Author: Melissa Bridwell

In every new market, there comes a time when those who are paying attention and those who aren’t start to differ in important ways. In the world of trading cards, that moment for women’s hockey may already be here, but most collectors won’t know about it because it’s happening in the background. The Professional Women’s Hockey League and Upper Deck announced earlier this year that they would be working together on trading cards for a long time. This made what seemed like an inevitable partnership official. Even though the PWHL had only been around for nine weeks, a game between…

When something unexpected happens at a card convention, there’s a certain kind of electricity that flows through the room. Not the planned excitement of a celebrity appearance or the buildup of hype from weeks of promotional emails, but something more natural and quiet. The kind of chatter that starts at one table and spreads until two strangers across the aisles are comparing notes. This is pretty much what happened when a single Topps Resurgence drop showed up at Fanatics Fest this summer. Within a few hours, it was all anyone could talk about. To give you an idea, Fanatics Fest…

If a player breaks through at just the right time, it sends a certain kind of electricity through the sports card hobby. It took place with Patrick Mahomes. It took place with Josh Allen. It’s happening to Jaxson Dart right now, in a quiet but clear way. The second-year quarterback for the Giants went to MetLife Stadium on a Thursday night and beat the team that had just won the Super Bowl. Not in a lucky, grinding way, but convincingly on national TV. It was the first time in years that Giants fans could really breathe out. It was like…

The noise is the first thing that hits you when you walk into one of these events on a Saturday morning. They take place in convention halls in mid-sized cities and hotel ballrooms in suburbs that most sports reporters never go to. There was no roar of the crowd or the whistle of the referee. Instead, there was the low, buzzing energy of hundreds of people hunched over card tables, bargaining prices in whispers while holding slabs of graded plastic up to fluorescent light like they’re checking for diamonds. It seems like the ways that football fans spend their weekends…

On the first day of school, there is a certain kind of silence that fills the room. Students are taking a look around the room and figuring out how much sleep and work the semester will cost them. And then Professor Dana Ellroy walks in. Before she even says hello, she puts a card on each desk. It’s not a syllabus. A card for theory. Each card carries a name — Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Patricia Hill Collins, W.E.B. Du Bois — along with a core idea, two or three lines of context, and a question printed at the bottom.…

When someone puts Foucault on the reading list for a seminar, there is a certain kind of silence that falls over the room. The students nod. They write down the title. Then, sometime between leaving the library and getting home, the goal quietly fades away. It takes place every semester at universities all over the world, and most teachers are okay with it. So, when David Gauntlett, a media scholar at the University of Westminster, came up with the idea for what he called “Theory Trading Cards” about 20 years ago, it almost seemed too silly to be taken seriously.…

Every card collector has been through a certain point. All for a chance at a single box of Topps Tier One. You’ve set an alarm, cleared your schedule, opened three browser tabs, and maybe even texted a friend to do the same. And then the time comes for the release. It seems like all of a sudden, the page says “sold out.” It sounds crazy. A box of baseball cards that is gone before the coffee is even ready. However, anyone who has played for more than one season will tell you that this isn’t a lie—it’s Tuesday. What makes…

Every market has a point where the rules start to change slowly but surely. They don’t change all at once or in a big way, but they change in ways that make some people in the room sit up and take notice. The Pokémon Trading Card Game may have just reached that point. It happened last month at Nintendo’s 86th Annual General Shareholders Meeting in Tokyo, not at some trade show. President of Nintendo Shuntaro Furukawa took questions about card shortages and scalping, issues that have been bothering collectors and parents for a long time. I didn’t hear a thunderclap…

At card shows, there is a certain type of collector who stands quietly in the back and flips through binders with the calm focus of someone who has done this a thousand times. People in Melbourne are more likely to be holding a piece of early 20th-century American baseball history than a footy card or a cricket stub. On paper, it sounds like an odd niche. American sports cards that are older than most of their grandparents are owned by an Australian collector. Still, there is real interest that is growing, and for those willing to put in a lot…

A certain type of person quietly builds something over the course of their career. It might not be money, but it could be knowledge, patience, or the ability to explain difficult concepts in simple terms. Such is the way teachers are. Even though Heather had been a teacher for thirty years, most people thought she would garden, travel, and maybe watch her grandchildren during the week. No one thought she’d spend her mornings taking pictures of holographic trading cards and her evenings online arguing about PSA scores. But that’s pretty much what happened. Like most of these things, it began…