Putting on a show: Local sports card collectors work to put Spokane on hobbyists’ national map

Formerly an amateur hobbyist, Nathan O’Brien has turned pro.

O’Brien and his wife, Rachel, relocated to Spokane from Puget Sound’s Whidbey Island in 2006 after he accepted a job at Gonzaga University. O’Brien had been an avid collector of “every type of sports card, comic book card – cards from almost every occasion, even movies and TV,” he said, frequently visiting collectible shows throughout the region.

“Comics and cards, that was my wheelhouse of collectibles and things to do as a kid,” O’Brien said. “Growing up I was going to sporting events, going to comic shows, to shows of all different shapes and sizes. They seemed to be in abundance on the West Side and highly popular, whether they were in a church or a hotel ballroom. I was used to going to things like that with family and friends. It’s something that is part of who I am and part of my culture.”

O’Brien, 45, said the dearth of exhibitions near his new home in Spokane “blew my mind” and set the stage for what he wanted to do next.

“I called my buddy in Seattle who would always go to games and shows with me,” O’Brien said. “I told him I’m going to start my own show. He asked, ‘Do you even know how to do a comicon?’ I said, ‘No, but I’ll figure it out.’ ”

O’Brien hosted the first Spokane Comicon the following May in 2007.

“The first two years we were at Gonzaga, where I was working,” he said. “I rented the Cataldo Hall, which was a small venue for meetings, wedding receptions. It was maybe a couple hundred bucks. … The first year we had 18 exhibitors and probably about 300 people in attendance. It was a first-year show, a single-day event. I was happy with that. I didn’t know if anybody would show up. I didn’t lose my shirt, I still had a roof over my head, and I thought I’d do it again.”

The show has experienced growth nearly every year, and O’Brien rebranded the event Lilac City Comicon in 2015 when it moved to the Spokane Convention Center, a transition he acknowledged gave his exhibition an added sense of legitimacy. He expects more than 10,000 paid attendees for the first time when the event returns June 1-2.

“It’s grown across the board with everything: vendors, guests, attendees, the community embracing it,” O’Brien said. “As Spokane has grown, so has the show.”

O’Brien was in Post Falls on March 16 as a vendor peddling his sports card collection at an exhibition at the Prairie Athletic Center at 9044 W. Prairie Ave. He kept his comics and action figures at home and brought a collection of graded and ungraded baseball cards and “what I thought would be exciting to people coming to the show,” he said.

“This is new for me deciding to take card collecting to the next level,” he added. “It’s primarily been just a hobby, but now I think I’m getting more joy out of it. I get to talk to like-minded people and like-minded vendors. I’m just getting into exhibiting at card shows, but I’ve already signed up for future shows.”

O’Brien said when he decided he wanted to start selling some of his collection, he wasn’t sure if any card shows existed locally. He soon discovered various card shops throughout the region have scheduled events in Spokane and within driving distance in places like Pullman and Missoula.

“I was about an inch away from starting a card show, whether it was part of the show floor already at (Lilac City) Comicon or my own thing,” he said, “Then I thought, ‘No, I need to do more research.’ Then I found a Facebook group for (card shows in) the Pacific Northwest, and most of it was focused on Spokane and North Idaho.

“I thought, ‘Perfect, I don’t need to step on anybody’s toes.’ I’d rather participate.”

Filling a niche

Spokane native Jordan Athos was compelled to organize a sports card show after buying his own card shop in Spokane Valley in 2022.

“We have a good sports card market around here,” Athos said, “but no one puts on a decent show. After enough people were asking if I’d put on a show, it’s like if you want something done right, you do it yourself.”

Athos, a 24-year-old who owns Spokane Valley Sportscards at 9404 E Sprague Ave., said he partnered with friend Thomas Acosta and hosted the first Pacific Northwest Card Show at the Spokane Valley Event Center on Memorial Day weekend that same year.

