Five questions about the trading card frenzy answered by a TXST card economist

There is no question that the trading card market has expanded. There are more ways to collect, more places to buy and sell, and more businesses built around the hobby than ever before. Products in the primary market range from inexpensive retail packs to premium boxes costing hundreds or thousands of dollars, while rare cards or sealed products on the secondary market routinely sell for six, seven, or even eight figures.

There is also much more variety in what collectors can buy. Cards differ across sports and non-sports categories, manufacturers, product lines, eras, scarcity and condition. These changes can also make the market difficult to navigate.

1. How has the trading card hobby changed over the last few years?

I tend to think about the biggest changes being in four broad, and often overlapping, categories: expansion, professionalization, digitization, industry reorganization, and financialization.

Expansion is perhaps the most visible change. There are collectibles for everyone, as more cultural subjects and events are being turned into cards across an expanding universe of sports, gaming, entertainment, music, pop culture, and other interests. The result is not just more cards, but more dimensions along which collectors can choose what to collect. One useful illustration of this point is the change in the number of unique rookie cards of a single player over the last couple of decades.

Michael Jordan, for example, has only 1-2 cards that collectors commonly recognize as rookie cards. LeBron James, by comparison, has over 60 distinct rookie cards produced by major manufacturers. More recently, Victor Wembanyama and Cooper Flagg have each appeared on well over 100 distinct rookie cards.  

You can now see professionalization throughout the hobby. Collectors, local card shops, and card shows remain central, but grading companies, auction houses and consignment services, data providers, large-scale dealers, livestream sellers, and storage companies now perform functions that were once handled more informally. The uncertainties of what’s inside packs, conditions of cards, and uncertainty of authenticity make information valuable and create room for specialized businesses to help collectors.

Digitization has probably been just as consequential as it has changed the hobby’s geographic boundaries and market reach. Collectors can now find and transact with sellers across the country or around the world in near real-time. Transaction databases, population reports, scanning tools, portfolio trackers, and other digital tools have made previously difficult-to-obtain information readily accessible. Social media, livestream commerce, and collectibles-specific online communities have added another dimension by making collecting more participatory. That last point is important because attention has economic value in this market. The discovery of a rare card, a player’s recent performance or off-field activity, a viral post, comments from a prominent collector, or a major livestream pull can quickly affect what people search for, buy, and sell, and sometimes the prices they are willing to pay.

Livestream “breaks” are a good illustration of how several of these changes overlap. Consumers buy the rights to teams, players, packs, or other portions of sealed products that are opened live, dividing the product’s cost and uncertain payoff among multiple buyers. Each participant pays for the chance of receiving a high value “case hit” from a product they may not otherwise be able to purchase on their own. Breaking combines commerce with social interaction, entertainment, and chance, and has created an entirely new type of market intermediary: the breaker.

Repack products are another example. Companies (or individuals) buy cards on the secondary market, assemble them into new randomized products, and resell them online, sometimes with guaranteed buy-back offers. These products raise interesting questions about information asymmetry, transparency, reputation, and trust.

The industry’s market structure has also changed substantially. Major firms now operate in multiple stages of the supply chain rather than specializing in a single activity. This creates value for firms, but it also raises questions about market concentration, competition, and potential conflicts of interest.

Finally, more capital—and types of capital—have entered the hobby, and the language surrounding cards has become noticeably more financial. Market participants readily discuss and promote cards in terms of returns, portfolios, liquidity, arbitrage, indexes, and investment performance. Yet cards have not become purely financial assets, and I think that distinction is important. The same card can represent a childhood hero to one collector, a resale opportunity to another, and inventory to a dealer. A card can be something a person enjoys owning, something that connects them to a player or community, and an asset they expect to increase in value. Those motives are not mutually exclusive. 

2. Are investment opportunity, entrepreneurship, FOMO, or nostalgia driving the increased interest?

The answer is some combination of all four, although I strongly believe investment and entrepreneurial opportunities have been especially important drivers of recent growth.

Nostalgia has always been a powerful part of collecting. People who collected Pokémon or sports cards as a kid may return decades later with more disposable income and reconnect with a favorite player, character, or moment. At the same time, a hobby once stereotyped as niche or childish has become far more mainstream and intertwined with interests in sports, entertainment, and financial opportunity.

