The Tape
The hobby’s barbell keeps stretching in both directions. At the top, seven-figure card sales are running well ahead of last year’s pace, and the legal system just handed the industry’s biggest player a clean win in a closely watched antitrust case. At the bottom, grading has quietly gotten more expensive almost everywhere at once, PSA, SGC, and Beckett have all leaned on price or capacity levers in the last few months, which is squeezing the economics of grading anything that isn’t already valuable. In between, CGC is putting up the kind of growth numbers that should make every other grader’s board ask questions, and a single NFL trade was enough to send a rookie card’s eBay volume into the hundreds overnight. Call it a market that rewards conviction at the high end and punishes marginal bets everywhere else.
Top Stories
Fanatics shakes off a class-action antitrust challenge. A federal judge in the Southern District of New York dismissed Jones v. Fanatics on September 29, tossing all 13 counts from a proposed class of collectors who argued Fanatics’ exclusive licensing deals and acquisitions drove up prices and narrowed choice. The court’s reasoning was procedural as much as substantive: plaintiffs couldn’t point to specific purchases, prices, or dates tied to the alleged harm, and their pricing evidence leaned on Reddit threads and YouTube commentary rather than anything the court could verify. It’s the second such dismissal this year following a March ruling against a similar suit, though a separate antitrust case brought by Panini against Fanatics is still working its way through the system. For an industry built on a handful of exclusive licenses, the ruling is a meaningful data point on how hard it is to challenge that structure in court.
Mickey Mantle’s estate goes after an unauthorized tribute card. Mantle I.P. Holdings and Major League Alumni Marketing filed suit in late September against Cardsmiths, Toynk Toys, and the company’s CEO, alleging a card in a 2025 currency-themed set lifted the iconic 1952 Topps Mantle design wholesale, portrait, Yankees logo, facsimile signature included. The rights holders say they sent cease-and-desist and demand letters back in June and were rebuffed before escalating to federal court. The complaint leans on trademark infringement, dilution, and right-of-publicity claims and asks for an injunction and destruction of existing inventory. Design-adjacent tributes to vintage icons have become a recurring product category across the industry; this suit is worth watching as a test of how much latitude that category actually has.
Panini finds a side door into baseball. With Topps holding the exclusive MLB license, Panini signed a non-exclusive multi-year deal with MLB Players, Inc. covering every active Minor League player, letting it build prospect-driven checklists across up to a dozen annual baseball products without MLB team marks. The first release under the deal lands in November. It’s a clever end-around on an exclusivity structure that’s reshaped the card business since 2023, and a reminder that “exclusive license” rarely means a competitor has no path back into a category.
Upper Deck retires its old instant-card format for something built for the scroll era. The company launched Upper Deck Moments on September 30, a print-on-demand program that gets a digital version of a card into collectors’ hands within hours of a notable in-game moment, tradeable on its e-Pack platform before the physical card ever ships. It replaces the long-running Game Dated Moments line and mirrors the Topps Now and Panini Instant playbooks that have proven collectors will pay for immediacy as much as scarcity. It launches with NHL content and a Professional Women’s Hockey League rollout teased for later this year.
Movers Desk
A single front-office transaction remains one of the most reliable catalysts in modern cards. When the Giants acquired J.J. McCarthy from Minnesota in a late-September trade, his rookie cards saw eBay listing volume jump into the hundreds within a day, spanning everything from budget ungraded copies to premium graded autographs. McCarthy struggled as a starter in Minnesota and had been pushed down the depth chart before the trade, so this is pure speculative repositioning on a change of scenery and a respected coaching staff, not a performance-driven rally. Worth remembering for the Aristocrat framework: this is the kind of modern-card volatility the vintage, condition-verified thesis is explicitly built to avoid.
Retail distribution for grading just got wider. PSA’s new PSA Go program is now live at roughly fifty Lids locations nationwide, letting collectors drop cards off at a mall store instead of handling submission and shipping themselves. It extends PSA’s physical footprint beyond hobby shops and GameStop into mainstream retail, a distribution strategy that’s as much about customer acquisition as convenience.
Tom Brady’s CardVault retail chain is expanding into the Midwest, with a location planned for downtown Indianapolis this fall, positioned near the city’s convention and stadium district. Retail footprint continues to be a quiet proxy for where operators see durable collector demand.
