a mid-tier player has a floor because Prizm collectors exist across every sport and will always want the set complete. The scarcity of those parallels compounds over time as they leave the market and do not come back. A PSA 10 Topps Chrome refractor of a no-name player from a recent year has no real floor – the set is not scarce, the player is not in demand, and there is no collector class that needs that specific card.

Troy applied this directly to a Xavi Flawless auto he was holding. The card had uncertain comps, but he knew that Flawless – the set itself – commands collector attention across soccer, and the Xavi name carries legacy demand that does not evaporate. He was comfortable holding for as long as necessary because the downside scenario where the card goes to zero simply does not exist for cards embedded in a blue-chip set with the right player attached.

The Seller’s Checklist: Plan Before You Buy

The closing framework from this conversation is the one that ties everything together. Before buying any card, Troy runs through the same set of questions: What is the downside? What is the upside? Who is the likely buyer? What is the exit? What channel does this card belong in when it is time to sell?

If you cannot answer those questions before you buy, you are not investing. You are hoping. Hoping is fine for the collector pocket. For the investor pocket, it is how you end up holding cards you cannot exit at prices you cannot justify.

Troy acknowledged this from his own recent experience: two high-end Yamal autos he bought expecting to flip above cost. New comps came in, the injury news hit, and the thesis broke. His response was not to hold and pray. It was to put them to auction, take the loss, and redeploy the capital. That decision is harder than it sounds when there is real money at stake. But the alternative – holding an asset that no longer makes sense because cutting the loss feels like admitting failure – is what separates disciplined sellers from people who just got lucky in a hot market.

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