Yeah, we won’t be catching them all actually…
It may be time to check your attic for all your old trading cards! You could make a killing!
May is mental health awareness month. If you need assistance in finding help, or you would like to donate to help others get the help they need, visit https://mhanational.org/
SOURCES
https://www.sportscardspro.com/game/baseball-cards-1989-donruss/ken-griffey-jr-33
https://allvintagecards.com/honus-wagner-t206/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/over-26-million-cards-graded-in-2025-how-the-market-exploded/ar-AA1TwBmj
https://www.si.com/collectibles/million-dollar-cards-are-exploding-again-could-2026-shatter-the-hobby-record
https://www.tcgplayer.com/content/article/A-Short-History-of-Pikachu-Illustrator-the-Most-Expensive-Pok%C3%A9mon-Card/d26cffe2-6e5f-4720-8519-a6317c11c060/
https://www.cllct.com/sports-collectibles/sports-cards/why-a-12-year-old-was-once-sued-over-a-12-nolan-ryan-rookie-card
Pokemon Card Market Update: What’s Hot and What’s Cooling in Spring 2026
https://www.thepricedex.com/guides/most-expensive-pikachu-cards
Logan Paul’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmkpzIi0udY
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
When I was growing up, I collected baseball cards, and like a lot of kids in the late 80s, I did so less out of enthusiasm for the sport than because I thought they actually might be worth something some day.
I don’t want to suggest that I wasn’t into baseball – growing up in St. Louis, you have to root for the Cardinals even if you’re only a little interested in the actual games – but what I will say is that I spent far more time sorting through my longbox of cards and carefully putting them into my binder with protective plastic sleeves than I ever did following the sport itself.
I had no idea what the stats on the back of the cards meant, nor did I have any understanding of who the players actually were or why their cards might be worth so much money.
In the early 1990s, one of the hottest players was Ken Griffey, Jr., and when I discovered my brother had his rookie card – worth about $6 at the time according to my price guide – I connived a way to con him out of it and then carried the card in my wallet to prevent my brother from getting it back.
That’s typical older brother stuff I’m ashamed of today, and hey, bro, if you’re listening – I’m still really sorry about that! Because not only did I deprive my brother of a valuable card, but I also made it pretty much worthless by warping the corners and keeping the card in an often-humid location.
I should have handled that card gingerly with latex gloves, gotten it off to a grading service and sealed it away for an investment in my future.
By the way, that card today is potentially worth hundreds of dollars if it’s in pristine condition.
But most people aren’t paying hundreds of bucks for it.
They’re paying at most about $4-6.
So I guess I owe my brother an appetizer next time we have dinner together to make it up to him.
Although at today’s prices, I still better make him split the check.
I don’t think I can get an appetizer for the market value of a Ken Griffey, Jr rookie card anymore.
On the other hand, if I had a T206 Honus Wagner 1909 White Border Sweet Caporal American Tobacco trading card, I could start planning my retirement, because one of those in worse shape than my Ken Griffey, Jr rookie card sold earlier this year for $5.1 million.
One in excellent condition can sell for $8 million.
But that’s because there are probably no more than 100 of these cards in existence, and only 53 that are actually registered through a card grading company.
Baseball cards have had their ups and downs in popularity, but they’re still one of the most popular collectible hobbies around, right up there with comic books and coins and stamps.
And yet if you want to make the really big money, you can try your luck with Pokémon cards, because one of those, an extremely rare Japanese card featuring Pikachu under the title ILLUSTRATOR, just sold for $16.5 million in February.
There are only 41 of these in existence, and prior to this sale, the most one had sold for was just shy of $6 million, to YouTube star Logan Paul.
This was actually the same card, made even more famous by Logan Paul’s showboating with it, and had it encased in a custom diamond necklace.
It sold this time to hedge fund founder AJ Scaramucci for that absurd amount of money.
And so we should ask – how is a piece of cardstock with a bunch of Japanese text and a picture of Pikachu worth the price of a mid-sized mansion in 2026? And is this something marketers ought to write off as a one and done… or something we can learn from?
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
The entire principle of the field of economics is scarcity.
If I have something you want and you can’t get it anywhere else, I can pretty much name my price and see if you’re willing to pay it.
But if I have something that you can get from pretty much anyone else, the market value of that thing you want is a lot lower, because all you have to do is spend the time and energy searching for a better deal.