Topps extended its exclusive Neymar Jr. partnership through a new multi-year deal spanning cards, stickers, and trading card games, adding autograph and match-worn memorabilia rights, while its upcoming flagship basketball set will reflect the summer’s biggest player movement, with LeBron James appearing in Sixers gear and Giannis Antetokounmpo in Miami colors for the first time. Both are reminders that player movement and athlete licensing remain the two most dependable demand levers in modern cards, for better or worse.
Grading Desk
The backlog story is the hobby’s longest-running soap opera, and this month it’s actually trending the right way. PSA’s active queue has fallen from a late-July peak of roughly 12.4 million cards to about 9 million as of September 22, a drop of 900,000 in just the last two weeks of that stretch alone. The company credits new grading centers in Plano, Texas and Frankfurt, Germany, plus capacity gains it says now run nearly five times 2021 levels. PSA has not set a firm date for fully reopening its paused Value tiers, which remain closed since June, but has rolled out an interim mid-priced Standard service with a roughly three-month turnaround while it works toward its stated goal of a 5 million-card queue.
Volume data tells a sharper story about where share is actually moving. Across August, PSA graded about 537,000 sports cards, down sharply both month over month and year over year as its lower tiers stayed shuttered. CGC, by contrast, graded roughly 218,000 sports cards in August, up about a third from July and roughly six times its volume from August of last year. Beckett and SGC remain comparatively small players in sports by volume. However the backlog saga resolves, CGC’s growth curve this year is the single most important competitive data point in grading, and it deserves more attention than it’s getting.
That growth is coming against a backdrop of rising costs across the board. SGC raised prices significantly in early September, citing the same capacity and demand pressures PSA has cited all year, and in the process gave up much of its longstanding position as the budget alternative. Beckett, meanwhile, reopened its base and standard tiers in mid-September after a six-week pause, while cautioning it could pause again if demand outstrips capacity. Net effect: grading a card of modest value now pencils out far less often than it did a year ago across every major grader, not just PSA, which is quietly reshaping what’s worth submitting at all.
Catalyst Calendar
October 7 – Topps Allen & Ginter Baseball releases, alongside the first wave of 2026-27 Upper Deck Series 1 Hockey, which debuts this season’s Young Guns rookie class.
October 9 – Leaf Football hits shelves with its college and veteran autograph checklists.
Mid-October – PSA’s own trajectory puts its backlog near the 5 million-card threshold it has cited as the trigger for reopening Value-tier submissions; watch for an announcement here, as it would be the single biggest news event grading has produced all year.
November – Panini’s first Three and Two Baseball release ships, the debut product under its new non-exclusive Minor League Players deal.
2027-28 – The National Sports Collectors Convention has confirmed a return to Detroit for 2028, with Huntington Place undergoing a major expansion ahead of the show; expect formal 2027 host-city news before year-end.
Deal Desk
Fanatics and UEFA extended their Topps-branded trading card and sticker partnership for six more years, running from 2027 through 2033, covering the Champions League, Women’s Champions League, and UEFA’s other club competitions. The renewal adds a new Debut Patch program starting next season, authenticating a match-worn patch from a player’s first Champions League appearance into a one-of-one card, a format that’s worked well for other properties and is clearly being imported here.
Panini’s new Minor League Players agreement with MLBPA, detailed above, is also worth flagging as deal flow in its own right: it’s a licensing structure built specifically to route around an existing exclusive, and it may become a template other challengers borrow against other single-license categories.
Bottom Line
Three threads are worth carrying into next week. First, the legal system keeps siding with incumbents on market-structure challenges, which should reduce (not eliminate) near-term regulatory tail risk for the biggest licensors, even as smaller IP-enforcement suits like the Mantle estate’s action show the hobby getting more litigious at the margins. Second, grading has quietly become a less friendly business for low-value submissions across every major player, not just PSA, which should modestly reduce speculative grading volume on marginal modern cards over the next few quarters. Third, and most relevant to the Aristocrat thesis, the gap between modern-card volatility (a single trade moving hundreds of listings overnight) and high-grade vintage’s steadier, fixed-supply behavior is on full display this week. That contrast is the whole argument for the strategy, and it’s playing out in real time.
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