Author: Melissa Bridwell

When something truly new comes along, there’s a certain kind of electricity that moves through the collector community. Not just a new set with fresh art, but something that feels like an event. This kind of set came out with the Pokémon 30th Anniversary set, which is called 30th Celebration in Japan. It comes out everywhere on September 16, 2026, and pre-orders at major stores have been moving so quickly that it’s hard to ignore. Before you think this is just hype, you should find out what’s actually in the box. In this set, each booster pack has six cards…

There is a type of collector who doesn’t make themselves known. They don’t brag about their auction finds on social media or at dinner. Come to swap meets early on the weekends, ask lots of questions, and always have a notebook with them. These days, they carry a phone with a well-organized spreadsheet on it. This type of collector in Auckland has been quietly putting together what most people in the hobby would call an amazing collection of old trading cards. It’s now worth well over six figures and took about ten years to put together from almost nothing. Many…

A 45-year-old man walks alone through the darkened aisles of a Best Buy that is closed after midnight, surrounded by display models and box sets, waiting for the store to open so he can be the first person in line for Pokémon cards. The scene looks almost like something out of a movie. It sounds like the beginning of a joke. It wasn’t. It was early Wednesday morning when Patrick Keys was arrested at a Best Buy store in Pasadena, California. Employees watching a live security feed saw him walking through the store hours after it had closed. When the…

Soon after the Eagles won Super Bowl LIX, tickets for the Philly Show went on sale. The website didn’t just slow down. It went down. In every way. That is not a sales pitch; it is a signal. An important part of the hobby had changed, and Philadelphia was right in the middle of it. Since 1975, The Philly Show has been on the air. Something like a card show takes fifty years, which is a long time. It takes place at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center and covers more than 140,000 square feet. More than 300 dealers from more…

In the world of sports cards, there is a certain amount of excitement right before a big event drops something unexpected. Collectors keep the secondary market listings up to date, Discord channels light up, and people talk quickly. Just like that, when Tom Brady did a live card break on Fanatics Collect, he casually broke down the internet for 45 minutes straight. It began as a livestream for advertising. Brady was introducing the athletes who will be performing at Fanatics Fest 2026, which will take place this summer at the Javits Center in New York City. It was pretty simple:…

A certain kind of wound can only be caused by trust being broken. The slow, quiet kind, not the sharp kind from a stranger on the street. The kind you don’t feel until your credit score drops sixty points and you see that $6,500 has been charged to a PayPal account you never opened. There was a church member in Memphis who put his trust in Steven Flockhart, the pastor of 901 Church, which has two locations in Millington and Bartlett. Flockhart, who used to be on “American Idol” and NBC’s “The Voice,” was arrested on charges of theft of…

There’s a point in every collecting cycle where even the most experienced fans have to stop scrolling and look up. In March 2025, a single trading card of Paul Skenes sold for $1.11 million on Fanatics Collect. This was the big moment for many people who collect sports cards. Of course not at a white-glove auction house. Not locked up behind glass in the vault of a private dealer. Online, in real time, collectors can see the bids go up. Dick’s Sporting Goods bought it in the end, presumably so that people could see it. That tells us something interesting…

It’s an 80s set of 55 cards that most people who collect cars have never seen or touched, and most people who like books have never heard of it or played with it. Gothic fiction, French auto history, and the kind of gross-out art made by teens that defined a certain decade in American pop culture are all influenced by it. And for some reason, against all odds, it’s really brilliant. Topps Chewing Gum makes the show, which is called Weird Wheels. This is the same company that makes baseball cards and, a few years later, the amazingly gross Garbage…

A certain kind of energy builds in the sports card market when a city that hasn’t won anything in more than fifty years starts to believe again. This energy is really strong in New York right now; it’s raw and a little feverish, and it’s really clear in the sales numbers. This 2018 Panini Prizm Jalen Brunson Blue Prizm rookie card was graded PSA 10 and was one of only 199 ever made. It sold on eBay for $3,383 on May 31, 2026. This card has never been used that many times before. The same card sold for $1,500 a…

If you go into almost any sociology department in the US right now, you might see an odd thing on a professor’s desk or pinned to a graduate student’s bulletin board: a small, illustrated card with the face of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or Anthony Giddens on it, along with a list of their intellectual strengths, weaknesses, and what we can only call “special skills.” School in the United States now has trading cards with theories on them. Without making a fuss, in secret, and about 25 years later than planned. The first cards were not at all American. David…