Why Can't I Buy Sports Cards? An Open Letter to Michael Rubin

John Roman October 19, 2026 · 13 min read

Sealed sports card boxes behind glass, out of reach of a collector

Michael, I have lost nineteen Topps EQL drops in a row. I opened the app again this week, watched "Not selected" roll down the screen one more time, and decided to write you instead of refreshing the page for a twentieth loss. If you collect, you have probably been asking the same question I keep asking: why can't I buy sports cards at a normal price anymore?

I am not writing this as someone who hates the hobby. I love it. I collect vintage, I collect modern, and we run a seven-figure live-selling channel at BattlBox, so I understand firsthand why live breaking is powerful. That is exactly why the current setup bothers me. The honest answer to that question has almost nothing to do with luck and almost everything to do with where the product goes before it ever reaches us.

A couple of friends who are deep in the hobby and I spent a week picking this apart. I started that conversation with very little sympathy for anyone, and I ended it having changed my mind on a few things. Here is where I landed, with the receipts.

The short version, for anyone skimming

Topps and Fanatics send the majority of premium product to a small group of mega-breakers and large e-commerce distributors. Regular collectors are left fighting over a thin slice through the Topps EQL, randomized drops, or a race to checkout, and most of us lose. Then we buy on the aftermarket at a markup those same big accounts helped set. A set of leaked Fanatics documents, which Fanatics has not confirmed, lines up almost perfectly with what collectors have been saying for a year. The fix is simple. The reason it is not happening is the uncomfortable part.

Why can't I buy sports cards at retail anymore?

The short answer is that very little premium product reaches normal retail in the first place. The largest allocations go to a short list of high-volume breakers and distributors, which leaves the rest of us with four options, and three of them end in losing.

Here is what trying to buy a box actually looks like now. You can enter the Topps EQL, which is a lottery where demand runs many times higher than the product available. You can try a Fanatics randomized drop, which feels a little better than the EQL but still misses more often than it hits. You can sit on the on-sale and try to win the race to checkout before it sells out in minutes. You can give up and pay the aftermarket, either buying a sealed box for well over its original price or paying a breaker for a spot in a break, which is usually the most expensive path of all.

I buy sealed product to hold. Sometimes I open it, sometimes I sit on it for a few years, sometimes I move it. What I cannot do, most of the time, is simply walk up and buy it at a reasonable price the way I could a few years ago. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

Is the EQL rigged, or is the product just that scarce?

The EQL draw itself is probably clean. I dug into this already in a full breakdown of Topps EQL and why you keep losing, and my honest conclusion was that the lottery is likely fair. It assigns selection numbers after the window closes, so timing does not help you. The issue is that demand for these releases runs roughly twenty-five to one hundred times higher than the product offered through that channel. A clean raffle cannot fix scarcity. If fifty thousand people want two thousand boxes, forty-eight thousand people lose no matter how fair the draw is.

The EQL is just the pressure-relief valve for a supply problem created one step upstream, at allocation. Fix the allocation and the lottery stops mattering. That is where you come in, Michael.

Who is actually getting all the sports cards?

The biggest breakers and e-commerce distributors, by a wide margin. This is where the leaked documents matter, and I want to be careful with them. In the summer of 2025, a set of internal Fanatics files surfaced around the National Sports Collectors Convention. Sports Card Radio broke the story, and Cardlines did a detailed breakdown of what the documents appear to show. Fanatics did not respond to requests to confirm they are real, so treat every number below as reported and unconfirmed, not as gospel. I am including it because, if accurate, it is the clearest look we have ever gotten at how the product is actually divided.