“I was just under 60 tables for that one,” he said. “It felt kind of cramped. It didn’t go the way I wanted it to. But 60 tables is still a good show, and it filled up quick.”

The modest success encouraged him to move the event to the Spokane Convention Center last year, and he has lined up another show for May 18. Athos said the added services and extra space at the facility contributed to a better experience for vendors and visitors. He said exhibitors predominately sell sports cards and trading game cards, but there are always a “few random things” available for collectors.

“Now my goal is to increase foot traffic,” Athos said, noting he expects “between 1,000 and 1,500” paid attendees and 105 vendors this year.

“I don’t make a ton of money taking the show in,” he added. “I heard people complain about a $5 entry fee. The amount of time I spend (organizing and hosting the event) … I pay myself about $3 an hour for my time. I do it because people deserve a good show, and I want to help put one on. They support me all year. I can support them for a weekend.”

Athos bought his store from its previous owner, Alan Bisson, in 2022. He said he had been visiting Bisson’s shop “since I was 3, 4 years old” and was a student at Whitworth University when Bisson began talking about retirement in 2020.

“He said, ‘Hey, I’m looking to retire and want someone who will keep the shop running and not just take the inventory and sell it for scraps and be done with it,’ ” Athos said. “I love sports cards, and I know how to do it. I sold cards on the side to pay for college. I had never thought about (owning a card shop), but I was good at it, and I enjoy it, so yeah, let’s start talking about it and make it happen. … I had about two years to get all that in line. We set the date in 2020 and made it happen.”

Athos said there was an important advantage to buying Bisson’s store rather than opening a store of his own and having a blank slate with which to work. Bisson already had acquired the licensing agreements necessary to purchase boxes and packs of cards from manufacturers at a discounted rate compared to the average consumer.

“It’s hard to get in where you get (boxes) at a better price and sell at a better price and still profit,” Athos said.

Athos has spent much of his life collecting rookie cards and autographs from Hall of Fame football players.

“I collected with my dad, who collected with his dad,” said Athos, who still is pursuing the remaining 30 autographs of Hall of Famers not in his collection. “If you can collect anybody, why not collect the best of all time?”

Tom Priel, 62, is the owner of Sport Cards Miniatures-n-More at 3000 E. Seltice Way in Post Falls. He grew up a Baltimore Orioles fan, and his dad took him to an Orioles game when he was 12. He said his father got up from his seat at one point and returned minutes later with a paper sack and handed it to his son.

“Inside was a signed baseball from Brooks Robinson,” Priel said. “There is nothing that tops that. It’s what got me into baseball, sports cards and that kind of thing.”

Priel, still loyal to the Orioles after living in Maryland during his teens, said he always is on the lookout to add cards featuring Baltimore catcher Adley Rutschman and shortstop Gunnar Henderson to his personal collection. Rutschman and Henderson have won the previous two American League Rookie of the Year awards.

Priel said he sold a carpet cleaning business to pay for his card store in Post Falls, but the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States in March 2020 derailed his grand opening one month later.

“I had a brand-new store and a lot of inventory to start,” he said. “But people weren’t going out. People didn’t know where my store was. I had a sandwich sign on the sidewalk, and people would see it and come look. I had to go on Facebook. I’m not a social media guy, but I had to do what I had to do. I had replica Super Bowl rings, and that helped me get through that. I had enough of them, showed pictures of them online, and people would say, ‘I want to get one of those.’ … I felt like a drug dealer meeting people in parking lots.”

Priel sells mega boxes and booster boxes, as well as packs and individual cards, he said. Other merchandise includes NFL key chains and mini helmets, Funko collectibles, Disney pins and dollhouse miniatures. He added Pokemon cards to his store last year and learned sports card collectors’ and Pokemon aficionados’ interests can overlap.

“I can get a Pokemon sale and a sports card sale at the same time,” he said.

