Author: Melissa Bridwell

In a way, stuffed toys were where it all began. When a passenger from Thailand arrived at Perth International Airport in September 2023, Australian Border Force officers stopped him. The passenger had declared that they were traveling with commercial goods and were supposedly headed to stalls at the Perth Royal Show. More than 1,400 items with distinctive Pokémon branding, such as hair clips, pencil cases, key rings, and plush toys, were found inside the luggage. It didn’t appear that anyone was taking this seriously. That contributes to the story’s current level of interest. That type of seizure was the end…

Forty Pokémon cards were mailed out in a Value Bulk submission eight months ago by an Ohio collector who anticipated receiving them by late summer. They may still be in PSA’s Sun Valley warehouse, or they may be in a satellite facility in Texas or Florida. No one, not even PSA, seems to know for sure anymore. The true cause of the 2026 grading backlog crisis is that uncertainty. What began in late May as a standard operational announcement has evolved into something more akin to a hobby-wide reckoning. Four of PSA’s most well-liked service tiers were put on hold…

On restock day, a certain kind of quiet chaos occurs in a card shop. Customers wait an hour early at the door, boxes are ripped open before they’ve even passed the counter, and a shop owner in the back is calculating whether the next shipment will arrive in time for the weekend. That math hasn’t been working out in Wellington lately, at least not for NFL cards. The store in question isn’t very ostentatious. Fluorescent lighting, a few folding tables for players to sit and trade, and a glass cabinet that is rearranged nearly every week based on what recently…

I lost before I started the first time I attempted to purchase a Pokémon Elite Trainer Box using the standard method, which involves holding a phone, refreshing the Target app, and standing in a parking lot at 7:58 a.m. The listing was already marked as “out of stock” when the page loaded. I wasn’t the first to do it. It was written in code. That is the current quiet reality of purchasing Pokémon cards in North America. Automated bots are performing tasks that a human cannot complete in seconds behind the scenes of almost every restock on Target.com, Walmart, GameStop,…

It began with someone staring at a picture for an extended period of time, as these things frequently do. A $120,000 Stephen Curry rookie patch autograph caught Kyle’s attention. Kyle is a 32-year-old collector who spends his evenings relaxing by perusing card listings. The autograph appeared overly tidy. He opened his own files, located an old photo with a smudged signature, and placed the two next to each other. Smear and all, they matched, but the smear had vanished. Other collectors flocked to confirm his findings within minutes of him posting them on a message board. It appeared that a…

As these things frequently do, it began at the dinner table with a child taking something from a backpack. It’s not a math worksheet. Not a slip of authorization. A glossy little card with a black-and-white picture of a balding Frenchman on the front and a friendly bubble font summary of his views on power and prisons on the back. That’s about how an increasing number of parents claim to have first come across theory trading cards, a classroom innovation that has become popular in some K–12 schools during the past year or so. The format blatantly appropriates Pokémon decks…

These days, a sociology classroom at a community college in Texas may resemble a hobby shop rather than a lecture hall. Students gather in pairs and exchange tiny, glossy cards with pictures of Michel Foucault, Patricia Hill Collins, or Karl Marx printed on the front and statistics and theories listed on the back like a batting average. At first, it’s a strange sight. Then it makes sense. There is a reputation issue with critical theory. It is complex, abstract, and frequently taught through lengthy readings that presume an academic language familiarity that many first-generation students haven’t had the opportunity to…

The eight-bit crowd noise, the blocky touchdown dance, and the referee character who didn’t resemble a real referee but managed to become iconic are some of the sounds that people associate with the Tecmo Super Bowl rather than the actual game. Topps is making a big wager that there are still a lot of people like this, that they still have money to spend, and that they still have feelings when they see those pixels. The 2025 Topps Chrome Football, Topps’ first licensed NFL card release in over ten years, is currently the result of that wager. The Tecmo Super…

Until recently, the person with the Theory Trading Card taped above their desk was almost always a graduate student in sociology with an unfinished thesis and an intense, somewhat defensive love for Foucault. That is beginning to change. The cards have been forced out of seminar rooms and into a much louder, messier discussion about who gets remembered and who is subtly left in the footnotes thanks to the deck’s most recent expansion, which is centered around social justice thinkers. For those who don’t know, Theory Trading Cards are nothing new. More than 20 years ago, David Gauntlett developed the…

That’s roughly what’s happened to Disney Lorcana over the past several weeks, ever since Wilds Unknown, the game’s twelfth set, brought Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Brave into the mix for the first time. Pixar had never been part of Lorcana before. Now it’s arguably the reason the whole market is moving. The timing wasn’t an accident. Toy Story 5 hit theaters in June, and Ravensburger, the company behind Lorcana, released Wilds Unknown just weeks ahead of it, with prereleases starting May 8 and a wide release the following week. Pairing a new card set with a major theatrical release…