Our topic today is going to be a topic that we've never done before: Harry Potter cards.
There are a lot of Harry Potter cards that are out there, but some of these entertainment related cards don't always get the notoriety that baseball and basketball and football do.
I wanted to talk with somebody who from my perspective is an expert on Harry Potter cards, and has had some big Harry Potter cards come through his collection.
But as you'll hear, when he gets into something, he goes deep in developing a deep understanding of what all is out there so that he has a a well-rounded perspective on what cards he wants to get.
And that's Adam Gray from Basketball Card Fanatic Magazine and The Basketball Card Podcast.
And he's going to educate us on the history of Harry Potter cards and some things that we might think about if we might want to get into Harry Potter cards.
Mike:
Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam:
The WaxPackHero, Mike Sommer, It's great to see you again.
You and I last saw each other and talked at the National.
It was good to meet you there.
And I will tell you something that I think a few people might know about me already, which is that when when you asked me to come on and talk about Harry Potter cards, I don't know if there's any topic in the world that I would have rather have you ask me about.
I haven't had anybody ask me to talk about this, and it's something that I have a lot of passion for.
So thank you for for for inviting me on.
Mike:
Why do you have this passion for Harry Potter and Harry Potter cards?
Adam:
I think a lot of people experienced Harry Potter the same way, which was when the books were coming out and they were obsessed with it.
And you know, there were these midnight sort of like releases of the books and people were going to their bookstores and buying the books and then reading them all the next couple of days until they were done.
That wasn't me.
I had no interest in reading when the when the books came out.
And then I went on a mission to to England.
And so from October of 2002 to October 2004, I was in England.
And when I got there, there were these double Decker buses everywhere that had like pictures of Hermione or of Harry and Ron.
And I just thought it was stupid.
I lived there for two years thinking Harry Potter was dumb.
And then after I met my wife, we went to the number six movie, which is called The Half Blood Prince, and I found myself like, loving it.
And maybe it was because I had this nostalgia for England, but I loved the movie and I thought it was super interesting.
And we just sort of fell in love with the story.
Then I had kids, and as we had kids, we'd like, I've read the books aloud to my kids multiple times.
It's become Harry Potter's become like this, like really important part of my family's life and my and my life.
An early Emma Watson auto from Artbox.
And so when I discovered or sort of rediscovered the idea that there were cards that were made while the movies were coming out, and there aren't very many of them.
They include things like autographs and set props and thing, costume cards and stuff.
And then I started getting into those and researching those.
I couldn't have been more excited for it. I went head over heels crazy.
I don't even want to talk about how much time I spent, how much money I spent, but I just, Mike, I just loved getting into this stuff.
It was in, it was early 2022.
I got into it and for about a year it's like all I did went crazy with Harry Potter cards.
And that sort of that sort of takes us up to today.
Mike:
It sounds like it wasn't until early 2022 where you started to connect the dots between this passion that you and the family had and the fact that there were cards that existed for Harry Potter?
Adam:
Well, I think Half Blood Prince came out in 2006 or 2007 and then we've been kind of obsessed with Harry Potter as a family, really like since then and more and more.
So that's been, you know, less than a decade, but I've loved the movies all that time, I think.
I think the question that you're asking though, is is interesting because I've always been a a basketball card collector because I love basketball, but I didn't ever really jump to the idea that entertainment could have these tangible, you know, pieces of cardboard.
It wasn't until a friend of mine posted a picture of a Harry Potter autograph card where I went, Huh, that could be kind of cool.
And then I remembered back when I worked at the card shop.
And I remember him opening these cards and thinking, those are dumb 'cause remember I at the beginning I thought Harry Potter was dumb.
I never would have paid attention to the cards.
And then when I remembered him opening those packs and I'm and I saw those cards that were out there, I was like, this could be interesting and and life happens to card collectors sometimes when you start researching you end up in this place where you're like, hey this is even cooler than I thought.
And then you go down this rabbit hole and it consumes you.
Mike:
From the time where you or your interest was getting piqued, how much time did you spend doing research, finding out, learning about what was out there before you made your first purchase of a a Harry Potter card?
Adam:
I probably, I probably studied, I don't know, maybe like probably like 10 to 15 hours before I made a purchase.
