Your Kid Shouldn't Need Comps to Enjoy a Pack of Cards

I recently took my seven-year-old son to a card show, which should be one of the easiest ways in America to get a first-grader excited about collecting.

Within a few minutes we had walked past a $5,000 SpongeBob card, adult-oriented Japanese anime cards I didn't particularly want to explain, and table after table of grown men negotiating four- and five-figure Pokémon trades.

None of that is wrong. A dealer can put a five-figure cartoon card in a showcase and expect someone to ask about it because adults care that much about cardboard. Shows are crowded, new products sell out, grading backlogs run into the millions of cards and whole companies exist to tell collectors what their collections are worth by the minute.

Standing there with a first-grader, I kept wondering when we decided that children should enter the hobby through the same door as investors.

Childhood culture has become an adult asset class

It goes well beyond cards. Near my house in Los Angeles, a movie theater shows cartoons on Saturdays. When I took my son, the audience was almost entirely men over 30.

I'm not complaining that adults watch cartoons, since I watch them too. Adults are allowed to like things that were first made for children.

But my son looked like a visitor in a room built around something made for him. The card hobby feels more like that every year.

U.S. Pokémon toy sales rose 87 percent in 2025 to $2.5 billion, according to Circana.¹ Adults were the biggest source of the toy industry's growth in the first half of 2026, with sales to buyers 18 and older up 25 percent. Adult-only households bought 55 percent of all toys through June.

Only about 1 in 4 of the adults Circana found buying Pokémon cards for themselves said they played the game. Most were collecting, displaying or buying in bulk to resell.

I'd call that one of the hobby's great commercial successes. Pokémon, sports cards, Disney, Marvel and now SpongeBob have all become real adult collectible markets.

Take SpongeBob. A 2025 Topps Chrome SpongeBob triple-autograph 1/1 sold for $21,500 in October 2025.² A Sandy Cheeks and Larry the Lobster dual-autograph Superfractor 1/1 in a PSA 9 was listed at $5,000 on Fanatics Collect in August 2026 before the listing came down.³

It's kind of amazing that a children's cartoon from 1999 has a five-figure card market 26 years later. Adults can keep that market. I just don't think every part of the hobby has to become it.

When I was a kid, most cards were just cards

I collected in the 1990s, when there were expensive cards and price guides and kids absolutely cared when one card was worth more than another.

But information moved slowly. You might see a value in Beckett once a month, a great insert was a rare thing to pull and the expensive end of the hobby lived somewhere else, in card shops, at conventions and on magazine pages.

Mostly we owned stacks of base cards, with finishing a set as the goal. You learned players because you kept seeing them, knew which teams had the best uniforms and noticed the photography and the design. You liked players for reasons that had nothing to do with WAR, Hall of Fame odds or recent comps. Some of us even got weirdly attached to a common.

Because the market was hard to reach, collecting came with a kind of protective ignorance. You didn't know what every card was worth every second. That left more room to decide what a card was worth to you.

Today the price arrives with the card

A kid entering the hobby now can know the last sale of a card before they have finished opening the pack.

Everything built around cards now points that way: scan the card, find the comp, grade it, vault it, list it, then watch somebody else rip the next box live. On some products, buying and reselling happen in the same app.

Fanatics built that exact path for new and younger collectors at Fanatics Fest in New York this July. Its Card Combine started with a free Topps sample pack and the Fanatics Collect app. From there, visitors opened a pack at a ripping station with a scanner that checks card values, then moved through a live break studio, a CGC grading station, a lesson on vaulting and a free digital pack.

It's a smart way to sell the hobby to adults. It also teaches a kid that the first stop after the pack is the price.

A kid at a show today hears about hits, chases, multipliers, comps, pop counts and ROI. Those are useful ideas. CardWire exists to give adult collectors better information about them, but a seven-year-old shouldn't need CardWire.

I don't want a child looking at every card and immediately asking, "How much is this worth?" I want that question to come up sometimes. Learning about money is useful, negotiating is useful and a kid should know a friend shouldn't trade them a $100 card for a $2 card.

I just don't want it to be the first question every time.

We used to have a product for this

Topps Opening Day was never perfect, but the idea was right. Topps called it the "quintessential entry-level" baseball-card product.⁴ The 1998 debut was base-only, with no inserts or parallels. A hobby box still sold for about $43 in April 2022 and held 36 packs built around players, mascots and the game itself, even as inserts and rare hits found their way in.⁵

Topps retired Opening Day after 2022. This year's Series 1 Celebration Mega Box, its closest successor, came out on Opening Day, March 26, with mascot cards back in the mix. Topps also says autographs and relics "remain a cornerstone of the experience."⁶

Topps Big League is aimed at younger collectors too. Topps says it "primarily targets young collectors" while advertising "significant chase value" with rarity tiers, short prints, autographs and 1/1s.⁷

Even the products built for kids now come with a chase.