According to that reporting, the documents rank partners on a leaderboard by trailing twelve-month spend, which reads less like a sales report and more like an allocation map. The reported figures:

Blowout Cards: 49.7 million dollars
DA Card World: 42.3 million dollars
Blez Sports Cards: 17.1 million dollars
WeTheHobby: 13.6 million dollars
Filthbomb Breaks: 12.9 million dollars
Backyard Breaks: 9.9 million dollars direct
Card Vault by Tom Brady: 3.4 million dollars

Look at that top of the list. The two biggest accounts are not Target or a chain sending product to four thousand stores. They are breaking and e-commerce operations. The reporting also indicates something I cannot stop thinking about: certain breaking operations could receive stronger allocation support in exchange for breaking their product on Fanatics Live. Allocation, the single scarcest thing in the hobby right now, is offered in trade for platform loyalty. That is not a conspiracy theory from a forum. That is reportedly in your own partner documents.

I know some of these accounts have been the subject of preferential-treatment allegations for a while, and I am not here to drag any individual company. The breakers are playing the game that is in front of them, and playing it well. The point is the game itself, which you designed.

Is this actually hurting local card shops?

Yes, and this is the part where I had to check my own attitude. My first reaction was not sympathetic. Local shops had years to add live selling and breaking, I thought, and the ones that did not adapt made a choice. I still think there is some truth in that.

Then I looked at what shops are actually being asked to do. A Fanatics direct-buying agreement that circulated a while back reportedly runs seventeen terms across six pages, and Cardlines covered the specifics. A shop with a direct account cannot sell to other businesses without written approval. It cannot sell or solicit break slots online or to anyone who is not physically in the store during the break. It has to be an established brick-and-mortar location, not online-only. Topps product has to live in its own section, away from Panini. Stores even have to send in photos of their displays. On top of that, Fanatics has started grading shops on a three-point scale across nine elements, scoring store appearance, marketing, social media, and event participation, and has pushed some shops to hand over financial information.

Here is the trap that creates. The product goes disproportionately to online breakers, but a local shop with a direct account is specifically barred from using that account to run an online breaking business. In other words, you are telling a shop that has sold cards for decades that the one channel eating all the allocation is the one channel it is not allowed to compete in with its direct product. That is not a shop failing to adapt. That is a shop being boxed out.

I will add the operator honesty I promised. We built our live-selling channel at BattlBox the hard way, and it took us thirteen months and thirteen teammates touching it to get to real volume, and we are a national company with infrastructure and a team already in place. Expecting a two-person hobby shop to stand up that same operation just to keep the allocation it already had is a big ask. I have more empathy than I started with.

Why do breakers get so much product? The margin math

The direct answer is that breaking captures margin that selling a sealed box cannot, so the accounts that break move the most volume, and the most volume gets rewarded with more product. It is a loop.

When you sell a sealed box, you make box margin once. When you break that same box, you sell individual team or player spots, and the sum of those spots routinely adds up to more than the box itself costs, sometimes well more. The buyers who break are therefore willing to buy in enormous quantity, because every case is a revenue multiple, not a flat markup. You reward that quantity with better allocation and better pricing, and the cycle tightens.

The downstream effect is the price spiral every collector is living through. I wrote about one clean example already: a Topps Chrome Sapphire box that went from about 250 dollars to 649.99 across its releases. When the biggest accounts control most of the supply, they also become the aftermarket, selling to smaller breakers and shops at whatever the market will bear. Each wave resets the cost basis higher, and the collector at the end of the chain pays for all of it.

Isn't this just overproduction, like the junk wax era all over again?

No, and that distinction matters. The junk wax crash of the late 1980s and early 1990s happened because manufacturers printed everything into oblivion and flooded the market until the product was worthless. What is happening now is close to the opposite. The product is not being overproduced. It is being concentrated.

I would call it a centralized version of the same mistake. In the junk wax era, the value died from too much supply reaching everyone. Today, the access is dying from too much supply reaching almost no one. Both end in the same place for a regular collector, which is a hobby that feels rigged against them, but the mechanism is different, and the fix is different too.

How would you actually fix this?

Here is the frustrating thing, Michael. This is an easy problem to solve on paper, and I think your team already knows every lever.