And although that sounds like an incredible amount, that's probably less than I normally do.
The Harry Potter stuff, I I felt like I really jumped into more so because I I just didn't know that it really was there.
And then once I'd started started learning and I started thinking about the rarity and the cultural significance, I kind of was blown away by by the values of that stuff compared to like the values of modern basketball cards.
And this is the way to think about it at the point when when I was, when I was collecting, when I started collecting them.
Lamella Ball was one of the big names in the NBA.
And Lamella Ball has this, like terrible little Squiggle autograph.
And his big cards at the time were like the National Treasures rookie cards with like the big pieces of patch.
And there were 99 of them.
And then there were all these different variations and they were like $20,000 or some crazy amount of money.
So I looked at that and then I looked at like Daniel Radcliffe's first autograph card(eBay link), which is one of the biggest, one of the first big cards that I bought.
I think I paid and it's not cheap, right?
It was expensive.
I think it was like, it's like $5000 that I paid for this card, which again, I know is a lot, but I was like, let's see, Daniel Radcliffe who has around 100 of this card and he doesn't have a million variations.
He's one of the best known, like his character is one of the best known characters, if not the best known character, like of our era, of our generation.
And and he's again, he signed it when he was like a teenager and then you've got Lamella ball and I'm like and his autograph's terrible.
And Daniel Radcliffe's autograph you can actually read.
And I like, compared these two things and I was like, you're telling me this is worth like this this Lamella ball's worth like five times as much as this.
Not only does that that not make sense, but I like, love this and this is hard to find and it's really cool.
But but to go back to your question, it it was less time than it then honestly then you would think compared to how I think about other cards, but I was so enamored with it that I went crazy.
Like like I I went crazy with time and with money on these cards and no regrets there at all.
Mike:
What were some of the first Harry Potter cards out there?
I know there's a TCG game (eBay link) like a trading card game and then there's also the Artbox products,(ebay link) right?
If somebody is interested in in starting to learn what's out there, start to track down some things from the from the movies or or based on the movies, what is there for them to go after?
Adam:
There’s lots of different stuff.
There's stuff that started coming out right, both stickers and cards, right when the 1st movies were made, and I think even before the movies were made, there were some like artistic things that that came out, but they those weren't particularly interesting to me.
What was interesting to me was that during the filming of the Harry Potter or during the third movie, Warner Brothers contracted with this company called Artbox.
Artbox had been contracted by different movie movie studios to be like the official card producer for that movie or for that series.
Like Willy Wonka for for example(eBay link), is one of them where the Johnny Depp, Willy Wonka, where they had a bunch of the actors from that movie come in and sign a bunch of the cards.
And then they made like inserts and they made a base set and and they did the cards really well.
So they did that same thing with Harry Potter starting with movie #3, which is Prisoner of Azkaban.
So when Warner Brothers contracted Art Box to create these cards they had these kids sign a bunch of them like 100 like 100 copies each.
And then the the popularity was was obviously so great that they realized that they were going to need to come out with bigger sets.
But the thing they didn't do you would you would think you would think now given the lens of of what we've seen card companies do that as soon as the as soon as like something is viewed as really popular they would just mass produce that given set.
But that's not what Artbox did.
I think they made something like 5000 boxes of the first product.
That's it.
It's very little, it's very low.
Compare it to anything modern and it would be about the rarest thing that's out there.
The first set has an autograph of Hermione or Emma.
Watson has an autograph of series black Gary Oldman and it has like Dumbledore and a couple of other a couple of other guys that are in the set that are a little bit rare.
The Hermione.
There's only believed to be 50 of that card in the world and you know she signed it when she was super young.
At that point I think they realized we we've got to make more right away.
And and because because of the demand and at that same time other like, I don't think they were getting all the autographs back from the actors immediately and they didn't have this redemption sort of thing worked out yet.
So instead of waiting for all the autographs to come back to put into the packs, they then created this update set.
So Hermione's in the first set.
She's actually in the second set too.
But the second set all like they they did some really innovative things and I'll tell you about a couple of them.
They did a double autograph with both of the Weasley twins, Fred and George Weasley.
Harry Potter Triple Auto
They did like the card that's pretty easily viewed as like the Harry Potter biggest of all cards, which is they had the actors for Hermione, Ron and Harry all sign on the same card.
