Author: Melissa Bridwell

For some reason, this card always comes up when serious collectors talk about football and family at the same time. The card is from the 2008 Upper Deck Exquisite Collection. It has three quarterbacks, three signatures, and a family. Archie is at the top, Peyton is next, and Eli is at the bottom. Out of a print run of only fifteen cards, fifteen people signed them. It was sold by Goldin for just over $5,000 in October 2025, which seems pretty low for what it is. When I see that card, I can’t help but think about how much work…

There is something very interesting about a chest made of wood. Things like letters, coins, and old photos that people meant to keep but forgot are kept there. When Tom Conrad found a baseball card on Facebook Marketplace, he wasn’t looking for one. He likes to collect old soda bottles, oil cans, and signs. The everyday events in American history. But something made him stop, and for $75, he got what might be one of the most important grassroots card finds in recent memory. There were 122 baseball cards carefully stuck to the lid and inside walls of that chest.…

Between seeing a Pikachu card sell for $16 million and reading that the average value of a Pokémon card rose nearly 46% in a single year, there’s a point where you start to wonder if the financial world has quietly changed while everyone was arguing about interest rates. It’s not a joke. Card Ladder, a website that tracks trading card values, says that the value of Pokémon cards has gone up by about 3,261% in the last twenty years. To give you an idea, the S&P 500, which is what institutional investors chase for their whole careers, usually gives back…

The picture of hooded figures with crowbars running out of a small collectibles shop with arms full of Pokémon cards seems almost silly. But for shop owners all over the English-speaking world, this is not a joke. The crisis is getting worse and really costs a lot of money. Small business owners are strengthening their storefronts, sleeping poorly, and wondering when the next hit will come. It’s scary how consistent the pattern is. A store shuts down for the night. After hours, thieves usually show up quickly and in groups. They break a window or a security grille off. They…

Someone who has never been to a major card show would find it hard to describe the energy that’s there. Graded slabs were stacked on rows of tables, dealers were negotiating in whispers, and collectors were squatting down to look at corners under portable LED lights. It smells like strong coffee and carpet from a convention center. Most of the time, the person across from you flew in from another state. What’s different is the part about flying in from another state. People in the area used to come together on Saturday mornings to do hobbies, but now it’s more…

It’s almost like a movie scene that a thief walks into the store owned by the most decorated quarterback in NFL history, fakes a card swipe, and then walks out with almost $10,000 worth of trading cards under his arm. No broken glass. Not a crowbar. As soon as the clerk tapped on a terminal, the person was gone. They had no reason to doubt the machine. This is what took place at CardVault by Tom Brady in SoHo, Manhattan, around October 20. The suspect tried to buy both baseball cards and Pokémon cards, according to the NYPD. When the…

The best baseball cards don’t make a fuss about it. They were quietly put away in binders, shoe boxes, and packs by fans who liked the player, long before anyone else thought the market should care. That’s the thing about gathering. Timing is important, but you don’t really understand how good your timing was until years later. The Women’s Pro Baseball League is not going to wait years. The WPBL’s first official game is set for August 1 at Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois. Through a partnership with The Realest, a company started by Scott Keeney, better known as…

Most people wouldn’t have thought it would happen. A few years ago, Pokémon cards were a throwback. You could find them in a shoebox under the bed and maybe get a few dollars for them at a garage sale. Today, they’re being bought, sold, and stolen in Vancouver and the rest of the Lower Mainland at a rate that has even surprised the police. In April of this year, Sgt. Ryan Campbell of the Vancouver Police Department told the press that he hadn’t been paying attention to the Pokémon card market until it got violent. Being honest means something. You…

You can walk into a graduate seminar on cultural theory at almost any mid-sized state university and see the same things: coffee cups, dog-eared notebooks, and someone heavily underlining a copy of a Foucault essay. But quietly, a little something a little different has been showing up on seminar tables at the same time: small cards with pictures on them. There are cards that, if you look closely, kind of look like Pokémon. These are trading cards for theories. They are actually being given by professors. Most people don’t know that the idea began earlier than they do. The first…

You can meet a certain type of collector at weekend card shows. These are the people who drive forty minutes from a small town, carry their binders in a reusable grocery bag, and know every card’s grading history by heart. They’re not trying to make money by flipping cards. They’re keeping something safe. Which makes what’s happening to some of them right now seem even more fake. There is a new wave of fraud in the Pokémon card market, and it’s aimed right at collectors who are careful enough to protect and insure their collections but not skilled enough to…