I wasn’t looking for a community. I was looking for WNBA cards.
I had been watching the trajectory of women’s basketball and believed the growth happening around the WNBA would eventually show up in the hobby. I’ve collected cards for a long time and love the hobby, so I wanted to see what was happening. I opened Whatnot, searched WNBA and started scrolling through breaks. I probably stopped in six or seven different rooms before I landed on Cam at Midwest Cards Mayhem.
I stayed.
That part is important. I’ve probably watched 15 or more of the bigger breakers since then, and there are plenty of people who know how to open boxes, run auctions and fill breaks. But I learned pretty quickly there is a big difference between somebody who breaks WNBA cards and somebody who is actually a WNBA breaker. The best ones know the product because they collect it. More importantly, they know the women whose pictures are on the cards.
Cam was the first person who made that difference obvious to me. Her personality gets you almost immediately. Spend five minutes in her room and you pretty much know who she is. She’s funny, opinionated, authentic and incredibly knowledgeable about women’s basketball. She has her favorite players and teams like everybody else, but I’ve watched her defend players she doesn’t necessarily like because she respects their game. You can’t fake that very long when you’re sitting live with people for three or four hours at a time.
And I think that matters a lot more than the hobby realizes.
My First Break
Cam ended up being the first person I ever bought a WNBA break from, and I got pretty damn lucky. I hit a Paige Bueckers rookie, the first real Paige card I had ever owned. I was completely new to the room, surrounded by people who had been hanging out and buying from Cam long before I showed up, and I had just hit something almost everybody in there would have been happy to pull.
What I remember most is what happened next. Cam congratulated me, but so did everybody else. The moderators and regulars were genuinely excited that the new guy had hit something big. There wasn’t this feeling of, “Damn, that should have been mine.” Instead, they celebrated it with me.
At the time, I thought I had gotten lucky and hit a great card. Looking back, the more important thing was that it gave me my first real glimpse into what Cam had built around those cards. I kept coming back, started getting to know the personalities in the room and eventually stopped feeling like the new guy.
Apparently I’m Dad now.
That’s what they call me in the room, and I’m completely cool with it. In fact, the nickname probably does a better job of explaining what has happened in that room than calling it a “community” does. Everybody eventually seems to find a role. There are the level-headed people, the crazy ones, the ones who say something completely off the wall, the people who keep everybody else straight and the people who are always going to stir shit up.
It isn’t family-friendly. It is a family.
Cam is in the middle of all of it, somehow managing all those personalities while still bringing everything back to basketball. Then there’s Mia, who is one of the moderators and is basically an encyclopedia of women’s basketball and women’s sports. Everybody in the room knows basketball, but when something comes up and we need the actual answer, people tend to defer to Mia. She’s kind of the auntie we all need, the source of truth who will drop some piece of information about a player or women’s sports history that the rest of us didn’t know.
That is when I started realizing there was something bigger happening in these rooms than breaking cards.
There Is a Difference Between Breaking WNBA Cards and Being a WNBA Breaker
As WNBA cards have become more popular, more breakers have obviously started carrying the product. Some of them will tell you straight up that they’re really NBA guys, that they don’t personally collect WNBA, but the product is moving so they’re breaking it. They know the biggest names because everybody knows the biggest names, but then another card comes out and they don’t know the player, can’t pronounce her name or don’t know anything about her story.
Those rooms suck.
I don’t mean they’re doing anything wrong. If there’s demand for a product and somebody wants to sell it, that’s business. But there’s no connection to the game, and you can feel it immediately. The player on the card is basically a price tag. Is this a good hit? Is it worth money? Next card.
A real WNBA breaker changes that equation because they can give the card context. They know where somebody played in college. They know what kind of season she’s having. They know that a player who might not have a huge card market yet has a group of people who absolutely love her. More importantly, if they’ve built the right room, they don’t have to know everything themselves because somebody else in the community probably does.
That’s where this starts getting really interesting to me.
Breakers Don’t Just Follow the Market. They Can Create It.
We tend to think about card demand as something that happens outside the room. A player gets hot, people start chasing her cards and prices move. A rookie has a huge game and suddenly everybody wants her. Obviously all of that happens, but I think we’re missing another part of the market that is much harder to measure.
A great breaker can create discovery.