An industry in transition

Base cards form the foundation of annual printing runs of sports cards at manufacturers like Topps, Panini, Upper Deck and Leaf. Those companies, however, also print other versions of cards in smaller runs, making those more rare than their basic counterparts and more popular to serious collectors. Panini, for example, uses its National Treasures (autographs, jersey cards), Prizm (“parallel” to base cards, features different color schemes and finishes), Optic (thicker card stock, reflective) and Select (elite athletes) subsets. Companies may also print limited runs and stamp serial numbers (No. 1 of 200, for instance) on cards to further increase their rarity and, in theory, their value.

Base cards are a good starting point for collectors because the cards are more affordable and available in higher numbers. O’Brien suggested focusing on favorite players and teams.

“The best thing for people interested in collecting is to stick with what you know,” he said. “And if you don’t know it, there’s nothing wrong with doing some research and educating yourself. It’s a lot of fun. It’s something I love to do on the side because there is a natural crossover with sports I’m already following, and I like collecting in general.”

Seismic shifts are coming to the sports card business. Fanatics, a retailer of licensed sportswear, muscled its way into the card industry when it negotiated an exclusive deal to produce trading cards for Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association in 2021. That undercut Topps, which began producing baseball cards in 1952 and had an exclusive rights contract with MLB through 2026. Fanatics bought Topps later in 2021 for $500 million.

Fanatics quickly pivoted to the NBA and secured an exclusive deal also set to begin in 2026 – after Panini’s current agreement expires. Fanatics then finalized a similar deal with the NFL, and the NFL Players Association terminated its agreement with Panini early to begin its partnership with Fanatics last year.

Professional sports leagues, players associations and team owners owned roughly a 10% stake in Fanatics as of 2022, according to a CNBC report.

“I’m kind of leery,” Priel said, suspecting Fanatics’ ties to apparel and athletes could influence its card products. “We’ll wait and see if that makes sense.”

O’Brien was more optimistic.

“Right now I think it’s a good thing because (Fanatics has) a well-established business,” O’Brien said, “and if it’s a means of getting people to start collecting, that’s not a bad thing.”

Graded cards have become an important part of the hobby. Collectors can send ungraded – “raw” – cards to a company, which checks them for imperfections and authenticates the card’s grade for a price. Cards featuring unblemished edges and corners with images centered within the card’s rectangular shape earn higher scores on a scale of 1 to 10. A graded-10 card is considered “gem mint” or pristine. A “mint” card would be graded a 9, and the scale descends toward near-mint, excellent, very good, good, fair and poor (1).

Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) is the most popular among grading companies and recently acquired another grading service, SGC, giving PSA a market share of about 76%, according to GemRate, which tracks grading analytics, on X. Other grading companies include CGC Cards and Beckett. Prices can vary widely depending on turnaround time, which can range from days to several weeks to complete the grading.

Priel said he sends off customers’ cards in groups of 20 or more to CGC Cards, which merged with Certified Sports Guaranty (CSG) in 2023, at a cost of $20 per card. He said the process of getting cards graded takes about a month and a half, on average, and cards worth a considerable value may be charged a higher grading fee.

“When we get them back, it’s like Christmas for everybody,” Priel said. “Everybody flocks down here. ‘Look, I got a 9!’ ‘Look, I got a 10!’ Seriously, it’s like Christmas.”

Priel said getting a card graded can greatly enhance the value.

“I had a Tom Brady graded-9 Bowman Chrome rookie … that sold for $800 to $1,000 raw, and I sold that card for $4,400 online. As you can imagine, it’s a big increase. There is a wow factor. … Because that card was worth so much, they charged me an extra $300 (for grading). But because I sold it for $4,400, it was worth it. For other cards it might not be.”

O’Brien described grading as “absolutely necessary.”

It “puts aside any debate or arguments people may have” about a card’s condition, O’Brien said. “Before, it was kind of eye-balling it. Same thing with comics, too. … It may be different businesses that grade them, but if I’m looking for a key issue or a key card, whether it’s online or in person, I feel more confident in a graded one because I know what the condition of it is because it’s been certified.”