Make some cards bad investments again

I'd like to see a major manufacturer make a product with almost nothing to talk about on a breaking channel.

Give it a big base set with great photography, good card backs, player stats, team information and maybe some trivia, sold ten cards to a cheap pack. Leave out autographs, relics, serial numbers, redemptions, one-of-ones, parallel rainbows and any card that needs to go straight into a magnetic holder.

The chase is finishing the set. Pulling Aaron Judge is exciting because it's Aaron Judge. When you pull a duplicate, you ask another kid if they need it.

Panini has sold this product for decades on stickers instead of cardboard, with the Calciatori albums Italian kids have filled since 1961 and World Cup albums at every tournament since Mexico 1970.⁸ The packets are cheap, the base set is big and the album is the chase. Swapping doubles has been part of growing up across Europe and Latin America for more than half a century.

Panini changed that model too. The 2026 World Cup collection runs to 980 stickers, the largest album Panini has made. At about $2 for a seven-sticker packet in the U.S. in May, a run with no duplicates would cost around $280. Buying until the album is full can take more than 1,000 packets and cost more than $2,000.⁹

Those packets also hide 68 special-edition stickers plus 12 more that only come on Coca-Cola bottles. The North American version adds a colored-border rainbow running from blue at 1 in 2 packets to green at 1 in 1,400, with a black one-of-one on top. A black one-of-one Lionel Messi from the Qatar album sold for a record $139,200 after Argentina won the 2022 final.¹⁰

That's the rainbow I just asked a manufacturer not to print.

The album ritual never caught on in the U.S. at that scale. No major manufacturer sells a cardboard version here. Nobody has to invent anything new, because a card company can bring the album model over and keep the part a kid can finish.

Manufacturers will rightly say the economics are worse. Chase cards sell boxes because adults will spend far more on a shot at a $5,000 card than a child will spend hunting for card No. 217.

But not every product has to squeeze the most out of adults' gambling-adjacent excitement. A company that expects children to be its customers for the next 50 years can afford one product built to make collectors rather than cash them out right away.

Pokémon has another answer: actually play with the cards

One of the healthiest things about Pokémon is that the cards still do something. Its own parent resources promote My First Battle for kids six and up, Battle Academy for families learning together and local Pokémon League events where players meet, trade and play.¹¹

That changes how a kid sees the card. A Charizard in a deck can win a game, a card can be good without being rare and a kid can prefer one Pokémon over another because it fits a deck or because they just like it.

Once in a while a card gets bent. That's probably healthy too, because a kid should own a few cards that would be worth more in a PSA slab and not care at all.

Card shows need more space for kids

I want more card shows. Hundreds of dealers filling convention halls with sports cards, Pokémon, One Piece and cartoon cards is a sign of a thriving culture.

Some organizers are already trying. Fanatics Fest runs a Kids Zone apart from its Collectors Zone, though its games are built for young sports fans more than for card collectors.¹² Front Row Card Show events in Southern California let children 10 and under in free and ran a Hobby Hunt scavenger hunt for them in May.¹³

Shows could do much more:

• Kid-to-kid tables, where children trade with children.
• Quarter boxes, where every common costs a quarter.
• Set-building stations, a place to sit down and get closer to finishing something.
• Learn-to-play corners that teach Pokémon and show kids what the cards do.
• Free packs with nothing worth grading.
• Camera-free zones, where minors aren't content for somebody else's livestream.

I've seen videos of kids who should be trading on the playground negotiating spreads with adults while a camera rolls. Some of those kids are incredibly sophisticated. Good for them, but sophistication should be available to a child, not required of one.

The industry doesn't have to choose

This isn't an argument against investors, dealers, breakers, graders or adults buying SpongeBob cards.

Much of collecting is investing now. In some ways that's an improvement: price transparency protects people from terrible trades, grading gives buyers confidence and marketplaces turn up cards that were impossible to find 30 years ago. The money flowing in pays for better products, better shows and better infrastructure.

But somewhere along the way, collecting got good at turning affection into a price. Kids need some time before we teach them to do that.

There was real value in spending a summer trying to finish a set that would never be worth anything. You learned the players, studied the photographs, reorganized the binder and traded three duplicates for the one card you were missing, until the collection mattered to you for reasons nobody could see in a comp.

If you're taking a kid to a show this fall, skip the showcases for the first hour. Hand them a quarter box, a want list for one team set and their doubles to trade.