An enormous stuffed Pikachu hanging from a pole—like Christ at Golgotha—lords over the Portland Ballroom at the Oregon Convention Center. With a small knowing smile on her face, she observes the action at the Front Row Card Show, a big traveling collectables show that is setting down in Portland for the first time.
What does she see from her perch in the sky? Her subjects, wandering the aisles of the card show, ambling from booth to booth, leaning over glass cases, flipping through binders, taking bulk cards by the handful of flipping through the one by one, looking for that one card thing that might inspire them to drop dollars for the privilege of ownership. She saw preteens, strapped with big protective binders filled with valuable cards, wandering the halls, and looking to do big money deals with adults. She saw dealers, full-time professionals and weekend warriors alike, sitting behind the booths and chit-chatting with whoever passes by, the last class of shopkeeps in the world who are afforded the thrill of doing commerce the old way: bargaining, trading, and underselling.
She saw me, Corbin Smith, deeply and terribly compelled to purchase any card I saw that featured Michael Jordan wearing a ridiculous outfit; I managed to find one in which he sports an enormous pair of jorts in the 90’s, even though my grail card eluded me—Jordan wearing a Dan Flashes shirt on the golf course while talking on a gigantic brick cell phone. She saw a social world, a consumer world, jocks and wannabe jocks, comic and Pokemon nerds, young and old, all smooshed together in one too-small convention ballroom, more than 5,500 people over the course of the weekend, all hunting for the object of their temporary dreams. The fire marshal even had to step in to keep people in line from entering, though the participants were very polite about it, Front Row’s president Angela Bliss told me— another reminder that Portlanders are more willing than anyone in America to tolerate a line.
Front Row started doing card shows three years ago in Las Vegas, riding a new enthusiasm for card collecting that emerged from the pandemic. People, stuck at home and rifling through their stuff and holding onto money they couldn’t spend, juiced the market big time and ushered in a new wave of interest in the hobby.
“We try to keep it 50/50: fifty percent sports, fifty percent non-sports,” says Angela Bliss, who runs Front Row Sports shows all over the west coast (They will be back in Portland in July, in a bigger hall this time). “However, what’s happened in the last twelve months is that many of my sports vendors also sell Pokemon. You’ll look at their names, their brands, ‘Blah Blah Blah Sports Cards,’ and half their table is Pokemon because that’s what’s paying the bills. Pokemon is so hot.” At one of their shows, Bliss says, the vendor tables were sold out, and some of their sports vendors tried to sell their spots in the show to Pokemon vendors. “We don’t allow that. It was a nightmare. So we put rules in place with applications and things like that, but sometimes vendors show up with both.” She let out a little frustrated squeal. “I’m like, ‘what are you doing to me?’”
Card collecting, or “The Hobby” as it’s commonly known, is a whole social and economic world, built on obscure acquisitive desires, strange economic assumptions and forces, and a desire to practice commerce for fun.
What was for sale? Sports stuff, of course. The entire trading card industry was birthed from sports, and sports cards remain a hot product. There are comic books here and there—less than at a comic book show, but they’re around. There are some paintings, some anime, a smattering of people selling really, really old video games as collectors items. There’s not a lot of Magic: The Gathering product on display, as those collectors tend to actually play the game, rendering the hunt for mint condition product unnecessary.
The convention hall was swamped with people hunting for Pokemon cards and ephemera like the above Japanese phone card, from back before everyone had a cell phone plan that afforded them free long distance, largely negating the need to use pay phones. The world’s favorite little guys, famous for their exploits on television, Nintendo game systems, and your telephone, are just hot, hot, hot with collectors right now. This year’s Prismatic Evolutions Booster set features a set of lovely Eevee cards that are selling for absurd/bozo/really high prices; a gold rush that has injected yet another spike of juice into the market for objects that have been on a steady upswing for the last few years. One collector I spoke to, Carr, was carrying around a full set of these cards, all graded at 9 or 10, looking to offload them all in exchange for a single card of equivalent value. (He estimated a total worth of $1,200—which seemed a little low to me.) I asked him what card that would be, and he hesitated. He didn’t know, necessarily. He didn't have a plan, but would know it when he saw the object of his passion, the one that would take his breath away. Some collectors sitting on a gold mine like this might be plotting to acquire some specific thing, but he was seeking the romance of the moment when he would be driven to sell this goldmine.
While I can’t bring myself to drop the kind of money some of these people do—because a) I don’t have any, and b) I can’t free myself from the prison of thought that makes paying a hundred bucks on a slip of cardboard seem bizarre—I do collect Pokemon cards. I like the art. The visuals over the last five years have been fabulous, the product of a small stable of highly-skilled artists rendering an imaginary world where the spirits of folk myth populate a fully catalogable world of various textures and expressionistic modes. I don’t understand why sports brands don’t take this approach more often—a lot of their product these days is just cruddy pictures of dudes drowning in foil. The gold rush has some scalpers brawling in Costco parking lots nowadays, but everyone was on their best behavior at the Portland show. I saw one guy get kicked out because he was trying to sell a bunch of unopened Pokemon packs he was carting around, but he left peacefully and was allowed to attend the Trade Night after the show.
After the show on Saturday, some hardcore collectors congregated in another room for Trade Night, a card-show postgame where people of all ages kick back, shoot the shit, and shift around product and money. This is the strangest moment of any big card show, a strange little unlicensed side-market where eleven-year-olds are doing serious—like thousand dollar-type—business with grown adults, transactions backed with just good faith and handshakes. These kids are foreign to me—they’re hustlers and grinders, packing around little cases and heaps of cash, loaded with market knowledge, and a thirst for dealmaking. They’re not from this time: when all commerce has been stripped of its social aspect; a time after the market became the department store which became the mall which became the online shop which became the gutter asshole of Amazon.com, an institution that strips as much humanity as it possibly can from the act of buying and selling.
The card show exists in the past, where an image is a physical manifestation, commerce is a social act, and where both baseball players and small animals live in the hearts of all people, young and old. Capitalism as a hobby instead of a way of organizing society. It's nice.