This is not, I hope, a new concept to anyone listening.
But it’s an important one when we’re talking about collectibles, because the entire market for trading cards is predicated on three things.
First, there’s the question of value.
The trading cards have to feature something people actually care about and want to feel a connection to.
If you make trading cards of your friends and neighbors, they’re going to have a pretty limited appeal.
If it’s historical figures or movie stars, they might be a little more desirable.
But if it’s someone people tend to have limited access to, like sports stars, trading cards are a lot more desirable, especially if they have a lot of information about those players and allow fans of sports to feel as if owning a card featuring that player’s photographs and stats expresses their fandom for that player.
Trading card companies pay a lot for access to the players and leagues and are very competitive with one another.
It’s not easy to get into making trading cards anymore.
Next, there’s the question of quality.
The trading cards can’t be flimsy things you cut out of magazines or get as inserts in comic books by tearing them out of the binding.
They need to have a uniform quality, be durable enough to stand up to handling and attractive enough to be something people would be proud to own.
Often, trading cards feature strong graphic design and exciting photos showing players in action.
They’re also printed in color, may have holographic logos or foil borders, and enough heft to feel substantial when they’re held.
When I was a kid, baseball cards came in junky wax paper and had a piece of bubblegum inside.
You didn’t buy them because you thought they were valuable.
You bought them because you hoped you’d get a player you wanted and you’d trade the others away.
Now they come in foil-lined packages and no one would dream of putting gum inside them.
People buy sealed packs and leave them that way because a sealed pack from a particularly popular run can become quite valuable if it might have an expensive card inside.
And that leads us to our final question of scarcity.
Trading cards are printed in limited quantities and tend not to receive reprints without obvious changes to help collectors to know which one came from the original printing.
If there are millions of a particular card in circulation, they’re not worth very much no matter who’s on them because they’re not desirable.
If there are tens or hundreds of thousands in circulation, certain cards can rise above the rest if they feature a really popular player.
Michael Jordan, for example, is always going to be worth more than the other players on his team because he’s Michael Jordan and everyone wants one of his cards! But because Michael Jordan is so popular, what card companies will do is produce variants so they can keep the scarcity of each variation higher.
Some variants become very popular because they look cool or are printed in smaller quantities, while others will be more common or less desirable.
Once you have these three factors accounted for, you have a collectible good, and these rules really apply to just about any sort of collectible, from coins to stamps to Franklin Mint plates to Transformers toys to old video games or comic books to Beanie Babies to NFTs to Labubu dolls.
And the people who make these collectibles generally use every trick they can to enhance the value of their products and also encourage people to buy more of them.
They package them in blind packaging so you don’t know what you’re getting if you’re the original owner, they price them low enough that you might be enticed to buy more of them and they promise the potential for value – ultra-special editions or high resale value or extremely limited production quantities or whatever else.
For extremely expensive collectibles, certificates of authenticity and production numbers might be provided.
For less expensive ones, the company may provide a catalog or guide to show the rarity of each potential item so you can judge whether or not you hit the jackpot.
If it sounds like gambling… well, it activates the same dopamine pathways.
The difference is that you get an actual, collectible good that has resale value instead of the simple promise of the potential to make money.
That good is likely to be worth less than what you paid for it, but it’s still worth something.
Provided, of course, that you keep it in collectible shape, because collectors aren’t quite the fools you might think they are, and the only way they’re going to pay a lot of money for something is if they’re certain it’s going to hang on to its value.
And thus there’s an entire industry now for grading the quality of collectibles and then sealing them away in protective cases to help them retain their value.
For trading cards, comics and other printed materials, this is essential because they’re often not printed on the most durable of paper and it will degrade naturally over time no matter what you do to it.
The inks will start to fade when they’re exposed to light, the paper will absorb humidity, and there may be chemicals that were used in the printing process that leave residual acids that slowly cause the paper to decay.
You see that all the time with newsprint, and that’s one reason older comic books have to be sealed away and protected.
Sports cards from the 1980s and before aren’t much better.
Another problem in the collectibles market is that a lot of the people who get involved in the hobby love to be able to turn a profit.
There’s a pretty famous story from 1990 where a 12-year old in Itasca, Illinois convinced a clerk at a collectible card shop called Ball-Mart to sell him a rare 1968 Topps Nolan Ryan and Jerry Koosman rookie card.