I’ve watched it happen over and over. A card comes out of a pack and somebody says that’s one of their favorite players. Naturally, somebody asks why. Maybe they watched her in college. Maybe she’s from their hometown. Maybe they met her at a game and she was incredible to their daughter. Maybe they just love the way she plays. Then somebody else adds something. Mia knows another part of her story. Cam talks about her game. Someone else has followed her since college.
Twenty minutes later, somebody who barely knew the player knows exactly who she is. Maybe they Google her or watch some highlights. Maybe the next time her card comes out, they actually care. That is how a market starts expanding beyond the same five names, and it can happen without anybody in the room consciously trying to make it happen.
Cam has actually lived that process herself with Dominique Malonga. She kept pulling Dominique cards, so there was already this card connection. That led her to learn more about Dominique, watch her play and get to know more about her personality. Eventually, Dominique became somebody Cam personally collected.
Think about that cycle. The card created curiosity. The curiosity led to the player. The player created a fan. Then being a fan made the cards mean more. That’s an incredibly powerful cycle when you start multiplying it across players, collectors and hundreds of hours spent in these rooms.
It Works Both Ways
What I find even more interesting is that breakers sit between two completely different groups of people. There are basketball fans who enter the hobby because they want a card of a player they already love. They may not know what a parallel is or why everybody is talking about numbered cards, case hits, autos or grading. They just know they want a card of their favorite player. Spend enough time around the right breaker and suddenly they’re learning the hobby.
Then there are collectors like me who come from the opposite direction. I’ve watched basketball my entire life and watch a good amount of WNBA basketball, but I’m heavier on certain teams and players. I know South Carolina women’s basketball extremely well. I’m not going to pretend I know every player on every WNBA roster at the same level. These rooms have introduced me to players I wasn’t paying enough attention to and, more importantly, helped me understand why somebody else cares about those players.
That’s a huge distinction.
In the WNBA, There Is Usually a Why
My main WNBA chase is Jordin Canada. I love the way she plays the point guard position and the efficiency of her game. There’s also a personal connection because Trey Draper, one of my good friends and business partners, trains her. That makes collecting Jordin different for me than simply deciding her cards are undervalued and might go up. I don’t know what her cards are worth because I’ve never priced them. They are truly my PC.
I collect a lot of South Carolina players for obvious reasons. Raven Johnson and Te-Hina Paopao are two of my bigger chases because I like their personalities as much as their games. A’ja Wilson, Aliyah Boston and other South Carolina players are always going to mean something different to me because I’ve watched so much of their journey.
And then there’s Dawn.
I have a wall with rookie cards of twelve point guards I really collect. There are twelve spots, period. If somebody gets added, somebody else has to come off. I recently added VJ Edgecombe and had to remove somebody, and I’m still not going to tell you who because it hurts. Dawn Staley isn’t coming off. Ever.
I’ve had conversations in these rooms with people who knew Dawn almost exclusively as the head coach at South Carolina. They didn’t really know Dawn Staley the player. That starts a conversation, somebody explains it and eventually they’re finding old footage. Now someone who came into a card break has learned something about the history of women’s basketball that they didn’t know an hour earlier. Nobody announced that we were having a history lesson. It just happened.
The same thing happens every time we start arguing about the WNBA Mount Rushmore. Sue Bird is on mine. Maya Moore is on mine. Dawn obviously means something different to me. Then you get into A’ja, Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper and all the other names people make a case for. The best part isn’t actually deciding which four belong there. The best part is listening to everybody explain why, because that’s where the stories come out.
And that’s one of the things I find different about collecting WNBA cards right now. When somebody tells me they collect a player who isn’t one of the obvious stars, there is usually a reason. Maybe it’s where she went to school, where she’s from, how she plays or some personal interaction they had with her. The value of the card can matter without being the only reason the card matters.
I’ve seen the opposite side of that up close in the NBA. I know Ja personally, and I’ve watched people turn him into a commodity. He’s a player, a card, a headline, a click, a transaction. Sometimes people forget there’s an actual human being in the middle of all of it. He’s somebody’s son, somebody’s father and somebody’s family.
The WNBA side of the hobby still feels more personal to me. I’m not saying money doesn’t matter. Of course it does. People chase expensive cards and people want to make money. But I also see people buying cards that may never make them a dime because they simply love the player. I hope that part never changes.
