The Great Pricing Debate, Sticky Card Nightmares, and Why You Should NOT Wear a Basketball on Your Head
Welcome back to the Wicked Good Pulls blog! Episode 6 had everything: high-stakes pricing strategy, a classic vintage card fail, and a mid-podcast existential crisis over novelty headwear. If you’re running a card stream, grab your sticky notes—you’re going to want to take notes on what not to do.
The Pricing Puzzle: Four Tiers or Two?
The core debate of the episode centered on how to maximize those bids on your stream. Mike is experimenting with a four-tier starting bid strategy for Michael Jordan inserts: $3, $5, $10, and $23.The question from the crew: Does a four-tier strategy accidentally put a “cap” on your mid-tier cards?
The Argument Against: By introducing a $10 “mid-insert” tier, you subconsciously tell bidders that a card is only worth $10 because the “super premium” is held back for the $23 start. Matt is a proponent of a simpler, two-level approach (like $3 and a higher back-wall price) to let bidding momentum carry the mid-tier cards up organically.
Mike’s Plan: Test the four-tier system today and try to track the actual sales results on a sticky note for each insert. He’s so serious about the data that he’s even considered hiring his daughters, Emmy or Marlowe, for a few bucks to log the results. We call this “scientific method” applied to cardboard.
The “Early Bird Special” and Boosting the Algo
Need a hack to get your stream moving and get a quick boost from the “algo”? The host shares his “Early Bird Special” strategy:
The Hack: At the beginning of the stream, while the room is still filling up, instead of selling one $3 base Jordan, sell a lot of two or three base Jordans for the same $3 starting price.
The Logic: This quickly secures a few sales, getting buyers engaged and sending a positive signal to the platform’s algorithm that the show is active and worth pushing to more people. Getting a dollar-per-Jordan in the early minutes is hard to beat!
Vintage Horror: The Freezer Trick Myth
In a segment that could only be called the Vintage Horror Story, the crew ripped a couple of recommended ’93-’94 Skybox Premium packs. Spoiler alert: they were a sticky disaster.
The Problem: Vintage cards from this era are famous for sticking together, which can peel the ink off a valuable card when you try to separate them. The host learned this the hard way, with a Chris Mullen card getting a new, unwanted, white decoration.
The Freezer Trick: The hosts debated the effectiveness of putting the sealed pack in a freezer for 20 minutes to reduce stickiness. While recommended, it didn’t seem to help much, and leaving a pack in overnight just led to a frozen, sticky disaster.
The Ball Head Debate: A Caricature Crisis
The show took a hilarious detour when a listener suggested the hosts should wear a basketball or football on their head to stream to keep their identities private while also being a recognizable gimmick. This immediately led to a panic over becoming a “caricature”:
The Bert Kreischer Conundrum: The comparison was made to comedian Bert Kreischer, who famously takes his shirt off during shows. The fear is that the gimmick would overshadow the content, with viewers only tuning in to see the “Basketball Head Guy,” much like an audience who only cares about the comedian taking his shirt off and not the jokes.
The Joey Holes Alternative: This evolved into a truly bizarre and funny suggestion for “Joey Holes,” who would lurk in the background, slowly inching closer to the main host every 20 minutes with a knife and a hand grenade, making the audience believe the main host is in danger.
Tune in to Episode 6 of Wicked Good Pulls to hear the full unhinged conversation and to find out which cards they actually pulled!