Author: Melissa Bridwell

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…

It’s kind of relaxing to be in a room full of people on a weeknight flipping through binders. There won’t be any screens to distract you. Don’t make ambient DJ music that tries too hard. There was only the soft rustling of card sleeves and the occasional “what do you need for that one?” That’s what it looks like at a sports card shop in Toronto where NFL trading nights happen every month, and lots of people keep coming. A lot of hobby gatherings start out quietly. This one did too. The owner of a shop probably got tired of…

It looked like the right card. It looked like the surface would have- gloss. The centering looked almost too clean to be real. I think the price, which was around $80,000, was high enough to show that it was real. There was a Denver collector across from it, though, who had been buying and selling Pokemon cards for years, long before this market became popular. This collector thought something wasn’t right. He held it off to the side. Then another. If you roll the edges of a 1999 Base Set Charizard between your fingers, they should feel like the real…

At a card show, seeing a 55-year-old businessman and a 19-year-old in a hoodie stand next to each other and reach for the same binder is rather interesting. Someone is after a 1952 Mickey Mantle. One is looking for a Charizard that was made in the first run. They can’t be in the same community at the same time. Having fun with trading cards has been around for a long time. But no one could have predicted even ten years ago who would be in it, why they would be in it, or how much they would spend. Brady Hill,…

It’s almost poetic that this case wasn’t solved by a tip from a seasoned detective. Two people who did it for fun had spreadsheets and too much free time. Two online collectors—the kind of people who argue about card corners and centers at midnight—began to see a pattern. Cards were graded by a big appraisal firm, then bought in secret by a certain dealer, returned in different condition, regraded with higher scores, and then sold through a well-known auction house. The way the sequence used every link in the chain was almost beautiful. Since then, the FBI has started a…

One number in the NFLPA’s most recent annual report doesn’t get as much attention as it should. For the fiscal year that ended in February 2026, trading cards brought in $93.1 million for players. That amount was $39.6 million the year before. Before that, $29 million. The jump is so big that it almost looks like a mistake, but it’s not. Even people who work for the NFL are still trying to figure out what’s going on in the world of NFL licensing. Things are moving so quickly that no one can keep up. It’s likely that Shedeur Sanders is…

When you go to a product page and all you see is a grayed-out “Out of Stock” button, you already know how you feel. It’s not really frustration; it’s more like being late to something you thought had already started. At the moment, a lot of collectors are having trouble with the 2025–26 Topps Cosmic Chrome Basketball set, which disappeared almost as quickly as it showed up. People are still shocked by how fast it happened, even though the numbers don’t really surprise them. This season, Topps returned to basketball with a full NBA license, which changed everything. Collectors who…