San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
In some box breaks, big bucks in the cards
It’s Thursday night at Boomtown Sports Cards & Pokeshop on Bandera Road.
I’m arriving just 10 minutes before closing time, but this San Antonio business doesn’t depend on shoppers inside the store. It’s already made tonight’s sales online.
Inside, Boomtown employee Ryan Matthew Mitchell delivers rapid-fire patter to his Facebook Live video audience. His iPhone is propped up on a cardboard box, its camera trained on his hands as he unwraps collectible NFL trading cards from their neat foil packets.
“Here we are. Boomtown history in the making,” Mitchell says. “All right! T.J. Watt. He’s good. We’re going to sort through the veteran base here. Mike Gesicki. Max Crosby, also very good.”
I really have no idea what I’m watching or what Mitchell and his audience are reacting to. But I’ve been told this is called a “box break.” It’s the third online box break the store has run today. It may do dozens of these a week.
“Tannehill. Dalton Schultz, Houston Texans. We’re just spinning,” Mitchell says. “We got Bengals, Sam Hubbard coming in. Coming in with Tyler Lockett, the Man in Motion Inserts, Quenton Johnston on the Rookie
Rush.”
In the Facebook live chat, participants are reacting both to the cards and Mitchell’s narration. The whole event has the vibe you might feel at a racetrack, auction — or casino.
Vic Nava, Mitchell’s boss and the owner of Boomtown, offers interpretive commentary.
Each live viewer prepaid
$14 and has been randomly assigned an NFL team. If any card from the break is on their team, they get that card. The boxes of cards opened this night consisted of one $300-retail box of NFL trading cards and two more boxes that retail for $50 each.
Those prices are determined by how many autographed cards and how many rookie cards are guaranteed to be in each box.
What the viewers are really looking for, it turns out, are cards with autographs and low serial number rookie cards for star players. More than anything, the potential prize from this box break is a rookie card for C.J. Stroud, quarterback of the Houston Texans. Alas, Stroud’s card doesn’t come up.
“And then we have the Saints, Brian Bresee, rookie card,” Mitchell continues.
How it started
Nava started box breaking online in 2019, building an audience of card-collecting enthusiasts. But for many in the audience, this is slightly different than simply collecting. It may be better understood as a form of gambling.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, trading cards of all types — Major League Baseball, Pokémon, Marvel characters — soared in value. Stuck at home, seeking entertainment and with disposable cash, the audience for collectemployees,
ible cards and online card breaks soared.
And Nava turned a hobby into a business.
Earlier in the day, before I arrived at the store, they’d broken a box and found a vintage autographed Steve Young card. This, Nava tells me, should be worth from $600 to $800 — many multiples of the initial investment. Whoever got the San Francisco 49ers for that box break hit the absolute jackpot — if they decide to sell.
Many tonight will not get cards in the break worth their full $14 investment, but every once in a while you get a Steve Young or a C.J. Stroud.
Elsewhere in the store, under a glass countertop, I spot
an $800 Wonder Woman Marvel Comics card. What in the actual … huh? What I’m not understanding initially, however, is that it’s in mint condition and has the serial number 2 on it. So, you know, there you go.
This is investing?
Look, I sometimes hesitate to give investment advice. I know you should not invest in NFL trading cards any more than you should try to profit from other collectibles, such as bitcoin, Beanie Babies, gold bars, NFTs or signed Picassos. If it doesn’t produce cash flows then it’s a collectible and I’m not going to endorse it as an investment.
However, Nava and his
like Mitchell, clearly know they’ve got willing buyers who will enthusiastically pay these prices to satisfy their passion for collectibles.
As a hobby and a gamble, I grok the hedonic hit of the buyers. Nava absolutely understands that, for his customers, this is a heady combination of gambling and investing.
“The way I explain to people when it comes to cards is that every single card is like a share” in the stock market, he says. “It’s such a volatile market. Cards can move up and down in a day. It can shoot up one day, you drop it on eBay, you make a bunch of money, the next day it goes down.”
To illustrate this, Nava tells me this story:
Back in 2020, during one of his online box breaks, a customer who’d paid $20 to get in on the game landed a rare Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow rookie “Kaboom” card. One of ten. (Whatever that means.)
The customer asked Nava what he should do, but by the time that box break was over, a fellow participant had offered him $2,000 for it. After Nava’s customer sold the card to that buyer, Burrow got injured and the value plummeted.
Practically from one moment to the next.
In the 2021 season, however, Burrow led the Bengals to the Super Bowl. The buyer who paid $2,000 sold the card online for $50,000. One week before the Super Bowl. One week before the Bengals lost and, presumably, the value dropped again.
Passion for cards
This is an authentic passion for employees like Mitchell.
Off camera, he tells me that before he started working at Boomtown, he would happily spend up to three hours a day poring over collectible cards, parsing value, seeking the rare gem and tracking this volatile market. Working at Boomtown
allows him to pursue his interest and get paid while doing what he loves.
Nava shares more about the business side of Boomtown, which opened in January 2022.
“It was a dream to have a collectibles store, ever since I was young,” he says.
But this passion combined with his frequent box breaks since 2019 to serve his growing online audience had started to take over his house.
“So the wife was, like, I need you to get this stuff out of here,” he says. “So it gave me permission to open a shop.”
Nava estimates box breaks make up about 25% of his revenue. Buying collections from collectors and reselling them makes up another 50%. And he is also a supplier of new single cards that collectors seek. Not surprisingly, he does a brisk business in Victor Wembanyama rookie NBA cards.
Finally, he is an authorized card grader according to the Professional Sports Authenticator terms — a service he provides for a fee. Serious collectors depend on objective “grading” of collectible cards to determine resale value.
With fees to get that grading done, it’s a service Boomtown is happy to supply.
In his first year in 2022, Nava says Boomtown did $980,000 in revenue. In 2023 it had sales of $1.4 million. This year is on pace for even larger revenue. He and his staff want to go from three online box breaks a day to 10.
Nava’s new Boomtown website, launched this week, will allow them to accelerate the pace. It will also serve as a clearing site for tracking the status of cards his team is in the process of PSA grading.