Trading Cards in Pop Culture: From Baseball to Blockchain

Trading cards have been a fixture of popular culture for nearly 140 years. They predate radio, television, the internet, and every digital technology that has since tried to replace them. A cigarette manufacturer in the 1880s had the same basic insight that The Pokemon Company has today: people will collect small illustrated cards with an intensity that borders on obsession, and that obsession can be monetized.

This is the full story, from tobacco inserts to blockchain experiments, and where the medium is heading next.

The Origin: Cigarette Cards and the Birth of Collecting (1875-1930)

The first trading cards were not traded. They were advertising inserts.

In the 1870s and 1880s, American and British tobacco companies began inserting small illustrated cards into cigarette packs. The original purpose was structural: stiff cardboard inserts prevented the soft cigarette packs from being crushed in pockets. But the companies quickly realized that printing images on those inserts transformed a packaging solution into a marketing tool.

Allen and Ginter, a Richmond, Virginia tobacco company, issued what most historians consider the first major trading card sets beginning in 1886. Their "World's Champions" series featured boxers, wrestlers, shooters, and other athletes in hand-drawn color lithography. The cards were small (approximately 1.5 by 2.75 inches), printed on heavy cardstock, and visually striking for the era.

The key innovation was serialization. Allen and Ginter did not print one card. They printed sets of 50, encouraging consumers to "collect them all." This is the foundational mechanic of every trading card product since: completionism. The desire to fill gaps in a collection drives continued purchasing behavior. A smoker who had 48 of 50 Champions cards would buy more cigarettes specifically to find the two cards they were missing.

By the 1890s, dozens of tobacco companies were producing card sets. Subjects expanded beyond athletes to include flags of nations, birds, flowers, military uniforms, famous actors, and historical figures. The American Tobacco Company, formed in 1890 through the merger of several smaller firms, became the largest producer of trading cards in the world.

The most valuable cigarette card ever produced is the T206 Honus Wagner, issued between 1909 and 1911 by the American Tobacco Company. Wagner, a star shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, reportedly objected to his image being used to sell tobacco (though some historians dispute the exact reason for the card's scarcity). Production was halted early, resulting in an estimated 50-200 copies surviving. A T206 Wagner in SGC 3 condition sold for $7.25 million in August 2022 through Robert Edward Auctions, making it one of the most expensive trading cards of any type.

The cigarette card era ended gradually. Anti-tobacco sentiment, paper shortages during World War I and II, and the rise of new media reduced the incentive for tobacco companies to produce cards. By the 1940s, the practice had largely ceased. But the behavioral template they established, serialized collectible cards distributed inside consumer products, would prove permanent.

The Golden Age of Sports Cards: Topps and the 1950s-1980s

The modern trading card industry begins with Bowman Gum Company and Topps Chewing Gum, Inc. in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Bowman produced the first major postwar baseball card set in 1948. Topps followed in 1951 with a set that included cards packaged with bubble gum. In 1956, Topps acquired Bowman, establishing a near-monopoly on baseball cards that would last until 1981.

The Topps model refined everything the cigarette card era had pioneered. Cards were sold in wax packs at candy stores, drugstores, and newsstands for five cents per pack. Each pack contained several cards and a stick of gum (the gum was terrible; it always was). The cards featured player photos on the front with statistics on the back, creating both collectible artwork and reference material.

Topps understood something about their audience that drove every design decision: kids were the primary market. The card designs were bold, colorful, and easy to read. Stats were simplified. The wax pack format was priced for allowance money. And the distribution through candy stores and drugstores placed the product exactly where kids already spent time.

The cultural impact was enormous. Baseball cards became a universal childhood experience in postwar America. Kids traded at school, organized cards in shoeboxes, memorized statistics from the card backs, and argued about whose collection was better. The cards functioned as social currency: a rare card could earn playground status, and an unfavorable trade could ruin a friendship for a week.

Several developments expanded the market through the 1970s and 1980s. Fleer and Donruss broke the Topps monopoly in 1981 after a court ruling on antitrust grounds, increasing supply and driving innovation. Dedicated hobby shops emerged as retail channels, along with price guides like Beckett Baseball Card Monthly (first published 1984) that assigned market values for the first time. And the "investment" narrative took hold: a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card that originally cost a penny sold for $51,000 in 1991. Adults began buying new sets as investments, fueling a boom that pushed sports card retail sales to an estimated $1.5 billion by 1991.

The 1990s Explosion: Three Games That Changed Everything

The 1990s transformed trading cards from a sports memorabilia hobby into a global entertainment category. Three products launched within four years of each other, and each one reshaped the market.

