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 is no longer a small event. Two years ago, it began as a well-planned marketing event for a company with big goals. Since then, it has grown into something really important, with more than 200,000 people coming to the Javits Center in New York to use its convention space. There are panels with athletes, live podcast tapings, sponsor showcases, and so many famous people there that it would make a Hollywood publicist dizzy. This is where LeBron James was. There was Tom Brady. The news conference for the FIFA World Cup took place on the same floor. In spite of all that, the fact that one card release managed to take over the conversation is interesting.
There wasn’t a lot of excitement about the Topps Resurgence drop in question. Part of what made the reaction interesting was that. It was found by collectors who were in the right place at the right time. What came out of those packs quickly spread to other collectors. Before anyone had even left the table, pictures showed up on their phones. There were a lot of group chats. The venue was filled with a kind of unplanned excitement that is hard to create and impossible to fake. This is something that most planned events fail to do.
To fully understand why Topps is so important in this world, read this. Fans bought the brand a few years ago, turning one of the most well-known names in the hobby into an empire that includes licensed goods, a live shopping platform, a sports betting business, and this event. There was some disagreement in the collecting community about the purchase. People are naturally skeptical when a well-known brand changes hands, and for good reason. However, Resurgence as a line of products has done something more important than press releases: it has sparked real interest in collecting among long-time fans. It’s harder to do that than it sounds.
When you walk around an event like Fanatics Fest, you quickly learn that collectors are picky. They’ve seen this kind of hype before. They’ve seen products come out with a lot of fanfare and then fail to do well. When people go out of their way to talk about something, or “earn” attention, it tends to mean more than the advertising that went into it. It looked like that was the case here. The conversations going on about this drop weren’t sparked by sponsored posts or influential people. They were going on between people who couldn’t help themselves.
It’s still not clear if this moment will lead to long-term momentum for the product line or if it was just one of those one-time events that happen on convention floors and then are quietly forgotten. There have been a lot of one-hit wonders in the hobby. Collectors who were there, on the other hand, say that this felt different—less like a marketing win and more like a real hobby moment. The business world likes to think that those happen often, but they don’t.
There were a lot of exciting things going on over the weekend, like World Cup press conferences, celebrity entrances, and live betting announcements. But a lot of people at Fanatics Fest chose to talk about a card pack the most. In a quiet way, that’s the point.