There's no stickers like you see a lot of the time with with entertainment autographs.
Today they're all on card, and this card has three lines.
The three images of those three from the Prisoner of Azkaban movie.
It's Harry, it's Hermione, and then it's Ron.
Mike:
Could you you share a little bit about kind of what the the theory is or or what the math is behind how much of this product is actually out there?
Adam:
Yeah, the the the boxes are actually numbered, which is cool 'cause you can see how many boxes were made of each product really easily.
These cards, the boxes were numbered but the autographs weren't.
And there are some, there are some like prop cards and costume cards.
Those are numbered actually and those are really interesting.
But but the autographs are interesting because you really have to like sort of like do some real research, right.
And so there's a guy who runs a group called NSLists and so if you just Google NSLists, you're gonna see most of the non sports products ever made.
And within this, within this thing you get you basically see checklists.
You click on a link and you'll see everything that existed in these products and you see like pack odds and things like that.
What they what they did is back when the products were actually released, they tracked hundreds of boxes of this stuff and out of each box there were like patterns and out of each case there were patterns and people used to open a whole case because remember back then Mike, you'd have a a box would be like a box of Harry Potter stuff would be like $40.
If there were twelve boxes in a case.
Somebody was literally buying a case for like 400 bucks which is crazy to think now because most of the boxes are thousands of dollars, right.
To get any autograph to pull it like on your own you're you're gonna spend thousands of dollars to do that but back when they were released they were really cheap they were seriously like 40 or 50 bucks a box.
There is evidence of him sort of tracking these cases and if you know if you if you can see 10% of a of a run opened, you can determine approximately how many of these cards were produced.
Now the only the only two things here that are that are important to understand that sort of bring these things into question.
These population counts into question are one what if the sample was bad?
Harry Potter Quad Auto
I believe in his samples, I think he's done an awesome job and I think his percentage, sometimes he would, he would witness 20% of a product opened and that's what would give him sort of like the ability to extrapolate how many total there were.
The bigger issue for me, and I think this is true for some of the Harry Potter cards, is sometimes I think cards were held back from distribution.
We see this in sports cards today too.
What if a manufacturer only places 10% and then they hold or 50% and then they hold 50% back either because they're going to give them away as gifts to executives or hold them back for replacement copies or whatever else.
It's hard to know exactly on some of those things, but I think that directionally it's it's very good.
And I think if you were, if you to get back to the Harry Potter cards, what you find is there are very clear patterns around how often they would release some of these cards.
And so when you've got 20% of the population or even 5% of the population open, you can extrapolate pretty well how many there are because you know how many total boxes there are.
So unless unless our box held back at a bunch of the factory, you know basically how many of them there are and the numbers are shocking how low they are.
Like I said, Hermione's first autograph, there's fifty, Harry's first autograph, there's a hundred.
I think Ron is about the same.
Most of the guys, it's like 200 to 250 autographs.
After all, if you're looking at all the math that Harry, Ron and Hermione, across all 17 products that that came out for Harry Potter, there's 17 total products that came out between 2004 and 2009 or 2010 across all 17.
Each of those three actors have a total of about about 1000 autographs between 900 and like 1200 autographs each, so it's not a huge number.
And since they all have a bunch of different variations, you can understand why they've become as collectible as they have been.
Mike:
Now those those 17 products that you mentioned started with Prisoner of Azkaban, did they only go from Prisoner of Azkaban through the end of the the film run or did they actually go backwards and say maybe we should have had something for the first couple movies too?
Adam:
It's such a good question.
They they started Prisoner of Azkaban and they did the Prisoner of Azkaban update and then they went back and they went, wait a second, we need to go hit the Sorcerer's Stone, We need to go, you know, we need to go hit those first two movies.
So both of those first two movies have products that don't contain any of the big three autographs.
So there's no Harry Potter.
Daniel Radcliffe autograph from the Sorcerer's Stone doesn't exist.
But but then they do have some of those key characters, autographs, and more importantly, I think to collectors, they have some of the really key pieces of of movie like props.
But for the Sorcerer's Stone, they went back and they took the Harry Potter ticket, the 9 3/4 ticket, and they cut that into 40 pieces and they made 40 of that card.
