Author: Melissa Bridwell

Sometimes, a single fold, a light spray mark, or an image that isn’t quite in the middle can make the difference between a $300 card and a $30,000 card. Most people who aren’t into the hobby don’t know that. That is, collectors do. They’ve known for a long time. And that’s one of the most interesting things about the lawsuit against Professional Sports Authenticator, or PSA. The system didn’t fail without a fuss. Some say it failed right in front of everyone. Eric Savoy is a baseball card collector who started a class-action lawsuit against PSA, saying that the company…

What a strange thing it is to walk into a Walmart during “Ani-May,” the company’s month-long celebration of all things anime, and find the trading card aisle empty. Not only partly picked over. Not dressed. The kind of empty that makes you think you might have seen the advertising signs outside. Walmart planned its Anime Month event for May 2026 with real drive. There are more than 1,000 items in different departments that are inspired by anime. These include video games, collectible figures, Blu-rays, graphic novels, clothing, and even trading card games. A Bleach figure is selling for almost $65.…

Most people didn’t even have time to refresh the page before it was over. Pre-orders for 2025–26 Topps Chrome Basketball went away in about two minutes on Wednesday morning. Not hours. Not by the end of the day. For two minutes. There was a lot of demand for a product that hadn’t even been shipped yet. People in the hobby world are still trying to figure out what it means. Hobby boxes that were supposed to cost $369.99 were selling on eBay for as much as $580 just 24 hours after the pre-order window closed. People were seen selling Hobby…

There is a certain kind of tension that builds up in fields where the laws that are supposed to them grow too slowly. For years, this has been the tension in the mystery box sector of e-commerce, where people pay a set price for a random product that could be physical or digital, but is never known for sure. In peace. Making money. And feeling more and more nervous. It’s not a secret that these sites do this. HypeDrop, Rillabox, Jemlit, and MysteryDrop are all well-known platforms that have real users, real revenue, and real marketing budgets. Without much trouble,…

A rectangle of cardboard about the size of a man’s palm can become Exhibit A in a federal lawsuit. It’s almost poetic. Still, here we are—a disputed $1.8 million sale of a Mickey Mantle card is in court, adding a rough legal chapter to one of the most interesting parts of American sports collecting. This disagreement is about a card from the 1952 Topps set, which is a name that serious collectors attach a lot of weight to. People in the hobby tell stories about how many of these cards have been found. Alan Rosen, a dealer from New Jersey…

People who collect sports cards have thought for a long time that Fanatics would eventually just buy Panini. It seemed to make sense. Topps was bought by Fanatics in 2021 for about $500 million. Panini was the only company licensed to make NBA and NFL trading cards, which are two of the most valuable properties in the collecting world. It seemed like the right thing to do to do a buyout, which is a clean form of corporate consolidation that makes the market less chaotic. It didn’t happen that way. Instead, Michael Rubin and Fanatics did something that seems harder…

Pokédex that don’t belong to PSA are stored in a warehouse somewhere. They belong to tens of thousands of collectors who sent them in the mail and are now just waiting. By the middle of 2026, there were almost 10 million cards on that waiting list. A record 2.5 million grades were given by PSA in June alone. And demand still grew faster than that. That part is tough to understand. It wasn’t enough to just record the sound. People don’t talk about PSA like they do other important financial infrastructure, but in the collectibles market, it works like one.…

People who haven’t been to Fanatics Fest can’t really explain the energy that’s there. As they move from table to table, collectors hold cards up to a fluorescent light and talk quietly about printed cardboard pieces that can sell for more than a used car. From the outside, it doesn’t look like a billion-dollar business. But that’s exactly what it has turned into, and the NFL, led by Roger Goodell, wants a much bigger piece of it. This month, Goodell went to Fanatics Fest in New York, and it wasn’t by accident that he was there. There have been more…

In a Pokémon card store in Sydney on a Tuesday night, you’ll find something that doesn’t seem like a high-value deal right away. Pop culture t-shirts and hoodies. Under fluorescent lights, there are long white tables. The low chatter of people who are arguing about which card to play next. It has a casual, almost homey feel to it. But if you look more closely, you can see that something has changed. The cabinets have been strengthened, the cameras have been installed, and motion sensors are blinking near the ceiling. Over the past few months, store owners in Sydney and…

Something about it seems almost silly. In 1914, kids who were too full of sugar pulled cards from snack boxes and sold them at Heritage Auctions’ Winter Sports Card Catalog Auction for a total of $1.38 million. Not a mistake. One hundred forty-four pieces of cardboard, which were first found inside boxes of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts, have officially changed what collectors thought was possible for a card set from the early 1900s. A 1914 Cracker Jack Ty Cobb card that sold for $516,000 was the main item in the auction. It was the most money ever paid for a…