After many years of database driven digital collectibles, Topps Company has finally taken their first step towards granting true digital ownership by using the WAX blockchain. This is an important step towards bringing the blockchain to mainstream consumers, though only time will tell how effective it is.
Topps VS Panini
Panini, Topps’ rival card company, has a head start. At the beginning of this year they started slowly selling blockchain collectibles. These cards are on their own blockchain and cannot be taken out of it yet.
For a sale approach, they are using a Dutch Auction Format and the current sales are starting at $25,000.
Fortunately Dutch Auctions involve decreasing prices, but still cards are selling for very high prices. This is a value focused approach.
Topps, on the other hand, are selling two types of randomly filled packs. They sell five card Standard Packs for $4.99 and Mega Packs, with 30 cards, for $24.99. This is a mass adoption approach, making it very easy for people to start collecting. Unfortunately this also means the majority of the cards will be relatively worthless. As with physical collectible cards you are chasing the inserts.
Card Availability
As mentioned there are two different types of packs. The Mega Packs sold out in under 8 hours, but you can likely buy them on the secondary market as a lot are still unopened. In fact you can check how many exist by reading the blockchain here.
In the image above, “gpk.topps” is essentially a garbage can for all the opened packs. On that same page you can scroll down to see all the other Mega Pack owners.
At the time of this article, the Standard Packs are still available in the shop. I expect they will sell out eventually, but in 12 hours only about 3,000 have sold.
Series One
Series One was released in honor of the 35 year Garbage Pail Kids anniversary. The set consists of 41 different cards with two name variations each. These are available in four different rarities, Base (common), Prism (uncommon), Sketch (rare), and Collector’s Edition (ultra rare). To collect them all you would only need 328* cards.
Note: Currently there are only 8 Collector’s Edition displayed in the catalog. It’s unclear if that’s all that has been found, or if its all that will be available.
The base/common cards are digital recreations of the original Garbage Pail Kids Cards. The only difference between A and B series is the character’s name. It is possible that the A series is slightly more rare as is the case for the Prism and Sketch cards.
The uncommon/prism cards are the same art as the base cards, but they are in gif format and have an additional “shine” to them. They are basically the equivalent of foil cards. A cards are slightly more rare than B cards.
The rare sketch cards start with a lined drawing and then are colored. In my opinion its a better use of gif format than the prism cards. Again, A cards are slightly more rare than B cards.
Lastly the collector’s cards are actually animated gifs. They all have some sort of motion in them, whether its popping a zit in the case of Crater Chris, or swinging in the trees like Anna Banana. Check out the catalog if you want to see first hand.
Trading
If you have used any digital collectibles in the past you are likely familiar with trading. While Topps does give you the ability to trade, they completely fail in the implementation. In their existing mobile apps, like Bunt or Skate, you can post to a trade channel to solicit trades. Currently the best you can do is keep your wish list updated and blindly send offers.
Buying and Selling
You might be thinking “that’s ok, who needs to trade when I can buy and sell?” Unfortunately that isn’t much better. All sales are done through the WAX market which is in beta and works poorly.
It is really difficult finding what you want to purchase. The market allows you to filter by collection, but you cannot sort it or properly search it. If you try and type a card’s name, you get zero results. You can search by seller, but most people will only have a couple items for sale. Your only choice at the moment is to scroll through 1000 (or more) different records. Fortunately search engines are easy to make applications so this will hopefully be fixed in the future.
Provided you find the card you want to purchase, you need to pay for it in WAX. 1 WAX is worth about $0.03, and you need to buy it through an exchange. Unfortunately my exchange of choice, coinbase, doesn’t support it. You will need to do the required research to find one which does, OR sell cards first to earn some.
Selling isn’t much better. While WAX doesn’t charge fees like other blockchains, you are limited in what you can do based on how many resources you have staked. This is not clearly explained anywhere. If you want to find out whether or not you can actually post items for sale, the easiest way is to head over to your cloud based WAX wallet. If you expand the resources tab, you will see how many your current sales are using.
RAM is basically how much you can post. For me, I am only able to post two sales without investing money. CPU and NET are a mystery to me at this point. Additionally there appears to be a 5% fee on all sales which isn’t clearly documented.
The poor market concerns me as my understanding is that the existing WAX ecosystem is part of why Topps partnered with them. I can only hope it improves soon.
Trade With Me
If you are interested enough to start collecting, feel free to check out my collection. If I have any cards you are interested in, I’d certainly consider trading or selling them to you. You can view my collection here and reach out to me through the comments or even send a trade offer through the site.
Final Thoughts
Though I feel there are numerous areas which need improvement, Topps’ Garbage Pail Kids release does have potential. Provided they work out the various kinks and bugs I would be very happy to see their existing mobile apps move to to WAX. The cards themselves are reasonably priced and fairly well done, but the experience after purchase is painful. If you are a fan of the cards, or simply curious about blockchain, give it a look and decide for yourself.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you want to hear more from me. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
This is NOT investment advice. This is simply discussing digital collectibles which I find interesting. If you are looking at it from an investment perspective, make sure to perform your own research and due diligence.