The price tag said “1200”, and the boy convinced the clerk working that day to sell it to him for $12.
It was worth 100 times that. $1200.
And so the shop’s owner, Joe Irmen, sued the boy for $1,188 to make up the difference.
The judge presiding over the case ultimately made the Solomonic move of having the card put up for auction and letting the boy and the shop owner each select a charity to which their half of the proceeds would go.
You can bet after that story, though, everyone knew the true value of a Nolan Ryan rookie card, and it was a lot harder for collectors to take advantage of those who just happened to have a pile of old baseball cards they were willing to give away.
Even so, it’s not baseball cards that make the big money.
Right now, it’s Pokémon cards.
And when I stopped in a game store here in St. Louis called Yeti Gaming a couple of years ago that specializes in Pokémon cards, I was shocked to see a big crowd of people, each buying multiple boxes of cards at a time as the owner assured them that valuable cards were likely to be inside based on the rarity of the print run.
I trust he knows his business.
I trust he’s also really good at moving Pokémon cards to people who want to take a chance on them.
But with this year being the 30th anniversary of the series, there’s a growing interest in the cards, and because so many of the older sets are out of print and the cards also have utility in the trading card game itself, many of the people getting into collecting the cards – or back into it – are doing so in hopes of picking up still-sealed older sets with potentially valuable cards or current runs that may have valuable cards within them.
In many Pokémon print runs, there are cards that can be worth thousands of dollars if they’re scarce enough and desirable enough.
There are over 1,000 different Pokémon today, but many of the original 151 Pokémon are still very popular, and so new editions of their cards tend to be popular among collectors who specialize in certain cards.
For example, one Pokémon, Eevee, has many different variations called Eeveelutions, some of which are extremely popular among fans who like to collect all the different Eevee variants.
There are also people who try to collect all the Charizards or Bulbasaurs.
Pikachu has so many cards he’s often not worth a lot, but the original Pikachu cards – especially that Illustrator variant – are worth a ton because he’s such a popular character, and every now and then, there’s a variant that’s really popular and which people will pay thousands of dollars to get, like the EX Holon Phantoms Pikachu from 2006, which is worth $3,200 today in perfect condition.
But before you get big dollar stars in your eyes, let me remind you that Pokémon’s biggest asset besides its continuing popularity is its explicit focus on collecting things.
It’s core to the IP and The Pokémon Company controls production of these cards to ensure that they continue to have value among players.
You can’t get into this market yourself without buying their cards, nor can you make a copycat product that will be anywhere near as popular.
Pokémon is a once in a generation phenomenon, and other collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! don’t come anywhere near delivering the same level of value for collectors.
So, back to my original question – can we as marketers learn anything from this phenomenon? The answer, of course, is yes! If we can create products that have obvious value, which are high in quality and which have a stated scarcity, there is definitely an opportunity to get people to buy things because they’re afraid they might not have the chance later.
It’s been done with everything from designer garments to Happy Meal toys to limited edition books to Lego sets to Stanley Cups – not the hockey trophy, but the drinking mugs with a straw sticking up.
But here’s the problem.
You can’t be cynical if you’re going to do this, because collectors may be happy to spend lots of money, but they’re also not stupid.
You may get a short-term gain from creating things that are collectible and limited edition, but if you want to continue to make money, you have to build a real connection with the community and ensure that there is a resale market and also that you’re producing more of what people want in sufficiently scare quantities that your new products wouldn’t take away the value of your old products.
You also have to be aware of how your attempt to ride the coattails of popularity of something that is scarce usually won’t yield the same dividends.
If someone wanted to get the rights to reprint a Honus Wagner tobacco card, a lot of people would probably buy it to be able to say they had one, though they would definitely not want to pay collectible prices for it.
The reprint would be worth a little more than an average baseball card, but not a lot more, and the novelty would wear off pretty fast.
You’d have to constrain the supply or offer it through a specialty outlet to make any real money on it.
As it happens, you can currently buy an officially licensed one in an acrylic holder through the Baseball Hall of Fame Shop online for… yeah, just $8, or four interest-free payments of $2 with PayPal.
And if you’re a big spender, you can also get a Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle or Lou Gehrig card from the same site for $8 apiece.
$32 for four of the most valuable baseball cards ever printed.
But worth very little because they’re not the genuine article.
They’re just reprints anyone can buy if they want it.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway.
See ya next time!
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