Author: Melissa Bridwell

From the outside, this storage unit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, doesn’t look like much. There are fluorescent lights, concrete floors, and a faint smell of old paper. But inside, stacked in climate-controlled cases and sealed plastic slabs, is what one collector quietly calls his “real portfolio”: rows of graded baseball cards from over 30 years of American baseball history, along with an incredibly large sum of money. This is not the only way that people think. There is a new type of serious collector that has grown over the past few years. They talk less about nostalgia and more about PSA…

The beginning of this story feels almost emotional. Topps. Football. A deal for more than one year. For people who grew up in the 1970s or 1980s and remember taking cards out of packs, this sounds less like a business announcement and more like a welcome home. But don’t get the wrong idea—what Fanatics Collectibles has made here is not a throwback. It is a plan. And it’s a big bet that was made with a lot of thought. The NFL, Fanatics Collectibles, and the NFL Players Association just signed a new multi-year licensing agreement that lets Topps make all…

Markus Delray’s spare bedroom has a wall that has two different stories written on it. On one side, he spent three years putting together a corkboard mosaic with hundreds of wine corks neatly pinned into place. It’s a quiet, tactile record of dinners, parties, and regular Tuesday evenings. On the other, he has neatly stacked plastic sleeves with NFL trading cards inside each one that date back to the spring of 2020. There isn’t a clear link between the two collections. Marcus, on the other hand, thinks they go well together. He had no plans to start collecting cards. At…

Right now there’s a patch inside a card that was sewn onto a young baseball player’s jersey for their first professional game. There was a crowd. There were real nerves. As soon as it was over, that patch was carefully peeled off, sent to a factory, and turned into something that collectors now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for. That’s not an exaggeration. Paul Skenes’ MLB Debut Patch Autograph card has already sold for more than $500,000, and it’s still not priced at what it’s worth. People stop in the middle of scrolling to look at that number, which…

When something you loved as a child turns out to be worth real money, you feel a certain kind of shock. Real money, not just spare change. The kind that changes their minds, pays off their debts, and buys homes. Johnny Murphy knows how you feel. Murphy is a police officer who lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He tried hard all last year to save up for a down payment on a house. He didn’t just have $80,000 lying around. He did, however, have a collection of Pokémon cards that he had been saving up since he was four…

There is something almost stubborn about the way Marcus Hale talks about his collection. He keeps the cards in a temperature-controlled cabinet in the back room of his Paddington townhouse, each one sleeved in a plastic case stamped with a PSA grade. He is not a nostalgic man, not particularly. He did not grow up watching American baseball. But he has been quietly building a portfolio of authenticated vintage cards for the better part of six years, and in 2025, that decision started to look less eccentric and more deliberate. Hale is the kind of investor Brisbane tends to produce…

Something quietly strange is going on in Belfast. Not in a way that would make the news—no big launches or flashy storefronts. There are more and more people opening NFL trading cards in a city where most people wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a rookie card and a refractor card three years ago. One collector is in the middle of it. Someone who started importing American football cards because they were crazy about them and ended up, more or less by accident, building a small but real local following for a hobby that doesn’t really have…

When a major checklist comes out, there’s a certain kind of energy that goes through football card fans. It’s not really exciting. But it’s not quite anger. In the middle is that twitchy, opinionated buzz of people who really care about something that most people have never given much thought to. The 2025–26 Panini Prizm FIFA Soccer set has arrived, and the arguments have already begun. The set doesn’t come out until March 27, 2026, but hobby boxes are already selling on eBay for $450 to $500. That’s a real number for a product that hasn’t even come out yet.…

When something more important than shopping is going on in a mall, it has a certain energy. The low hum of a crowd that’s excited to be somewhere in particular rather than just killing time between errands is something you can hear before you even see it. That’s how SMX Aura feels this July, and it comes from a card game that most adults probably remember playing on their bedroom floor as kids. There will be big Pokémon Card Shows at SMX Aura on July 18–19, July 25–26, and SM Makati Cyberzone on July 31. These aren’t small get-togethers for…

Once someone dies, there is a certain kind of quiet that falls over a storage unit. Rows of boxes, unwanted furniture, and plastic bins full of things that meant a lot to one person but not much to anyone else at first glance. A woman in Omaha knew what to expect when she went through her late brother’s unit: the slow, boring work of going through someone’s life. A tin box wrapped in cardboard and tape sitting inside another box inside yet another box inside yet another was not what she was expecting. She almost threw it away. She stopped…