Missing Chase Cards Are a Bad Thing for the Hobby
On December 9th, Dave and Adam's, the well-known card company, quietly pulled its million-dollar bounty for a Connor Bedard rookie card. The card, an Outburst Gold 1/1 Young Guns, sent a jolt across the industry. Collectors who had never opened a hockey pack walked into their local shops looking to buy boxes of 2023-24 Upper Deck Series 2.
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The card never surfaced, the hysteria died down and with it, so did the bounty. The bounty's removal has drawn criticism, mainly around how a company can create a bounty to boost product sales only to backtrack whenever it wants.
Dave & Adam's has honored past bounties, including a $200,000 bounty for a Babe Ruth card from 2023 Bowman Chrome, a $100,000 bounty for a Lou Gehrig card from 2024 Bowman Chrome, and a $150,000 bounty for the Anthony Volpe MLB Debut Patch card.
However, the biggest problem is that Bedard's Outburst Gold rookie card never surfaced. It feels like people spent their money on a hockey card that doesn't exist. To clarify, we're not saying it doesn't exist, only that it feels that way. It's a feeling that became eerily similar throughout 2024.
A look back at the past year, and one can't help but notice the number of missing chase cards. Released in December 2023, Bowman Draft benefitted from a big marketing campaign touting limited Tom Brady cards, including two inscribed versions, one out of 25 and another out of 50.
Both inscribed cards were number 12 - Brady's jersey number. Brady even made a slickly-produced video in which he dreams of having a baseball career in a parallel universe. But the inscribed cards have yet to surface.
During last year's Summer Olympic Games, the United States Men's Basketball Team had one of its most iconic teams capture the gold medal. It was punctuated by a Topps Now 1/1 triple-signed autograph card of Steph Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant. It's the only card with Curry's and James' autographs.
More than 588,000 packs were sold, and one lucky buyer got the opportunity to redeem the Triple Autograph card. Now, nearly five months later, the card hasn't been seen. There are rumors it has been pulled, or it could be in one of the blue parallel packs for sale on eBay.
It hasn't reached the other cards' duration, but the Paul Skenes MLB Debut Patch card is headed that way. According to a tracker created by @Tp35 on X, nearly 73% of MLB Debut Patch cards have been pulled.
Presumably, Skenes' card is one of the final 68 remaining in packs, echoing back to Volpe's MLB Debut Patch Card. It took eight months to pull Volpe's card, the biggest pull from 2023 Topps Chrome Update. Will we see a similar occurrence with Skenes? And if so, what are the odds that the biggest cards from their respective releases are some of the last to be pulled?
How different would 2024 Topps Update sales be if Skenes' MLB Debut Patch card had been pulled in the first week of product release? It's a rhetorical question: it would have made a huge difference. Two months after the 2024 Topps Update release, collectors still buy into breaks, dreaming about pulling the Skenes.
There are dozens of viable reasons the cards above haven't surfaced. They may have all been pulled, but the owners didn't want the publicity that came with it. Some great cards don't get found until years later.
But with the cards still out there, especially after they were used to market their respective products in one succession after the other, one can't help but ask more questions. What is happening, and what should the hobby community do as more of these cards remain hidden even as the industry uses them to sell products?
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