The investment appeal has also become much more prominent. Highly publicized sales demonstrate the potential upside, while digital marketplaces make it easier to track prices, compare cards, and buy or sell quickly. For someone who loves sports or Pokémon but may be less familiar with traditional financial markets, cards likely feel more accessible than other types of self-directed investments. They offer the possibility (though certainly not the guarantee) of earning a return from something the buyer also enjoys owning.

That accessibility also creates entrepreneurial opportunities. Someone can sell cards from a childhood collection or inheritance, buy and resell individual cards at almost any price point, set up at a local show, break boxes online, or build an audience through social media. Digital marketplaces provide immediate access to buyers and extensive information about products and prices, which makes it easier to learn about the market and identify opportunities. With no storefront, employees, or substantial capital necessarily required, people can more readily turn their knowledge and passion into supplemental income or even a full-time business.

FOMO reinforces all of this. Although difficult to measure and certainly not new to the hobby, the modern industry is very effective at creating the conditions that amplify FOMO. Limited releases and rapidly moving prices create pressure to act, while auction houses, social media, and livestreams keep major sales and valuable pulls constantly in view, fueling the desire to experience the same seemingly once-in-a-lifetime moment. Yet these visible outcomes are rarely representative of the market as a whole.

Exceptional discoveries and profitable transactions attract attention; ordinary or unsuccessful purchases generally do not. This selective visibility can make rare discoveries appear more common—and the odds of pulling something valuable seem higher—than they actually are. It can also create the impression that opportunities are disappearing, which makes it difficult to distinguish a genuinely attractive purchase from the fear of missing one.  

3. Which trading card category is playing the biggest role: Pokémon, sports, or One Piece?

I would be hesitant to identify one primary driver without defining “biggest.” Total sales, transaction volume, cards graded, collectors, growth rates, sealed-product sales, and secondary-market value would not necessarily point to the same category. Sports cards remain enormous and diverse, Pokémon has reach well beyond traditional card collecting, and One Piece has experienced remarkable growth in a relatively short time. All are playing important but different roles.

Their demand drivers and risk exposures differ. Sports card prices are closely tied to fandom and player performance: an athlete can get injured, underperform, change teams, retire, or get into trouble off the field. Pikachu is not going to tear an ACL, die, or get arrested, so non-sports cards are insulated from those types of risk. Their demand instead depends more on the popularity and longevity of characters, games, and franchises.

Further, rather than treating categories as competing for a fixed pool of collectors and dollars, the cross-pollination may be more interesting. Pokémon may bring someone into collecting who later buys sports cards, or vice versa. Growth in one part of the hobby does not necessarily come at the expense of another.

4. Is current card-market pricing sustainable, or will the bubble burst?

I would push back on the idea that there is a single trading-card market with one price level that will either prove sustainable or burst. A newly released box, a mass-produced base card, a vintage Mickey Mantle, a rare Pokémon card, and a one-of-one autograph may all be collectibles, but their economic fundamentals can be very different.

At the most basic level, prices are determined by the circulating supply of individual cards and the demand for them. More cards competing for collectors’ dollars put downward pressure on prices; more collectors and money put upward pressure on them. The long-run question is whether demand can continue growing fast enough to absorb increases in production, product differentiation, and the number of cards reaching the market.

History provides a warning. During the late-1980s and early-1990s “junk wax” era, manufacturers produced enormous quantities in response to strong demand. Perceived scarcity often proved not to be scarcity at all, supply overwhelmed demand, values collapsed for many products, and many collectors and shops exited the market.  

The 2020-2022 boom provides another useful point of reference. As people spent more time at home, dug collections out of closets, and entered or returned to collectibles markets, prices for many cards rose extraordinarily quickly and then corrected as some of that demand subsided. A 2003 Topps Chrome LeBron James rookie card graded as a PSA 10, for example, sold for more than $40,000 near its February 2021 peak, fell to around $4,000 in November 2024, and rebounded to around $18,000 in July 2026. That path shows both how volatile collectibles can be and why a decline from a speculative peak does not mean the market disappears.

Grading can amplify these dynamics. High grades command premiums, which incentivize collectors to submit more cards. More submissions increase graded card populations, and growing populations can reduce the scarcity premium that encouraged submissions in the first place. Manufacturers face a related issue: a card numbered to five has only five copies, but modern sets contain large numbers of similarly scarce cards through parallels, short prints, numbered tiers, variations, autographs, and one-of-ones. Individual cards may be scarce even as scarce cards become more abundant in the aggregate.