The Breaker Is Becoming an Influencer
The more time I’ve spent around this, the more convinced I’ve become that we’re using too narrow a definition of influence. We tend to measure influencers by followers, views, impressions and engagement. Those things matter, but I’m not sure they capture what is happening inside a great breaker’s room.
A breaker can introduce someone to a player, educate them about the league, influence what they collect and create demand for players who otherwise might get overlooked. At the same time, they’re introducing WNBA fans to the card hobby. The influence is moving in both directions, and it isn’t coming from a sponsored post or somebody telling an audience what they should care about. It’s happening through hours of conversation between people who actually care about the game.
The best breakers are also doing something beyond influencing what people collect. They’re creating a place people want to return to even when buying cards isn’t necessarily the reason they’re there that day. I’ve seen new people enter Cam’s room and say some version of the same thing: “I love the vibe in here. I’ll definitely be back.” I understand exactly what they mean because that’s what happened to me.
Customers, Audiences and Communities
I think there are breakers who have customers, breakers who have audiences and breakers who have communities. Those are three very different things. Customers follow the product, so if somebody else has the same product cheaper, they can go somewhere else. An audience follows the content or personality. But a community becomes something different because eventually the people aren’t just connected to the breaker. They’re connected to each other.
That’s what I think Cam has built. If she stopped breaking where she is tomorrow and went somewhere else, I believe a large part of that group would go looking for her. Not because they couldn’t find WNBA cards somewhere else. There are plenty of places to buy WNBA cards. They would go because Cam went, and because they would expect the rest of this group to eventually find its way there too.
I’ve seen a version of that happen in professional sports. When a player changes teams, some fans move with the player because their original connection may have been to the uniform, but eventually the relationship became about the person wearing it. Ja goes to Portland and there are going to be people who weren’t Portland fans before who suddenly care about what Portland is doing because that’s where Ja is. I think the best breakers are developing a smaller version of that same kind of equity.
The platform may be where people originally discover them, but eventually the platform isn’t the relationship. The breaker is. And if the community is really strong, even that isn’t the entire relationship anymore because all these people now have relationships with each other. I don’t know if Cam realizes how powerful that is, but I think that’s probably the clearest indication of the influence she’s built.
The Cards Almost Become Secondary
Maybe the strangest thing about all of this is how often we can spend three or four hours together and the cards aren’t really the center of the conversation. We’re talking about games, players, Team USA during international competition and the history of women’s basketball. We’re arguing about somebody’s Mount Rushmore. Somebody says something crazy, someone else gets pissed off, Mia teaches us something and Cam tries to keep the train somewhere near the tracks. Apparently Dad is hanging around too.
Eventually, Cam starts opening packs, and by then you’ve already spent half the afternoon together. The cards are still incredibly important because they’re the connective tissue. They’re what originally brought all these people into the same place. But once the right breaker creates the right environment, the cards don’t have to carry the entire experience anymore.
The people do.
Pay Attention to the Rooms
That’s why I think the WNBA, card manufacturers, hobby shops and anybody trying to understand where this market is going should pay more attention to the breakers building these rooms. Don’t just look at who sells the most boxes. Look at who actually knows the game and who collects the product themselves. Look at the rooms where somebody can mention a player at the bottom of a roster and three different people can tell you why she’s worth watching. Look at where a collector enters knowing nothing about a player and leaves wanting to watch her next game.
Then look at it from the other direction. Watch a WNBA fan come in wanting one card of one player and six months later they’re talking about parallels, numbered cards and personal collections. That’s a new customer for the hobby. The collector who came in looking for cards and leaves caring about another WNBA player is potentially a new fan for the league. Sitting right in the middle of both exchanges is the breaker.
The best ones aren’t simply benefiting from the growth of women’s basketball. They’re helping influence where attention goes next. They’re creating discovery, educating collectors, introducing people to players and giving fans another reason to spend hours inside the WNBA ecosystem. Somewhere along the way, they’re also creating relationships that have almost nothing to do with the cards anymore.
I know because I went looking for cards and found Cam, Mia, Sian, Big Dawg, Kie, Hawkeye and a bunch of other people I didn’t know and probably never would have met otherwise. Somewhere along the way, I became Dad.
And that Paige Bueckers rookie from my first break?
It’s still sitting on a stand in my office.
It’s not for sale.
At this point, I’m not sure it ever could be.
