Author: Melissa Bridwell

Someone is engaging in what appears to be an odd pastime in a corner of Brisbane. He imports NFL rookie cards directly from American dealers, including Topps, Panini, and the entire spread, sorts them into binders, and waits. Without much fanfare, quietly, methodically. It’s likely that the majority of his neighbors believe he collects sports memorabilia in the same way that some people collect dust. However, if you take a moment to examine the evolution of Australia’s trading card market over the previous five years, the move begins to appear less bizarre and more like real foresight. Ten years ago,…

For someone who lives twenty minutes from Aviva Stadium, Ciarán Doherty’s shelves don’t seem to belong in his spare room. There are no framed jerseys, signed Premier League programs, or copies of the kits. Instead, there are slabs, which are the hard plastic cases that grading companies use to seal and certify sports cards. They are neatly stacked in rows, and most of the names on them sound more like they belong in Ohio than Dublin 4. Jim Brown. Walter Jones. Dan Marino. Doherty, a financial analyst in his mid-40s who has spent most of his career watching people make…

When you open a hobby box, you do something special. To count the packs, you cut the shrink wrap open and pull back the flaps. For more and more collectors in Toronto, that ritual now includes one more step: they quietly figure out how much the extra 25% Canadian tariff cost before the first card is even put down on the table. Still, orders keep coming in. Products that cost between $1,400 and almost $4,500 CAD are still moving out of distributors and into the hands of Canadians. These include cases of 2025 Topps Chrome Football, sealed Panini Prizm boxes,…

During every live box break, the chat stops for a while, usually between the fourth and fifth pack. Not because there is nothing going on, but because there could be. Those who break the rules slow down. The foil is wrinkly. A dozen or more people watching on their phones hold their breath over a piece of cardboard for a short time. Those feelings are what courts, lawyers, and consumer advocates are trying to put into groups right now, more than anything else. For decades, people who like the hobby have been able to buy “slots” that let them get…

When you think about how brave it is, it almost sounds poetic. A seller who wanted to make a $24,200 deal on a rare Pokémon card picked what might have been the best place to meet: the lobby of a police station. A place with rolling cameras and police officers nearby is called a “Safe Exchange Zone.” But somewhere between shaking hands and exchanging money, things went wrong. Elam, 26, from Philadelphia, has been charged with third-degree theft by deception and second-degree computer-related theft. He is said to have used fake cryptocurrency to buy a rare Pokémon card on Facebook…

In one version of this story, Derrick Bell and a stack of legal briefs are in a seminar room at law school. There is also a story that begins in the 1960s, sometime between the Civil Rights Act and the slow but steady re-segregation of American schools. But the story that’s worth telling today starts with 32 trading cards that were put online around the turn of the century by a site called theory.org.uk. These cards did something that law journals and academic conferences had been trying to do for decades: they made critical theory seem like something that a…

A certain kind of silence falls over a room when a bid that no one expected wins. Some people in the sports card hobby felt that way earlier this year when a rare Ken Griffey Jr. autograph card sold for a price that made even experienced collectors think twice. It wasn’t a coincidence. That said, most people who have been following the Griffey market for the past two years weren’t too surprised by the number. It did, however, surprise them in the best way possible. Card Ladder data shows that Griffey’s total card market has grown by more than 75%…

Take a look inside TCG Collector NZ on Carlyle Street on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not quite what you’d expect from a card shop. There aren’t any kids near the counter opening packs. Instead, there are men and women in their late 20s and early 30s carefully looking through binders and whispering about card grades while trading like they’re negotiating something important. For many of them, it does. It’s strange that at this time, Christchurch has become one of the busiest places in New Zealand for trading Pokémon cards. Sales of traditional toys have been going down for a long…

Being able to watch a graduate student in a course on teaching methods hold up a trading card and talk seriously about Vygotsky is almost calming. The card has a name, a short bio, and an idea that was quoted. The back of it has a list of important contributions to learning theory instead of batting averages, making it look a bit like a baseball card. It’s not normal. It also seems to be working. Theory trading cards, which can be real or digital cards that summarize the ideas and frameworks of major educational theorists, are starting to show up…

In 2014, Steven and Alan Spiegel paid $35,000 for a LeBron James rookie card. The 2003-2004 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection LeBron James Rookie Patch Autograph card had James’ signature and a piece of a jersey he had worn, so it seemed like a good buy. Only 99 of these cards were ever made. When it was bought, most collectors would have called it a good hold for a long time. It looks like the Spiegels had bigger plans than that. The market for sports cards was doing something that almost no one had seen coming by early 2021. Values were…