Trading cards have become big business says LEE BOYCE - here's why...
'Would you take £2,600 for it?' That was the plea from a woman I found myself next to at the weekend, looking to buy the item of her dreams.
Not a luxury handbag, not a diamond ring, not a ULED television the size of an entire wall.
No, a Weiss Schwarz Disney trading card she had been looking to snap-up for 'many months.'
I was attending the Essex Card Show III at the Brentwood Centre in a personal capacity. My 9-year-old nephew Harrison (and 40-year-old brother-in-law Elliott) have got into Pokémon cards in a huge way in the past 18 months.
They invited me along to the show and I was blown away by the vast size, popularity and mixed crowd in attendance.
Big business: Thousands of buyers were rifling through trading cards in a frenzy at the Essex Card Show III
I'd pictured nerdy men in tight-fitting Pikachu t-shirts but it was nothing like that. At one point, I was standing next to a well-dressed lady, in her 30s, deep in discussion about the nuances of baseball cards with a pair of stall holders.
She plucked out a shiny card from a Fort Knox type box that she unlocked with a combi lock to show the stall holders, and they stared at it in awe.
'That is one of the best cards I've ever seen,' one of them mused. 'I couldn't even put a price on it. It's a one of one.'
Trading cards, seemingly, have become big business in recent years. It is likely driven by people like Harrison and Elliott, parent/children combos, finding common ground in a physical asset to ultimately bond over.
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For adults, it's a way to tap back into the nostalgia of youth and a way to invest… but invest in something tangible. A better way to spend their hard-earned cash on their children, rather than on throwaway toys.
For children, it's the brilliantly-made cards, the characters and colours, and a way of collecting something off-screen. Harrison and Elliott have built a cabinet at home which now contains all their favourite cards and Pokémon nick-nacks. It looks great.
The card show had 50-odd stalls, the majority of which were hawking Pokémon, but there were also sports cards, Disney cards, Yu-Gi-Ho! cards and everything else in between.
While I don't collect trading cards (retro video games are my collecting poison of choice) I was still swept up enough to go into full resale mode, attempting to sniff our bargains in the vast number of binders, hoping to strike gold.
I bought a 1993 Merlin Ian Wright Arsenal card for £1 – the reason being, I love Ian Wright, I love Arsenal, I went to my first Gunners match at Highbury with my brother in 1993, and the card looked great.
Upon returning home, I searched it out on eBay and it turns out it was one of only 5,000 made, and regularly sells for £20. A tidy bonus for a card I simply like.
I bought a couple of cool looking Pikachu cards, and also a special card of one my favourite basketball players – Dirk Nowitzki – from his last season playing in the NBA.
That card is extra thick and has a small piece of a game-worn shirt inside. I'll be frank, I think it's cool and for £10, something I'll keep hold of. I don't care if it's worth more or less than that, or if it'll grow in value, I just like the card.
And for the price of a pint-and-a-half in London, I can own and admire it forever.
It's hard to put an exact value of the trading card industry. Companies like Pokémon, Mattel, Topps, Konami pump out billions of them every year.
But for serious collectors, it's the Holy Grail cards they're after – and you only have to dip into social media to be bombarded by 'pull videos'.
It felt right: I bought this Ian Wright card for £1 - a quick eBay search suggests it could be worth £20 (but I don't care)
Granted, that sounds dodgy, but essentially, they're videos of people who buy packs of cards and open them, hoping to unearth a rare one worth hundreds – or even thousands of pounds.
Most of the stalls at the Essex Card Show had a mixture of binders with cards worth a few quid, alongside locked glass cabinets with cards worth up to £5,000.
That's right, £5,000 for a card typically 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. The rare cards are usually graded – and a PSA 10 (the top grading) is essential for top prices.
Meanwhile, I saw an unopened mint condition Pokémon booster box from 1999 for sale for £15,000. That's half a house deposit.
Our writer Sam Barker took a fascinating dive into Pokémon and collecting last year.
And while plenty of the attention at the moment is on bitcoin, clearly trading cards are big business – and a bigger business than I ever truly realised before attending this show.
Trading cards are seemingly our generation's stamps (my dad, like many others I suspect, was a big stamp collector. I've never really known why).
I didn't stick around to see whether the buyer managed to haggle that PSA 10 Steamboat Willie card down to 'just' £2,600 – but she seemed to be on a steamboat-like mission to finally have that card in her possession.
Are you into trading cards and want your collection valued? Get in touch with Modern Treasures in the subject line: [email protected]