Magic: The Gathering (1993)

Richard Garfield, a mathematics doctoral candidate, designed Magic: The Gathering and pitched it to Peter Adkison at Wizards of the Coast. The game was released in August 1993 with an initial print run of 2.6 million cards (10 million had been projected as a year's supply; they sold out in weeks).

Magic did something no trading card product had done before: it combined collecting with gameplay. Previous cards, baseball cards, cigarette cards, non-sport novelty cards, were static objects. You looked at them, sorted them, stored them. Magic cards were game pieces. Two players could sit down with their collections and play a strategic game with enormous depth.

This fusion of collecting and gameplay created a market dynamic that did not previously exist. Cards had two sources of value: collectibility (rarity, art quality, nostalgia) and playability (competitive power in tournament formats). A card could be worth $50 because it was rare, or because it won tournaments, or both. This dual-value structure made the secondary market far more complex and active than sports cards, because demand was driven by both collectors and players.

By 1997, Magic had sold over 2 billion cards worldwide according to Wizards of the Coast. The Pro Tour (launched 1996) offered $1 million in annual prize money and created a competitive ecosystem that sustained demand year-round. Magic had single-handedly created the "trading card game" (TCG) category and spawned dozens of competitors, most of which failed.

Pokemon Trading Card Game (1996/1999)

The Pokemon TCG launched in Japan in October 1996, developed by Media Factory and creatures Inc. The English-language version, published by Wizards of the Coast (the same company behind Magic), arrived in the United States in January 1999.

Pokemon cards arrived in America at the perfect moment. The anime had begun airing on US television in September 1998 and was an immediate hit with children ages 5-12. The Game Boy games (Red and Blue) launched in September 1998 and sold millions of copies. By the time the card game hit shelves in January 1999, demand was already overwhelming.

The scale of the Pokemon card phenomenon was unprecedented. Wizards of the Coast printed over 11 billion Pokemon cards in the first three years of the English-language release, according to company reports at the time. Retail stores sold out within hours of restocking. Schools across the United States banned Pokemon cards from classrooms because trading was disrupting instruction (a reaction that, predictably, made the cards even more desirable).

Pokemon cards succeeded where many TCGs failed because the barrier to entry was far lower than Magic. Simpler rules, appealing artwork, and the multimedia reinforcement loop (anime, Game Boy games, and cards all driving demand for each other) created irresistible social pressure. Critically, Pokemon also succeeded as pure collectibles independent of the game. Many children never learned to play; they collected, sorted, and traded based on characters they liked and rarity of what they pulled. The holofoil cards were coveted for visual appeal rather than strategic value, expanding the audience beyond gamers to anyone who liked Pokemon.

Yu-Gi-Oh! (1999/2002)

The Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, based on Kazuki Takahashi's manga (serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump beginning in 1996), launched in Japan in 1999 and in North America in 2002. Like Pokemon, it benefited from a multimedia tie-in: the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime aired on Kids' WB starting in 2001 and created enormous demand before the cards were even available in English.

Yu-Gi-Oh! positioned itself between Pokemon and Magic in terms of complexity. The game was deeper than Pokemon, with trap cards, chain mechanics, and more intricate combos, but more accessible than Magic, with no mana system to manage and no deck color restrictions in the base format. This middle ground attracted an audience of roughly 10-16 year olds who had outgrown Pokemon's simplicity but were not ready for Magic's strategic demands.

Konami, the publisher, reported cumulative worldwide sales of 25 billion Yu-Gi-Oh! cards by 2011, making it one of the best-selling TCGs of all time. The game's longevity is remarkable: as of 2026, Yu-Gi-Oh! continues to release new sets, hold tournaments, and maintain an active player base, 27 years after its initial Japanese release.

Together, these three games created a TCG ecosystem that dominated youth culture through the late 1990s and early 2000s. At their peak, combined annual revenue from Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards exceeded $5 billion globally, according to estimates from industry analyst firms.

The Decline and the Junk Wax Lesson (2000-2015)

The early 2000s brought a reckoning for the trading card industry, and the cause was overproduction.

In sports cards, this era is called the "Junk Wax" period (roughly 1987-1994). During the late 1980s and early 1990s boom, manufacturers printed cards in unprecedented quantities. Topps, Fleer, Donruss, Upper Deck, Score, and others all produced multiple sets per year, with print runs in the hundreds of millions. Cards that collectors hoarded as "investments" were produced in such volume that the supply overwhelmed any possible demand.

The result was collapse. A 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, which traded for $50-$100 at its peak, dropped to $5-$10 by the late 1990s. Complete sets of 1988-1992 baseball cards, which collectors had stockpiled in climate-controlled storage, turned out to be worth less than the cost of the binders holding them. The "invest in cards" narrative of the 1980s was exposed as a speculative bubble driven by overproduction.

