Mental health experts increasingly see similarities between opening a pack of trading cards and the rush that accompanies traditional gambling. Nick Devor

In another era, Topps enticed kids to buy its baseball cards with a stick of gum inside every pack. But as the industry grew, the freebie became a liability, leaving sugar stains on increasingly precious cards.

Today, Topps relies on a different kind of sugar hit: one-of-a-kind cards randomly inserted in packs. On its YouTube account, the company promotes one baseball card as "an absolutely life-changing pull." Its videos are part of a social-media ecosystem that treats all kinds of trading cards more like winning lottery tickets than expressions of fandom.

Scratch-off lotto tickets at bodegas in New York City now sit next to Pokémon cards, priced at $15 a pack. A cashier at the Heavenly Market corner store on Manhattan's 2nd Avenue says one frequent customer recently bought six packs at once. Another buyer recently ripped open a pack to find a $90 card inside.

Unlike the bodega's lotto tickets, there's no age requirement to buy its Pokémon cards. Yet experts now see similarities between opening a pack of trading cards and the rush that accompanies traditional gambling. Every pack holds the promise of a million-dollar find.

In late 2024, six-year-old Champ Stutts saw an online video about a rare rookie card for Pittsburgh Pirates' pitching phenom Paul Skenes. Champ asked his dad, Brandon Stutts, if they could try to find it. Father and son eventually pulled a different, though still rare, Skenes card. In a viral video the family posted to TikTok, Champ is overwhelmed with excitement: "I can't breathe!" Skenes' girlfriend, gymnast Livvy Dunne, saw the post and invited Champ and family to a Pirates game.

Last month, Stutts posted another TikTok of Champ and his brother Maverick, age 3, sitting in their car seats with trading cards scattered across their laps. "We just bought these boxes at Walmart, and we could not wait to rip them at home, so we ripped them in the truck," Champ says into the camera. "And you cannot believe what my brother hit!"

Topps reposted the video.

This past Christmas, Morgan Stanley valued the collectibles market at $100 billion. Shares of eBay are up 138% since June 2022, when it introduced eBay Vault to store and authenticate rare trading cards sold on the online auction site. Meme-stock favorite GameStop, which has roughly 1,600 retail stores in the U.S., has sought to acquire eBay in an effort to create a collectibles behemoth.

Mizuho's David Bellinger recently named Target, Walmart, and Hasbro as beneficiaries of the boom. But it's privately held Fanatics that has become the industry's top dog. The firm began as a sports apparel business before adding sports betting and collectibles. It acquired 88-year-old Topps in 2022.

Mizuho estimates that Fanatics will generate $5 billion in collectibles revenue this year. "We believe an emerging collector community engaged across social channels and chasing 'hits' should allow for continued growth well beyond 2026," Bellinger wrote. Fanatics was last valued at $31 billion, according to PitchBook.

The most valuable cards now lie outside the world of sports. A 1998 Pikachu Pokémon card belonging to teen-favorite influencer Logan Paul sold for $16.5 million in February, the most expensive trading card ever sold at auction.

In May, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said "the trading-card category -- either this year or next year -- will be the biggest single toy and game category, eclipsing building blocks."

This spring, Professional Sports Authenticator, the leading card-grading firm, suspended some of its services due to overwhelming demand. The firm's backlog of work has reached 12 million cards, and it's spending $200 million to expand capacity. Collectors, PSA's Santa Ana, Calif.--based parent company, has been valued at more than $4 billion in the private market, according to PitchBook.

The elder Stutts says card collecting today is nothing like when he was growing up in the 1990s. It's "more like gambling than people collecting for the love of the cards or the love of a player."

Trading cards have a major presence on social media, with more TikTok videos than popular collectibles like Labubu dolls and luxury handbags.

Victor Wembanyama, the National Basketball Association star player, was recently recorded haggling over an autographed Luke Skywalker card. ($3,000 asking price; sold for $2,500.)

Other trading-card videos show scalpers crawling the aisles of big-box toy stores to find decades-old card packs forgotten under shelves; people "ripping," or opening, packs in odd locations, such as while riding a roller coaster; and over-the-top reactions to finding an extremely rare card. The price of a card is often shown on-screen -- the higher the better for virality's sake.

At a recent card show in New York City -- one of nearly 1,000 happening monthly across the country -- vendors had cameras on unipods pointed at their wares and wore lapel-clip microphones to capture their negotiations with customers and clip the footage for content.

Mental health experts are increasingly thinking about the intersection of collecting and business.

"There's a lot of content on social media that seems to perpetuate the commodification of Pokémon cards and the likelihood that kids will take this to an unhealthy place," says Andrew Tepper, a psychotherapist in upstate New York.

He sees eight patients who frequently talk about their trading cards. Their enthusiasm ranges from innocuous to problematic.

Tepper's younger clients often offer a very adult defense of their hobby. "Well, certain Pokémon cards outperform the markets," they tell him. And they aren't wrong.

Since 2020, Pokémon card prices have surged 1,634%, according to an index run by Card Ladder, a subsidiary of Collectors. Hobbyists monitor the value of their card portfolio with apps that resemble digital brokerages such as Robinhood and Charles Schwab.

"The thing that seems to be pretty prevalent among people that are into Pokémon cards is this insistence that it's an investment strategy," Tepper says. "And that seems to be a justification for engaging in behavior that looks pretty addictive."

