A critical point that has not yet been mentioned in this thread:
Gold stars have condition rarity whereas alt arts don’t. Nearly all alt arts printed in 2021/22 are in mint condition, and they still will be in 15 years. The reasons behind this are obvious and have been discussed ad nauseum in other threads.
Whereas gold stars (excluding the Unseen Forces ones for obvious reasons) are rarely in mint condition. It takes one second to glance at the pop report and realize this is the case:
There are 762 mint condition TRR gold stars in the PSA and CGC pop reports combined.
There are 9713 mint condition Brilliant Stars gold stars in the PSA and CGC pop reports combined.
And if we take into account the rate of pop growth, the story is even crazier. Brilliant Stars currently “only” has 13x as many mint graded alt arts as TRR has mint graded gold stars. However, that paints a misleading picture that is much too kind to alt arts:
- There have been a total of 11 mint TRR gold stars added to the PSA pop report over the past 5 weeks (a pop increase of ~1.5%).
- There have been 1412 mint Brilliant Stars alt arts added the PSA pop report over the past 5 weeks period of time (a pop increase of ~20%).
When the dust settles, it’s conceivable that the population of mint Brilliant Stars alt arts will literally be >100x that of TRR gold stars. And this isn’t because TRR gold stars are artificially scarce – in fact, the opposite: gold stars were significantly easier to pull than alt arts. The difference is that adults are now opening product en masse and preserving the cards. And through doing this, they’re ensuring that the cards printed in 2022 will never be collectible in the way that WotC/EX are.
Oh, and this is all ignoring the fact that TRR boxes are rare as fuck whereas Brilliant Stars boxes line the closets of speculators across the world. Meaning: there’s significantly more potential mint supply of alt arts than gold stars.
TL;DR: gold stars are collectible in a way that alt arts never will be. It’s great that people enjoy collecting and appreciating the beauty of alt arts, but the idea that they will ever be like gold stars is clearly incorrect. As collectibles, gold stars have vastly better fundamentals in pretty much every conceivable way.