The lesson is straightforward: scarcity drives value, and manufactured scarcity only works if the supply is actually limited. When every card shop in America had cases of unsold product, the cards were not scarce, and the market priced them accordingly.

TCGs experienced a parallel decline. Magic maintained its audience through game design innovation, but growth stalled. Pokemon card sales dropped significantly after the initial mania cooled in 2002-2003. Yu-Gi-Oh peaked culturally around 2005-2006. All three continued releasing sets, but the explosive cultural centrality of trading cards in the 1990s was gone, replaced by steady niche enthusiasm. Video games, internet culture, and smartphones competed for the same attention, and a 12-year-old in 2010 had options that a 12-year-old in 1999 did not.

The 2020s Revival: Nostalgia, Streaming, and New Platforms

The revival began before COVID, accelerated during it, and has reshaped the industry permanently.

Several forces converged in 2019-2021.

The nostalgia demographic reached peak purchasing power. Adults who collected Pokemon cards in 1999, Magic cards in 1998, or baseball cards in 1992 were now 25-40 years old with established careers and disposable income. The emotional pull of childhood collections, combined with the financial ability to act on it, created a wave of returning collectors who entered the market at higher price points than the kids they once were.

YouTube and TikTok created a content economy around pack opening. The visual format of "open a pack, see what you pulled" was perfect for short-form video. Logan Paul's Pokemon card streams in 2020-2021 were the most visible example, but hundreds of smaller creators built audiences around pack openings across Pokemon, Magic, sports cards, and Yu-Gi-Oh. These videos served as both entertainment and advertising: every viral pull drove viewers to buy their own packs.

COVID lockdowns compressed years of behavioral change into months. With limited entertainment options and unexpected disposable income from stimulus checks, millions of adults rediscovered card collecting simultaneously. eBay reported that trading card sales on the platform more than doubled in 2020, with Pokemon and sports cards leading the growth.

NBA Top Shot introduced NFT trading cards. In October 2020, Dapper Labs launched NBA Top Shot, a platform selling officially licensed NBA video highlights as blockchain-based digital collectibles. In the first six months, Top Shot generated over $500 million in transaction volume. A LeBron James dunk "moment" sold for $387,600.

NBA Top Shot was culturally significant because it tested whether digital assets could replicate the collecting experience of physical cards. The answer: partially and temporarily. The initial excitement was real, driven by novelty, speculation, and the 2021 crypto bull market. But as crypto prices declined in 2022 and novelty faded, Top Shot's daily active users fell over 90% from their peak by 2024.

The NFT experiment taught the industry that digital scarcity alone is not enough. Physical cards have tactile appeal, display value, and 140 years of cultural precedent. Digital cards need to offer something physical cards cannot. The projects that focused on animated art, interactive gameplay, or social features unique to digital fared better than those selling JPEGs with serial numbers.

Pokemon TCG Pocket: Digital Collecting Done Right

If NBA Top Shot showed how not to do digital trading cards (scarcity without gameplay, speculation without collecting culture), Pokemon TCG Pocket showed a more promising model.

Launched in October 2024, TCG Pocket brought the Pokemon card collecting experience to smartphones. The app let users open digital booster packs with the same rarity tiers as physical cards: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and increasingly premium tiers including Illustration Rares, Full Arts, and the ultra-scarce Immersive cards with animated 3D effects.

TCG Pocket did several things that NFT projects did not.

It was free to play. Users opened packs without spending money (with a timer-based system, free packs every few hours). This removed the speculative investment framing and replaced it with a casual collecting experience. Nobody was buying TCG Pocket cards hoping to resell them at a profit. They were collecting because collecting is fun.

It leaned into animation and interactivity. TCG Pocket's "immersive" cards used 3D rendering and particle effects that physical cards could not replicate. Tilting your phone made the card art shift in parallax. Holographic effects responded to device orientation. These were not static images; they were interactive objects that justified the digital medium.

It connected to the broader Pokemon ecosystem. TCG Pocket was not an isolated product. It existed within the world's largest media franchise ($150+ billion in total lifetime revenue as of 2024, according to The Pokemon Company's public reporting), alongside games, anime, films, and physical merchandise. The brand recognition and emotional attachment carried over from other Pokemon experiences.

The numbers were staggering. Over 60 million downloads in the first few months, with daily active user counts in the tens of millions through 2025. The Pokemon Company reported record revenue for fiscal year 2025, with TCG Pocket contributing to digital revenue growth while physical card sales also increased. The app proved that digital and physical collecting could coexist and reinforce each other rather than competing.

