My take aways from Fanatics Fest-
The CT scanner hype is real. This was the elephant in the room and it's going to kill the high end breakers. With a company willing to scan your cases for a fee and scanners so sensitive they can pick out pokemon full arts you are looking at breaks becoming a thing of the past.
Not that breakers are honest. There's been more breakers scamming lately when huge hits are being pulled.
I also got the vibe fanatics will slowly start squeezing out shops who carry upper deck and rightly so. The days going to come when upper deck won't be avaliable at shops or retail, only online. Now that fanatics has LeBron and Curry and is chomping at the bit to throw money at Jordan once his UD contract expires it leaves UD with nothing.
I has a great time. The hobby is slowly weeding out the bad little by little.
The future of the hobby is probably something similar to ePack, but all the breaks are standardized and done in house.
They can up the gambling aspect by auctioning off points in each product. So instead of sitting on cases, UD approved speculators/gamblers can be the marks who buy into the entire line. Or they could allow card shops to open their own store fronts on ePack and wholesale the same way a card shop would, and solicit preorders or price their items through their own store front on ePack.
They basically can do the same thing they do now, which is pass the risk on to card shops, but it's all online, and the selling point to buyers is that it is standardized.
The way AI is going, they won't even need to host their break live. They can clone their voice so when they don't have to stick around for the break to say "nice case hit, Tanner Glass auto numbered to 499".
If UD wanted to make a quick buck before going belly up when Fanatics get all the licenses, I could see moving all hobby products to ePack and selling a limited number of virtual "store fronts" to card shops as being a big short term money maker.
In the long term, UD should be focusing on being the one to revolutionize how cards are consumed and own that platform, so that they can sell or license it to Fanatics when Fanatics puts them out of business. As in, they shouldn't be a book seller, they should be Amazon.
