Trading cards surged during COVID & evolved into a new collectibles economy

A father and his kid walk into a Scottsdale card shop and, within minutes, the conversation sounds like a scene from a family reunion.

The child points at the cards of modern stars in a display case. Dad starts talking about the cards he had in his collection – the ones now tucked into binders, shoeboxes or attic bins.

“That’s a catalyst,” said Noah Blechman, owner of Valleywide Sports Cards. After the sports card market surged during the pandemic, Blechman said he watched “multiple generations come together” over card collecting.

Kids discovered the hobby, parents dug out old collections to show them the prized cards that they once chased. And that generational pull remains a reason the hobby has proved sticky beyond its 2020 spike.

But it’s not the only reason.

Lockdowns, disposable income, social media and a fast-growing online marketplace culture reshaped sports cards from a niche collector world into something that often looks like a financial bet – complete with the rush, the risk and the same language that accompany gambling.

“It surged during COVID because people were locked down and had some extra money and couldn’t go out and spend it anywhere,” Blechman said. 

He noticed collectors circling back to the era they grew up in – what he called the “junk wax era,”  buying cards they once wanted but never had, down to specific nostalgia targets like “Your 1986 Donruss José Canseco Rated Rookie card.”

National data backs up the notion that the hobby didn’t just get louder, it got bigger.

In 2021, Forbes reported that eBay had seen a 142% increase in U.S. trading card sales from 2019 to 2020, with more than four million additional cards sold by U.S.-based accounts, according to the massive online marketplace’s “State of Trading Cards” report. 

In 2020, mainstream sports storytelling also collided with the collectibles culture. Blechman pointed to ESPN’s “The Last Dance” documentary series that focused on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls as a major accelerant. 

“When that Jordan or Chicago Bulls documentary came out, it really spiked this market quite a bit,” he said. Collectibles outlets documented a jump in Jordan-related interest and prices during the series’ run.

The boom didn’t just bring in collectors. It also expanded the number of ways to buy — and the number of ways to chase returns.

“There’s definitely a lot more gambling,” Blechman said. In his view, today’s hobby includes purist collectors, speculators trying to flip, and “online breaks,” where buyers purchase a share of a box break streamed live. He compares the spectrum to a casino: “You have the penny slots and you have the high roller slots and everything in between … except you do walk away with something every single time,” he said.

The pandemic also created a classic supply-and-demand squeeze. “The availability was a lot less during COVID,” Noah said, describing a period when the product was hard to find. “High demand, low supply … it creates a different perception of value.”

In Phoenix, Rip Valley operations manager James Torres said COVID-era demand helped convince people the market could support new businesses. “COVID was definitely the boom … kind of the reasoning behind opening up a shop during that timeframe,” he said.

Torres said the market is still expanding, especially across non-sports categories that now share shelf space with football and baseball. “It still hasn’t come down, in my opinion, especially with Pokémon,” he said. “There’s just always something new.”

That “always something new” is increasingly online. Torres pointed to Whatnot, a live-shopping platform that has become a major pipeline for breaks, auctions and quick sales. “Whatnot has been a big help with that, just making breaks easier, accessible, even cheaper,” he said. 

A recent report cited by Sports Collectors Daily said that Whatnot reported more than $8 billion in gross merchandise value in live sales during 2025. But greater access has also sharpened a culture shift that shop owners hear daily: less collecting for the love of it, more “what’s it worth?”

Torres said he sees “a lot less true collectors now and more people who are in it for just flipping,” describing a familiar pattern: “People will rip a pack, and the first question is what’s this worth.”

He also pushed back on a common misconception among new entrants. “Everything is flippable, and … you make money back on every box you open,” he said — a belief that, in his experience, doesn’t match reality. For prospects, he added, patience matters: a hit today might not pay off until a player reaches the majors “five to six years” later.

The industry’s corporate power structure is shifting, too, as licensing rights consolidate. Fanatics completed its acquisition of Topps’ trading card and collectibles business in January 2022, a move that signaled how aggressively the company planned to expand in the category. Also, in a legal fight with Panini, Fanatics’ long-term league licensing deals — and the pressure they put on competitors — have become central to the dispute.  

For independent sellers, the post-2020 era has meant adapting quickly — sometimes out of necessity.

Benny Trujillo, who runs Benny’s Card and Collectibles and sells at card shows, said he leaned into shows and online tools to support himself after health issues. “When I became ill, I sold my collection and started doing the card shows,” he said. “This helped me to supplement my medical and prescriptions.”

Trujillo said the pandemic period forced him to modernize. With card shows canceled during COVID, he leaned into online sales: “I learned how to use the internet,” he said. “I was a person who had no clue how to use the tools I use now.”

He also described how the ecosystem around the hobby widened after COVID: “All sorts of entrepreneurs came out of the woodwork, from card shows every weekend, new grading companies, card vaults, card pricing platforms, and auctioneers,” he said. “It’s incredible.”

Back in Scottsdale, Noah said the market has “plateaued to some degree,” with attention rotating across sports and even into other categories like Pokémon and One Piece. Yet he believes there’s still room for long-term collecting, for kids who pick a player and “watch a 15-, 20-year career unfold.”

He also warned newcomers about price confusion in the age of fast search results. Taking a photo with a tool like Google Lens, he said, can produce a distorted sense of what a card is worth. The better habit, he said, is learning to verify value through real-world sales — “including like an eBay sold” search and understanding how to interpret those results.

That’s the tension at the heart of the post-2020 era: a hobby fueled by nostalgia and community, now living alongside an always-on marketplace that can make every pack feel like a wager.