AI-Generated Cards: The Next Wave

The most recent evolution of trading cards is the application of generative AI to card creation.

The premise is straightforward: instead of collecting cards designed by a professional team and mass-produced, what if anyone could generate a unique card featuring any subject? Upload a photo of your dog, your best friend, or a random object, and receive a trading card with AI-generated art, stats, abilities, and a randomly assigned rarity.

This is what tools like MakeACard do. The AI pipeline handles the entire process: analyzing the uploaded image, generating stylized card art, creating contextually appropriate stats and abilities, assigning a rarity tier with weighted probability, and rendering the complete card with holographic effects for premium rarities.

AI-generated cards represent a different model from traditional TCGs. They are not mass-produced; each card is unique. They are not competitively played (there is no standardized rule set for custom AI cards). They are not financially valuable on a secondary market. What they offer is the personalized collecting experience: the dopamine of pulling a rare card, the satisfaction of seeing your own photo transformed into trading card art, and the social sharing potential of a unique creation.

The cultural significance is in democratization. For 140 years, creating a trading card required either a major corporation (Topps, Wizards of the Coast, The Pokemon Company) or significant design skill and printing infrastructure. AI generation removes those barriers. A 10-year-old with a phone can create a card that looks (approximately) like something that could come out of a booster pack. The creation experience, not just the collecting experience, is now accessible.

This shift parallels broader trends in AI-enabled content creation. Just as AI writing tools democratized text creation and AI music tools democratized music production, AI card generators democratize a specific form of visual design. The quality ceiling is lower than professional work (an AI-generated card is not as refined as an officially illustrated Pokemon card), but the accessibility ceiling is incomparably higher.

Whether AI-generated cards will merge with or remain parallel to the traditional TCG market is an open question. One plausible future: traditional TCGs continue to dominate competitive play and high-end collecting, while AI-generated cards carve out a distinct niche in casual creation, personalization, and social sharing. These are different use cases serving different motivations, and there is room for both.

What 140 Years of Trading Cards Tells Us

The through-line from 1886 to 2026 is consistent. Every successful trading card product, across every era and medium, relies on the same psychological mechanics.

Serialization creates completionism. Allen and Ginter printed 50-card sets. Topps printed 660-card sets. Pokemon prints 190-card sets. The number changes; the impulse to "collect them all" does not.

Scarcity creates desire. The Honus Wagner T206. The Base Set 1st Edition Charizard. The Pikachu Illustrator. The value of these cards is inseparable from their rarity. When supply is genuinely limited, demand translates directly to price. When supply is abundant (the Junk Wax era), prices collapse regardless of demand.

Visual appeal is non-negotiable. Every successful card product invests heavily in artwork. The cigarette cards of the 1890s used chromolithography, the most expensive printing technique available. Topps hired photographers and designers to make baseball cards visually compelling. Pokemon commissions hundreds of illustrators to produce card art that ranges from charming to genuinely museum-quality. Cards that look mediocre do not get collected, regardless of their other qualities.

Community multiplies individual interest. Trading cards are inherently social. You trade with other collectors. You play games against opponents. You show off your pulls to friends. You argue about values in online forums. The community layer transforms a solitary collecting activity into a shared cultural experience. Every era of trading cards has been sustained by its community, from playground trades in the 1950s to Reddit threads and TikTok pulls in the 2020s.

The medium evolves; the mechanics persist. Cardboard, digital screens, blockchain ledgers, AI-generated images. The physical form changes. The underlying mechanics, rarity, serialization, visual appeal, community, remain constant because they are rooted in human psychology, not in any particular technology.

Trading cards will continue to evolve. The next 10 years will likely bring augmented reality cards that animate when viewed through a phone, AI-generated cards that are indistinguishable from professionally illustrated ones, and perhaps entirely new formats that we cannot yet predict. But whatever form they take, they will still be small, collectible objects that people care about more than they logically should. That irrational attachment is the entire point. It always has been.

Sources

Heritage Auctions - Auction records for vintage baseball cards, trading cards, and collectibles including the T206 Honus Wagner and high-value Pokemon card sales
The Pokemon Company - Corporate Data - Official revenue figures, TCG sales data, and franchise lifetime revenue
Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro - Historical data on Magic: The Gathering sales, tournament structure, and card production volumes
Robert Edward Auctions - Record of the $7.25 million T206 Honus Wagner sale in August 2022
Topps Company History - Historical data on baseball card production, the Bowman acquisition, and the development of modern sports card formats
Konami Holdings Corporation - Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG cumulative sales figures (25+ billion cards as of 2011)