The sports card industry—once the wholesome domain of America’s youth trying to own a piece of their favorite player—has morphed into a high-stakes, multi-billion dollar business that has former collectors and addiction experts raising concerns that it has become a form of legalized gambling.
Gone are the days when kids were racing to their local store in hopes of pulling a cardboard image of their hero from inside a fifty-cent bubble card pack, replaced today by modern collectors spending thousands of dollars, sometimes on a single pack, in pursuit of trying to find rare limited edition cards that can then be resold on the secondary market at a profit.
