Sometimes there is a certain kind of quiet in a hobby shop right before a big release. The person behind the counter acts like he’s not looking at the door. A few regulars walk around and look at their phones. Then the boxes show up, and within hours, or sometimes even less, all of the food is gone. Not necessarily into the hands of collectors. Just left.
That’s pretty much what happened when 2025–26 Topps Signature Class Basketball came out. Online sellers bought retail boxes with a known manufacturer price and sold them for two or three times that amount before most collectors even knew the item had dropped in price. This isn’t a new problem in the hobby, but this release seemed to make things worse.
It has something to do with what’s inside. Topps Signature Class isn’t a cheap product. It’s based on autographs, with Chrome parallels, on-card autographs, and a base set of 150 cards featuring veterans and a really strong class of 2025 rookies like Cooper Flagg, Dylan Harper, and Kon Knueppel. The Crystal Clear Autographs, which are printed on acetate and have a look and feel that is different from anything else in the product, give it a high-end feel that’s hard to argue with. In that group, a 1-of-1 Steph Curry card is what makes the whole hunt feel real.
The secondary market doesn’t wait when the product has that much appeal. People who know distributors or get early access list sealed boxes before the average collector is done reading the product details. People who drive to the store find that either the shelf is empty or the price has changed. There is a chance that this is just supply and demand working as planned. But there’s a feeling that something worse is happening: the hobby is slowly losing its appeal to the right people.
The argument from the reseller isn’t completely crazy. There’s a limited supply of a good that people want, and there are willing buyers. But you should think about what is lost in that deal. The kid who planned ahead to buy a blaster box. The casual fan who wanted to get a rookie card of a player he tracks. These are the people who made the hobby important, but they keep hitting the same problem.
There is a growing chain of hobby shops called CardVault by Tom Brady that is directly opposing this. They have promised to keep all Topps retail SKUs at MSRP prices, no matter what happens on the secondary market. It’s an interesting move because it doesn’t happen very often. Most stores aren’t set up or have enough stock to cover the loss of sales when they don’t mark up a popular item. It is still not clear if this kind of commitment can actually change collectors’ expectations across the board, but at least the problem is named.
The Topps Signature Class set, on the other hand, is not going anywhere. If you pay the right amount, this set has real content for collectors. It has the Monarchs of the Game subset, the Legends of Their Class autographs, and the Pressure Points case hits. There is a special card of Kevin Garnett commemorating his moment in the 1995 NBA draft that is only one of its kind. The fact that the box it came from sold for three times its original price doesn’t take away from its value. That being said, it is harder to enjoy when the entry point seems to have been hacked.
Seeing all of this, I get the sense that the hobby is at a turning point that has been building for a while. On one path, sealed boxes are goods and the cards inside them aren’t really important in a market where people buy and sell them. The other reason most collectors got into this in the first place is the thrill, the surprise, or the link to a player or a moment. That second path is worth taking because the 2025–26 Topps Signature Class Basketball set is good enough to deserve it. The market might let it go there, but that’s a whole different story.
