—Would you accept £2,600 for it? That was the plea of a woman I ran into over the weekend, looking to buy her dream item.
Not a luxury handbag, not a diamond ring, not a ULED TV the size of an entire wall.
No, a Disney Weiss Schwarz trading card that I had been looking to acquire for “many months.”
He was attending the Essex Card Show III at the Brentwood Center in his personal capacity. My nephew Harrison, age 9 (and brother-in-law Elliott, age 40) have gotten really into Pokémon cards over the past 18 months.
I was invited to the show and was blown away by the sheer size, popularity and mixed crowd that attended.
Big business: Thousands of buyers frantically rummage through trading cards at Essex Card Show III
I had imagined nerdy men in tight Pikachu t-shirts, but it was nothing like that. At one point, he was standing next to a well-dressed lady in her 30s, engaged in a discussion about the nuances of baseball cards with a couple of street vendors.
He pulled a shiny card out of a Fort Knox-type box that he opened with a combination padlock to show the stall owners, and they looked at it in amazement.
“That’s one of the best cards I’ve ever seen,” one of them reflected. “I couldn’t even put a price on it. It’s one of one.’
Trading cards, apparently, have become big business in recent years. It’s probably driven by people like Harrison and Elliott, combinations of fathers and sons, finding common ground in a physical asset to ultimately bond.
For adults, it’s a way to tap into the nostalgia of youth again and a way to invest… but invest in something tangible. A better way to spend your hard-earned money on your children, rather than on disposable toys.
For kids, it’s the brilliantly made cards, the characters and colors, and a way to collect something off-screen. Harrison and Elliott have built a cabinet at home that now contains all of their favorite Pokémon cards and decorations. It looks great.
The card expo had over 50 booths, most of which sold Pokémon, but there were also sports cards, Disney cards, Yu-Gi-Ho! cards and everything else.
While I don’t collect cards (retro video games are my collecting poison of choice), I still got carried away enough to go into full resale mode, trying to sniff out our bargains in the plethora of folders, hoping to strike gold .
I bought a 1993 Merlin Ian Wright Arsenal card for £1; the reason is I love Ian Wright, I love Arsenal, I went to my first Gunners game at Highbury with my brother in 1993 and the card looked great.
On returning home I looked it up on eBay and it turned out it was one of only 5,000 made and normally sells for £20. A nice bonus for a card I just like.
I bought a couple of very nice Pikachu cards and also a special card of one of my favorite 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 used t-shirt inside. I’ll be frank, I think it’s great and for £10, something I’ll keep. I don’t care if it’s worth more or less than that, or if it will go up 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 is difficult to put an exact value on the trading card industry. Companies like Pokémon, Mattel, Topps, and Konami produce billions each year.
But serious collectors are looking for the Holy Grail cards, and you only have to turn to social media to be bombarded with “pull videos.”
It seemed good to me: I bought this Ian Wright card for £1; a quick search on eBay suggests it could be worth £20 (but I don’t care).
Sure, it sounds dodgy, but they’re essentially videos of people buying decks of cards and opening them, hoping to discover a rare one worth hundreds, or even thousands of pounds.
Most stalls at the Essex Card Show had a mix of folders with cards worth a few pounds, along with lockable display cases with cards worth up to £5,000.
That’s right, £5,000 for a card that normally measures 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. Rare cards are usually graded, and a PSA 10 (the highest grade) is essential to get the best prices.
Meanwhile, I saw an unopened, mint condition Pokémon booster box from 1999 on sale for £15,000. That’s half the house deposit.
Our writer Sam Barker took a fascinating dive into Pokémon and collecting last year.
And while a lot of attention is on Bitcoin right now, clearly trading cards are big business, and a bigger business than I ever realized before attending this show.
Trading cards are apparently hallmarks of our generation (my father, like I suspect many others, was a big stamp collector. I never really knew why).
I didn’t stick around to see if the buyer managed to haggle that PSA 10 Steamboat Willie card down to “only” £2,600, but he seemed to be on a steamboat-like mission to finally get that card in his possession.
Do you like collectible cards and want your collection to be valued? Contact Modern Treasures on the subject line: editor@thisismoney.co.uk
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