A study published in February in the Psychology of Addictive Behaviors research journal found that "spending money on physical card packs containing random cards of varying value offered by collectible and trading-card games is linked to problem gambling."

Alyx Effron has firsthand experience. The 36-year-old from New Jersey says his blackjack and sports betting habit feels no different than his compulsion to buy sports cards, which led him to spend thousands of dollars a week on unopened packs.

He says that comes as a surprise to many, even some fellow gamblers. When he talked about sports cards at a Gambling Anonymous meeting, the group seemed unequipped to help. So, he "built something I wish existed when I was in the throes of my addiction," he says.

Effron's organization, Collectors MD, now has hundreds of active members who convene in virtual meetings and group chats. During meetings, the group treats card collecting as a potential conduit to addiction and talks about how to "rip responsibly."

Barron's has reported that as gambling addiction spreads to younger demographics, it's taking new forms that are alien to older generations.

In October, start-up Whatnot raised $225 million, giving the private company a value of $11.5 billion, according to PitchBook. The company runs a so-called live-commerce platform, in which each Whatnot seller essentially operates their own smartphone-era QVC channel. Sellers livestream themselves displaying or modeling products, while viewers can buy or bid on what's shown on screen while talking with one another and the seller through a built-in chat feature. The start-up has inspired similar offerings from Fanatics and eBay.

Brandon Stutts, whose family found the Paul Skenes card, has his own Whatnot page, which mostly deals in low-value baseball cards. He even does consignment sales for a local card shop. "When you can turn on a camera and run 200 cards, even with the fees it's better than cards sitting on the shelves for six months," he says. Whatnot charges sellers $0.30 per transaction and an 8% transaction fee, plus a credit-card fee equal to 2.9% of the sale price.

Stutts has sold nearly 38,000 cards through Whatnot since late 2024, according to the platform. A Whatnot stream is simple to run -- Champ Stutts, now almost 8, has hosted two streams on his dad's channel.

Bidding on the Stutts' stream starts at $2, and each auction lasts five seconds. That's standard across the platform. "If you run longer auctions, people lose interest," Stutts says. "If you put a card up, and it has to sit there for 30 seconds, someone who's not interested will just go to the next stream."

Stutts' channel is a picture of transparency compared with other Whatnot streams. The platform has come under scrutiny for catering to a form of live commerce specific to trading cards: so-called break streams, which involve hours of a host opening sealed packs of cards.

Unlike with Stutts' auctions, bidders are paying for a spot in the stream rather than specific cards. Whatnot uses a randomization system to assign the rights to cards revealed in the stream and takes its cut of the winning bid.

Boxes of cards can cost thousands because they may contain cards worth millions. Buying into a break stream is one way to chase those big cards, and it's cheaper than buying the entire box. Chat rooms are filled with bidders and spectators sharing in their wins and losses.

"Breaking combines money with randomized outcomes, live entertainment, speed and urgency, social pressure, and the possibility you could get something massive," Effron says. "It turns opening product into a shared live event instead of a solo experience."

It's the virtual version of 20 people crowding around a craps table in Las Vegas. One difference: Whatnot isn't a regulated casino.

Attorney Paul Lesko has filed 70 claims on behalf of clients who collectively, since April 2021, have spent nearly $250 million on Whatnot and claim to have developed a gambling addiction on the platform, according to records viewed by Barron's.

"Functionally, Whatnot operates an unregulated online casino where it exploits its customer base by encouraging compulsive spending and in the process generates billions in revenue without providing the safeguards required of regulated gambling operations," a complaint viewed by Barron's says.

The claims are headed for arbitration; Whatnot's terms of service require that users settle legal disputes in a private proceeding.

"We absolutely reject the characterization in this complaint," Whatnot said in a statement to Barron's.

At a Senate hearing in June on sports betting, Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) went on a tangent: "Has anyone in this room heard about Whatnot?" Few had. He raised points that are similar to Lesko's arbitration complaints. "I certainly hope these people get put out of business," Luján said.

While Whatnot is starting to attract attention from lawmakers, "regulators haven't been that interested" in trading-card packs themselves, says Leon Y. Xiao, the lead author of the February study on cards and gambling. The industry has been free to set its own rules, he says.

In a separate study, Xiao looked at 50 different card packs and found that "no pack allowed the consumer to know their odds of getting every individual card."

Xiao says: "This is in contrast to actual lottery products for which you can calculate your chances of winning."

In January 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined videogame developer Cognosphere $20 million to settle federal charges for not disclosing the odds inside a "loot box" in one of its games. In the case of loot boxes, gamers pay to unlock a random item inside a virtual slot machine.

In their complaint, FTC lawyers called out the risk that this sort of ambiguity poses to young consumers: "The unpredictability and randomness of receiving rewards based on chance makes it more exciting to participate, particularly for children and teenagers, due to their greater impulsivity and less developed executive function." It's one reason that states bar minors from gambling products, the FTC said.

Whatnot distances itself from the gambling comparisons. "Gambling isn't allowed on Whatnot, and we strictly enforce this policy," the company said in a statement.

Whatnot's users seem to have a different view. During a break stream in March hosted by Backyard Rips, a viewer complained in the chat about the cards they'd won. One of the breakers replied: "Brother, it's gambling! We're not going to win every time!"

Write to Nick Devor at nicholas.devor@barrons.com

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July 10, 2026 21:31 ET (01:31 GMT)

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