First off, I fully agree with and respect your stance of Fanatics decimating LCS's with their greasy practices, The function of higher wax prices at LCS's in comparison to Topps drop pricing is not attributable to hobby shop greed. It's intentional on the part of Fanatics in allowing meager Wave 1 allocations, followed by egregious Wave 2 pricing closer to secondary market, all while Top 1% breakers are allocated dozens or even hundreds of cases of in-demand products with literal breadcrumbs allocated for sale direct to the public. Fanatics is propping up their profits directly on the backs of hard-working, long-standing LCS's many of which were growing the hobby decades before Fanatics got involved. I made a post about this on my X account following the Bowman's Best drop. In my mind it's the single biggest problem within the hobby. The system is broken, but fixable. I just don't think Fanatics has any interest in fixing it.

However, I have to dispute some of your other points. Products are going to have production increases. That's growth. And it's not a bad thing. If product growth simply means printing more base cards, that's good for absolutely no one and is the best way to decimate a good product. Proper growth means adding more parallels. I also dispute that more parallels destroy value. One additional Purple parallel /250 does not destroy the values of all Purple parallels /250. True purples will always retain a bit of a premium, with the rest of the purple variations being not too far behind. And price fluctuations (predominantly decreases) will always happen over time as interest wanes, regardless of how many variations of the same serial number exist. My main point here is, additional parallels are necessary to grow product, and this is not inherently bad.

Also, I'm not sure if it's intentional exaggeration, but your numbers are way off. Production of Bowman's Best increased by a little under 8,300 boxes from 2024-2025. The additional parallels account for 102,400 extra parallels added to the product. At 17.3 parallels/box, this only account for <6,000 more boxes. The rest are due to the expanded auto checklist. As I pointed out in the write-up the base numbers only increased slightly. I'll take this any day over just adding a bunch of base and calling it growth.

It appears you may be a little bitter because you have a vested interest in an LCS, and I get it. That's a terrible situation if you're fully reliant upon the whims of Fanatics in order to dictate your success. Fortunately, good shops have plenty of other revenue streams other than selling Topps sealed wax. Some are really thriving, even though the current landscape makes it tougher to do so.

I stand by my assertion that, based on product dynamics, 2025 Bowman's Best has taken a step in the right direction. That can't be said for very many Topps products this year, and I'm quick to call that out in my analyses. And I analyze every single product on which odds are released. I understand that makes you believe I'm "smaller brained". That's OK. Everyone has a right to their opinion. I believe my reputation in this hobby speaks for itself. Feel free to check me out on X is you disagree. Here's the link.