Could some current prices be unsustainable? Absolutely. Scarcity premiums can be diluted by new products, scarcity tiers, or growing graded populations, and individual cards will inevitably experience corrections. But that is different from saying the entire market is one bubble waiting to burst. If demand broadens while supply remains disciplined, the market can grow even as individual cards, products, and categories experience boom-and-bust cycles.

5. What should the industry do to support sustainable growth and long-term trust?

Sustainable growth involves more than just selling more cards or attracting more money. It requires fortifying both the underlying collector base and the institutions that enable participants to trust the products, information, marketplaces, and intermediaries on which they depend.  

One key priority, then, is protecting and expanding the collector base itself. Professional participants add liquidity, information, entertainment, and valuable services to the market, but their activity ultimately depends on people who actually want to collect and own the cards. Investor demand should therefore complement collector demand rather than substitute for it. Maintaining accessible entry points for children, families, casual collectors, and new hobbyists may be just as important to the industry's long-run health as serving its highest-spending participants.

Collector education could play another important role in supporting that base.  

The winner's curse study I conducted during my field research at card shows around the country provides a good example of why economic literacy, practical skills in valuing cards, assessing risk, and navigating sales mechanisms matters. We conducted hundreds of auctions at around 20 large sports card shows across the country in which participants bid on sealed packs containing cards of uncertain value. The economic problem is straightforward: bidders have different estimates of the item’s underlying value, and the person with the most optimistic estimate wins. If bidders do not sufficiently adjust their bids for this possibility, they can end up paying substantially more than the cards inside the pack turn out to be worth.

What is particularly striking is that the packs we auctioned were intentionally simple to value. They contained only base cards from two 1989 sets (Score football and Upper Deck baseball), with no short prints, inserts, or other forms of rarity, which makes the expected value relatively straightforward to calculate. Yet bidders still proved highly prone to overbidding, even when aided with the expected value calculation during the bidding process. There are several potential explanations for this, but the results call into question the state of financial and economic literacy in the hobby and the ability of collectors to make decisions under uncertainty.

Manufacturers and repackers might consider providing more accessible and consistent information about print runs, product composition, relative scarcity, and the likelihood of different outcomes. Actual and perceived scarcity are not the same thing, and greater transparency along these dimensions would make products easier for collectors to evaluate and compare. The same principle applies to grading and related secondary-market data. Because grades serve as quality signals that substantially affect value, collectors benefit from transparency around grading criteria, population reports, changes in grading standards, and how issues such as card authenticity, alterations, and resubmissions are handled.  

Recent sales are also central to price discovery, but only when cards are correctly identified and transactions are legitimate. Mislabeled parallels, duplicate records, cancelled transactions, shill bidding, and fake sales can contaminate the information collectors use to make decisions. Greater use of standardized card identifiers, including manufacturer, year, set, card number, player, parallel, variation, and serial number, would benefit collectors, marketplaces, price guides, insurers, auction houses, and, of course, researchers.

The industry must also address potential conflicts of interest and opportunities for manipulation. Vertical integration is not inherently harmful; it can reduce costs, improve coordination, and create better consumer experiences. But as firms become involved in multiple stages of the market, the importance of transparency and appropriate safeguards increases. The goal should not be to discourage enthusiasm or financial participation, but to make it easier for consumers to distinguish genuine opinion and entertainment from what could be financially motivated promotion or unethical market activity. 

Closing Thoughts:

Ultimately, the industry cannot lose sight of why this market exists: people want to collect cards. Better information, authentication, transparency, and accountability should let collectors participate confidently without removing the fun and uncertainty that make collecting interesting. If I had to reduce it to one principle, it would be to protect the collector by continuing to improve the infrastructure that supports market function. 

Jesse Backstrom, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of applied economics at Texas State University. He is also the founder of the Cardonomics Lab, a research and learning initiative that uses trading card and collectibles markets as real-world laboratories for studying economic behavior.

Backstrom’s recent research examines how people respond to incentives, information, risk, and uncertainty, including through field experiments conducted in person at card shows and on digital marketplaces where cards are routinely bought and sold.