I had a chance to buy that card for $1000.
I I didn't do it, 'cause I was focusing on the autographs.
That card's probably 10 grand now, maybe more, maybe 20 grand.
It's it's like the grail of hairy like prop cards and and so that that is one of the great cards from the first one.
The first one also has like autographs of Nearly Headless Nick and one other one other key autograph that there's like 300 or 400 of but he's only he only appears in that first set.
And then they went through and they did the rest of the movies all the way to the Deathly Hallows 2 and they did update sets and then they did some funky like 3D sets and and and and in the end I think they ended up with 17.
It's either 16 or 17 sets.
Mike:
One of the other things that we we run into on the sports side so much is promo sets and kind of partnership sets. Are there other Harry Potter card releases that were either done by Artbox or other manufacturers that were more food promotional sets or other merchandise promotional sets and things like that?
Adam:
Yeah, there are.
There's a lot of those.
Just because the IP is so huge.
You in fact, I was at a store yesterday looking for Christmas presents for my kids, and they still sell these chocolate frogs.
They come with cards and they're like lenticular cards.
They're really cool.
But to me, I don't know a lot about those.
I've I've focused on the stuff that's like the rarer, like getting close to the actor sort of stuff, because that stuff sort of has a broader appeal to me.
But I I think if you were to look into it, there's probably dozens of those types of sets.
Mike:
Some people love to put together the base set of of certain products, especially entertainment products, because it's got the scenes from the movies that are pictured or you know the character cards of of people's favorite characters.
Have you or have you any of your kids is is they were looking at some, have you ever acquired or or put together or kept any of the base card sets?
Adam:
Yeah, this is a great question, Mike, because I'm 100% with you.
I kind of bury myself when I say, hey, I bought a card that was 5 grand and that was the first one, right?
And that's really a dumb way to talk about it because.
Because that's not where collecting starts, right?
Collecting starts with typically, like, usually, gifts, cards that are given to you or things that you give to your kids because they might just find interesting, they open a few packs, right?
So for Christmas last year now remembering, I bought each one of my kids a single pack that they could open and it was the retail version.
The retail versions didn't have autographs and so they're still, they're still pretty cheap actually.
Like you can find them for like 5 to $10 a pack.
And the thing that's really cool that you can discover even in the retails they've got like great looking base sets and great looking inserts.
The thing that happens with movies sometimes is they'll they'll put the movie into a set.
So like a a card represents a scene rather than representing a character.
So the base sets are like are mostly, not totally, but mostly around the moments rather than the individuals.
And they're really cheap, but they're cool looking.
A lot of the inserts are more sort of focused on the individual, and some of the inserts are kind of rare.
Those are really interesting.
They're not expensive at all.
There are tons of great Harry Potter characters with Artbox autos.
Mike:
Well, you've done a good job of kind of laying out kind of the history of these different releases, the options that are out there for us.
One of the things that I I did want to ask about, because I think it's such a big part of what we think about when we think about collecting, and that is the community aspect of things.
When we when we think about collecting sports cards, there's all kinds of hobby communities that are out there where we can talk with people, we can bounce ideas off of people, celebrate what we've collected or or put my want list out there.
Are you aware of any kind of Facebook groups or other hobby communities that are out there that are are solely focused or primarily focused on Harry Potter cards?
Adam:
They're the the Instagram community.
I put together a just a group that we talk to each other on.
It's just like a chat group.
I think there's like 25 of us.
The thing that's kind of hard about it is it's like a really diverse group of collectors.
There's like a bunch of people from the UK and America, but then there's people from there's a lot of people from Japan, there's a lot of people from other places in Europe.
So there's definitely a language barrier for like the community part parts of it.
But I I feel like that community is growing in a lot of ways because there haven't been like places where they can come together.
That blowout thread's a pretty good example.
There's it's it's been a very viewed thread.
If you just go to blowout and type in Harry Potter Artbox, you'll see the thread and and there's a lot there.
There's also a lot of a lot on Facebook as well.
So that's probably the the place that I would recommend anyone goes if they want to.
If you get to know people but also message me on Instagram, my I actually have a Harry Potter specific Instagram account.
It's 27guy_Harry Potter and that's where I post all of my Harry stuff.
The full interview with Adam can be found here!