Cap allocation per account so no single buyer can take twenty cases of a release while thousands of shops get none. Spread the rest wider across the network. Carve out a real retail and collector tranche so a person who just wants one box can buy one box at a set price, instead of being funneled into a lottery or the aftermarket. Publish print runs and allocation so the whole thing stops being a black box, which would also kill half the loaded-box conspiracy theories in one move. I covered why print-run transparency matters in a piece on pop reports versus print runs, and the short version is that collectors behave better when they can see the real numbers.

None of that is hard to execute for a company that already tracks its partners down to the dollar.

Which brings me to the only conclusion that makes sense. You are very good at this. You built a company by understanding distribution and demand at a level most people never reach, and the leaked documents, if real, show a team that knows its accounts cold. That means the reason the obvious fix has not happened is almost certainly not that nobody at Fanatics understands the problem. It is that the current model makes the same money either way.

Topps makes its number whether most of a release goes to a handful of big streamers or gets spread across thousands of shops. The revenue is booked, the product moves, the quarter looks great. There is no line on the P&L that gets worse when a hobbyist gives up. That is why an easy fix stays unused. The incentive to use it does not exist yet. It only shows up when enough collectors burn out that demand actually softens, or when competition or outside pressure forces the issue. I would rather you move before the burnout, because a hobby that prices out its real fans does not come back quickly.

Final thoughts

A collectible hobby is supposed to work in a simple order. A first buyer takes a risk, opens the product, and brings the cards into the world. The open market of shows, shops, and eBay then decides what those cards are worth. Right now, the big distributors are capturing the first wave and the second wave before a normal collector gets a turn at either one. The risk is still there. The reward mostly is not.

I am not asking you to kill breaking. Breaking is good, and we run a live channel at BattlBox ourselves, so I would be a hypocrite to say otherwise. I am asking you to leave enough room in the system for the person who just wants to buy a box, open it at the kitchen table, and chase a hit without taking out a loan. That is the whole hobby. Protect that, and everything else you are building has a foundation. Keep squeezing it, and you are running the junk wax playbook with better graphics.

Either way, I will probably enter the next EQL and lose again. Twenty in a row. I just thought you should hear why, from a collector who also helps run a seven-figure live-selling channel and still cannot win a single box.

Questions collectors are asking

Why can't I buy sports cards at retail anymore?

Because most premium product never reaches normal retail. The largest allocations go to a small group of high-volume breakers and e-commerce distributors, leaving collectors to fight over a thin slice through the EQL, randomized drops, or a fast-selling on-sale. Most entrants lose and end up paying aftermarket prices.

Are the leaked Fanatics documents real?

They are unconfirmed. Internal Fanatics files surfaced around the 2025 National, Sports Card Radio broke the story, and outlets like Cardlines analyzed them. Fanatics has not confirmed their authenticity, so the spending figures and allocation details should be treated as reported, not verified.

What is Topps EQL and why do I keep losing?

EQL is a raffle-style entry system Topps uses for high-demand releases. It assigns selection numbers after the entry window closes, so timing does not matter. You keep losing because demand runs many times higher than the product available, not because the draw is unfair. Scarcity, not the lottery, is the real issue.

Do sports card breakers really get better allocation than hobby shops?

Reporting on the leaked documents suggests the biggest breakers and distributors receive the largest allocations, and that stronger allocation support may be offered in exchange for breaking product on Fanatics Live. Local shops with direct accounts, meanwhile, are barred from running online breaking with that product, which limits their ability to compete.

Is buying from a breaker cheaper than buying a sealed box?

Usually not. Paying for spots in a break typically costs more in total than the sealed box itself, because breaking lets sellers capture extra margin on individual player and team spots. For a collector who wants the whole box, breaking is often the most expensive way to get exposure to a product.

Will sports card distribution get better?

It can, and the fixes are straightforward: cap per-account allocation, spread product wider, create a real retail tranche, and publish print runs. Whether it happens depends on incentives. Because manufacturers make similar revenue regardless of who buys, meaningful change will likely require softening demand, competition, or outside pressure.

Interested in learning more?

John Roman

Curated for Online Queso — a non-standard look inside the minds of the best operators in eCommerce. Tips, stories, and free advice, served digestible and delicious.