This will be a long one.
The problem is this isn't a team sport. With any of the big 4 you have greater chances of hitting either a big name or something for your team or player PC. With team PCs there's a better chance at selling cards, and with the larger following, selling them for higher prices.
But the UFC is a niche individual sport. The market isn't that big, and people just aren't out there PC'ing Ryan Jimmo, Bryan Caraway or
CB Dollaway. Look at the UFC rankings and in some divisions you'll see fighters outside of top 5s that you'll struggle to shift.
And therein lies the problem. Its these guys that pad out the hits. I mean look at the list of guys they used for the Grill Gear redemptions from Finest 2012.
Brian Ebersole
Chael Sonnen
Duane Ludwig
Dustin Poirier
Gray Maynard
Ian McCall
KJ Noons
Louis Gaudinot
Luke Rockhold
Ross Pearson
Shane Del Rosario
Stipe Miocic
(of which I pulled a McCall... still yet to be fulfilled!
)
The UFC's roster has grown, but number of "stars" that has emerged from this crop hasn't grown by the same rate. They got a spike when guys came over from Pride and Strikeforce, but those guys are on the backside of their careers. And now that there's less competition there's less promotions building up new marketable fighters. OneFC hasn't reached the heights of Pride and Bellator isn't offering as much of a threat as Strikeforce did.
The other problem is the product that Topps are putting out. Its just not worth the $200 a box they're asking. Fighter relics aren't attributed to any specific fight or events, god knows where they came from; Mat relics at least are cited, but then they are less personal given a bunch of other people fought on that same mat. And the over abundance of sticker autos. I'm well and truly over Triple Threads cards being blighted by sticker autos. It's even worse when you have cases like this:
a sticker auto used well after Tate switched from "Takedown" to "Cupcake".
And the only on-card autos you see are in Knockout, half of which are redemptions that are never fulfilled. It's maddening!
There's definitely a big divide between expectations and reality from collectors and sellers. Jon Jones first auto would've yielded big dollars, but 6 autos later and you could pick one up for lunch money. This then dilutes his value across all his autos. That's why I laugh when I see people asking $700-1200 for a Rousey, Jones, Silva or GSP auto. There is simply no one paying that sort of money.
I also feel like the bubble has burst a little and there are less UFC collectors than there were 2 years ago.
I skipped Knockout and Champions last year, but tried two boxes of Bloodlines. Neither yielded great results and I'm likely to bail on UFC boxes for good, and just pick up singles, unless something drastically changes.
It's just too bad Press Pass went bust. Their NASCAR boxes were filling the void nicely. Maybe that's how companies survive these days, by rehashing the same half-arsed shit year after year and ignoring the plees from collectors about redemptions.
, I'm thinking twice about it.
Then came along Topps Ufc...
