It’s no longer trendsetting, but sports cards.
The boom post COVID is… unreal. There are times months go by without being able to even get a quality box of cards at retail price. People who liked the hobby prior to COVID were able to amass a literal wealth because of it (I’ve seen a guy bring a box of JUST Patrick Mahomes rookie autos where if he sold everything, he’d have multiple millions of dollars strictly on quantity).
It’s also a really interesting hobby, because the main manufacturer is committing what I can only assume is a crime given their legal requirement of posting odds on a box by sending juiced product to a company that sort of dominates the industry. It’s a wildly debated topic, which the manufacturer ignores and the company just thinks it isn’t a big deal. Essentially, the breaker pulled the top four value cards out of the top products of a single sport, and the odds were so wildly insane that just to have less wildly insane odds, they had to sell north of 40 million IIRC in product. Which would be done almost entirely from TikTok/Twitch/Whatnot streams.
I’ve watched said company break 65k worth of product, and the break fill in under 2 minutes… Only for a guy who spends a ton with them to hit cards that in total were worth over 130k, just himself.
The trading card hobby has had many headwinds over the last six months. The latest? Math. That’s thanks to a long time collector and observer of the hobby,
www.actionnetwork.com
Here’s the link to the maths.
And this tweet includes one of the top 4- sold for 204k