The Hobby
Directed by Morgan Jon Fox
Unrated
Runtime: 89 minutes
Streaming on demand and on Documentary+ February 16

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

October 2021 to March 2022. That's when director Morgan Jon Fox filmed The Hobby, a new documentary about the business of trading cards, accidentally catching a market most of us never think about at a startling peak. As the movie begins, collectors are making millions. As it ends, the market is on the verge of collapse. As much as I'd like to see another documentary analyze this whole trend in ten years, I deeply appreciate what Fox has captured here by focusing on a quick six months when the world was turned upside down and rare Pokemon cards were worth more than some houses.

A few things happened before October 2021 that made the trading card market spike, and Fox explains them perfectly. He has a talent for laying out information that makes the film a propulsive viewing experience, meaning even as the people on screen are saying bananas things, you understand why they're saying them. He explains the irrational remarkably well, so that when you hear COVID-19 and The Last Dance made Jackass trading cards a serious asset, you can, somehow, follow the logic.

Those are the two big instigators of the recent trading card bubble that you may not have realized led to an increase in the number of armed guards at your local Target. The COVID lockdown left people stuck at home, digging through their attics and basements, finding old hobbies they had disregarded decades previously. A similar thing happened with Beanie Babies–in March 2020, we had nothing to do but run searches on the market trends of the Princess Diana commemorative bear. And in April 2020, ESPN released The Last Dance, the ten-part documentary miniseries about Michael Jordan's 1997-1998 season with the Chicago Bulls, reminding the world how huge that man, that team, and that sport had been to the world. Before The Last Dance hit, a Michael Jordan rookie card would go for $35,000, we're told. At the height of the boom, when The Hobby was filmed, the same card could net $800,000. A butterfly in China flaps its wings and a Pikachu card at the bottom of a box in your parents' house is worth more than you'd ever imagine.

Trading cards have been big in the past, but never this big. The film opens with old news footage from the ‘80s or ‘90s, with older people lamenting that younger people are only getting into "the hobby" to invest. One of them compares this to collecting rocks, saying you wouldn't buy a rare stone just to sell it the next day; you'd admire it. Even then, card collecting is exclusively referred to by its practitioners as "the hobby," the same way swingers call what they do "the lifestyle." By late-2021, people were making a living livestreaming card sales and pack openings. At one point in the film, an interviewee estimates that trading cards will be a $100 billion market by 2027, and you wonder what his life is like now. The card market's spike led to people starting fistfights and pulling guns on each other over Pokemon cards, while shady internet sellers scammed buyers with fake and resealed cards.

Fox regularly gets the hobby's greatest apostles to show off slices of their collections worth more money than a normal person can ever make. There's Mike Gioseffi, who co-hosts a podcast on the hobby, a journalist of marginalia, standing behind his car in a parking lot, displays twenty or so framed cards in his trunk, claiming that he's showing off $300-400,000. Another man later in the film sits at a table with original Babe Ruth cards and Jordan rookies. "Easily $10 million," he says when asked the value of his spread. 

We also meet Dani Sanchez, a full-time Pokemon "content creator." She opens Pokemon cards on Twitch streams. We meet Sharon Chiong, who occupies a space between Sanchez' enthusiastic fan streaming from her bedroom and Luber's Wall Street approach. Chiong co-owns a Brooklyn card store called Blackjadedwolf and grew up in the Philippines watching American sports with a severe time difference. Luber and others see Chiong as the future of the business, somebody smart enough to have come in early and predicted trends that have come to pass.

"Nostalgia" is one aspect of the hobby that is lightly explored. People grew up with sports and Pokemon and Marvel comics and whatever else is on cards. Sanchez, the Pokemon card specialist, began her streaming career with cards she grew up with. At one point, her parents bring her childhood Pokemon stuff to her–not just cards, but stuffed animals and VHS tapes that she collected before she ever would have thought reselling was an option, much less a way to make a living. There is real care in this passion beyond the "I wanted to own every Jimi Hendrix card" position Luber takes with his collecting. You never hear Luber talk about liking Hendrix or any sport. He's a cypher of a person. If you asked him who his favorite artists are, he'd google "popular artists" and read you the list. When Sanchez opens up about her worries that she's made the Pokemon card market hotter and is beginning to price herself out of the hobby, it's sad because she still loves Pokemon, whereas Luber would collect buckets of asbestos if he thought he could flip them for some cash.

Maybe that's the point of The Hobby. A post-script notes most of the cards we've seen have had significant drops in value since filming ended. Josh Luber has left Fanatics to start a new company. The market has started to trend downward. So maybe this is not a film about the trading card hobby blowing up. Maybe the title is vague because it could represent any hobby and that nothing here is unique. Art, car and sneaker collection all attract the same speculation. The difference is that this is a surprising medium to get big. We've all heard of original Basquiats going for millions, but you, like me, were probably unaware that there's an auction house in Tigard, Oregon with a custom-built trading card vault and better security than most banks. You don't expect Yu-Gi-Oh cards to be treated like gold bricks. That's the novelty.

As The Hobby ends, Luber is selling trading cards of shoes, but not actual shoes, and he's trying to convince himself these greeting card doodle animals are on track to be more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. He's a stupid person taking advantage of stupider people. But Dani Sanchez still has Pokemon. She is happy and I hope she always will be. As an assessment of a world that lets a person like Josh Luber sell pictures of shoes to the desperate and gullible, The Hobby gives you, perhaps fittingly, nothing. As a peak at the surface of that world, though, it's a lot of fun.